[In the following essay, Melnykovich considers Parra's perception that his work is a failure given the intentions of antipoetry.]

Since the publication of Poems and Antipoems (1957), Nicanor Parra has become one of the most controversial, if not influential, representatives of Latin American poetry. While some have denounced his antipoetry as non-poetry, recent criticism has been favorable. Edith Grossman's high estimation of Parra is not uncommon:

Nicanor Parra is probably the best known member of the poetic vanguard in Latin America today. … his antipoetry occupies a central position in the great literary effort of our century to create art where it did not exist before. …¹

While we do not reject entirely the critical acclaim which accompanies Parra's work, the praise seems to be inconsistent with the poet's protests and self-confessed failure to achieve his desired aims. Without denying the positive values and contributions of his poetic production, let us take his comments on his failure at face-value. Perhaps then we might better appreciate the struggle of a poet to achieve his idiom and, in turn, the struggle of modern poetry. But first let us consider what antipoetry intended to do.

Antipoetry has been characterized by a desire to communicate directly and to name things clearly without the highly stylized language and imagery of traditional poetry. Pablo García writes of the movement in Chile: “… our motto was war on the metaphor, death to the image; long live the concrete fact and clarity.”² Later in the same article he quotes Parra who says that the function of language is: “that of a simple vehicle and the material with which I work, I find in daily life.”³ In a welcoming address in honor of Pablo Neruda, Parra explains: “Antipoetry is an all-out struggle with the elements, the antipoet concedes himself the right to say everything without caring for the possible practical consequences that can befall his theoretical formulations.”⁴

None of these explanations is as precise and lucid as the poem “Piano Solo” which outlines the poet's need for self expression.

“PIANO SOLO”

Since man's life is nothing but a bit of action at a distance,
A bit of foam shining inside a glass;
Since trees are nothing but moving trees;
Nothing but chairs and tables in perpetual motion;
Since we ourselves are nothing but beings
(As the godhead itself is nothing but God);
Now that we do not speak solely to be heard
But so that others may speak
And the echo precede the voice that produces it;
Since we do not even have the consolation of a chaos
In the garden that yawns and fills with air,
A puzzle that we must solve before our death
So that we may nonchalantly resuscitate later on
When we have led woman to excess;
Since there is also a heaven in hell,
Permit me to propose a few things:
I wish to make a noise with my feet
I want my soul to find its proper body.(5)

The need to find a new idiom is not unique to antipoetry but represents a cycle in modern poetry which begins with Baudelaire, Mallarmé and Rimbaud and continues into the present day. Parra's antipoetry is not unlike T. E. Hulme's demand of modern poetry when he says: “I want to speak of verse in a plain way as I would of pigs: that is the only honest way.”⁶ The Imagist poet, whom Hulme represents, attempted to purify modern poetry by ridding imagery of useless ornamentation and freeing language from the confines of ordinary speech. “Language,” says Hulme, “being a communal apparatus, only conveys over the part of the emotion which is common to all of us.”⁷ This assumption creates the need for new metaphors and new epithets. Hulme continues: “It is because language will not carry over the exact thing you want to say, that you are compelled simply, in order to be accurate, to invent original ways of stating things.”⁸ The metaphor is lifted from a secondary function of poetry as a means of decorating or illustrating a truth, to a primary role. In fact we might say that poetry is metaphor.

While the antipoet was faced with the same problem of accurate and clear communication, his choice was the reverse of the Imagist. He opted for the rejection of metaphor as a useless luxury and a return to ordinary, simple language of everyday speech as the best means to communication.

With a minimum of imagery and maximum of colloquialisms Parra takes us on his antipoetic roller coaster. We are shocked by his attacks on sacred institutions and overwhelmed by the sheer weight of his chaotic enumerations of the vices of a modern world. For the present his warning to the reader appears more than a prideful boast:

“ROLLER COASTER”

For half a century
Poetry was the paradise
Of the solemn fool.
Until I came
And built my roller coaster.
Go up, if you feel like it,
I'm not responsible if you come down
With your mouth and nose bleeding.

(67)

But a nagging incertitude begins to creep into his later poetry. In a poem entitled “Poetry Finished Me Off” he confesses:

What do I gain by saying
I have acquitted myself well
And poetry has conducted itself badly
When everybody knows I'm to blame?
This is what an imbecile deserves!
Poetry has acquitted itself well
I have conducted myself horribly
Poetry ends with me.

(87)

The problem of writing poetry and the author's own doubt are clear in the message to young poets:

Write as you will
In whatever style you like
In poetry everything is permitted.
With only this condition, of course:
You have to improve on the blank page.

(143)

But the failure to overcome the blank page and the ultimate victory of silence are expressed most poignantly in his final poem of Obra gruesa:

“I TAKE BACK EVERYTHING I'VE SAID”

Before I go
I'm supposed to get a last wish:
Generous reader
                                                                      burn this book
It's not at all what I wanted to say
In spite of the fact that it was written with blood
It's not what I wanted to say.
No lot could be sadder than mine
I was defeated by my own shadow:
The words take vengeance against me.
Forgive me, reader, good reader
If I cannot leave you
With a faithful gesture. I leave you
With a forced and sad smile.
Maybe that's all I am
But listen to my last word:
I take back everything I've said.
With the greatest bitterness in the world
I take back everything I've said.

(149)

More recently Parra alluded to the apparent futility of his effort when he spoke of the suffocating influence of Neruda:

He compelled me to be a buffoon. I'm only beginning to get over that now. For the first time I'm beginning to write naturally, about what really moves me. So now I'm going to start a new revolution—perhaps religion is a better word, I will no longer be the prostitute I had become in my desperation to achieve purity.⁹

Even though we may accept Parra's retraction, the pervasive question still remains. Is antipoetry a unique attempt to arrive at poetry or is it simply non-poetry? The answer to this query invites the larger and more difficult question—what is poetry? While we will not attempt a definition (as Johnson said “it is easier to say what poetry is not”) we cannot deny that poetry is irresolubly linked to its medium, language. Herewith lies the problem. Language has proven itself incapable of bridging the distance between the object and its sign. Susan Sontag contends that: “language is the most impure, the most contaminated, the most exhausted of all the materials out of which art is made.”¹⁰ The poet's dilemma arises from his necessary dependence on words and the knowledge that these words already have a meaning independent of his will. As Octavio Paz points out: “Poetic activity is born of the desperation before the impotence of the word and culminates in the recognition of the omnipotence of silence.”¹¹ For Paz the recognition of language as communal apparatus creates the necessity of transcending this language towards a meta-language—or of lapsing into silence.

Parra, as we pointed out earlier, began with the faith that language was but a “simple vehicle” found in everyday life. He affirmed a belief in plain, unadorned and unpoeticized language, as the best means to communication. The newness and freedom of this approach soon became worn. Roland Barthes recognizes the eventual futility of this direction when he writes:

I can today select such and such mode of writing, and in so doing assert my freedom, aspire to the freshness of novelty or to a tradition; but it is impossible to develop it within duration without gradually becoming a prisoner of someone else's words and even my own. A stubborn after-image, which comes from all the previous modes of writing and even from the past of my own, drowns the sound of my present words.¹²

When the shock of the antipoem wore off and the critics not only accepted, but praised the work, the sustaining substance was drained from the body. Parra's antipoetry began to suffer from the shrill and despair that has become patently familiar in our age. The gusto and the freshness that were once new soon became noise begging for silence. Antipoetry too soon became as traditional and impotent as the previous literature it had assailed.

Borges observations on the subject are very appropriate here:

The emotions literature stirs up are perhaps unchanging, but the means used to evoke them must vary constantly, even if only slightly, so as not to lose their power. Means wear off the moment the reader spots them.¹³

Parra himself closes the cycle which begins with a distrust of traditional poetry and ends in apparent futility and silence. But it is not a mute and sterile silence, but rather one, as Sontag notes, that “points to its own transcendence to a speech beyond silence.”¹⁴ Towards the end of his poetry Parra seems to hear the echo of his own voice and it seems but a hollow replica of his original intent. Perhaps he, as did Gibattista Marino, received the revelation:

Marino saw the rose as Adam first saw it in Paradise, and he felt that it lived in an eternity of its own and not in his words, and that we may mention or allude to a thing but not express it, and that the tall proud volumes casting a golden haze there in a corner of the room were not (as his vanity dreamed) a mirror of the world but only one thing more added to the world.¹⁵

Notes

1. Edith Grossman, “The Technique of Antipoetry,” Review 72, Winter/Spring (1972), p. 72.

2. Pablo García, “Contrafigura de Nicanor Parra,” Atenea, Jan./Feb. (1955), p. 157.

3. García, p. 157.

4. Nicanor Parra, Discursos (Santiago de Chile: Nascimento, 1962), p. 13.

5. Nicanor Parra, Poems and Antipoems (New York: New Directions, 1967), p. 33. (All succeeding quotations of his poetry will be from this edition.)

6. T. E. Hulme, Further Speculations, ed. Sam Hynes (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1955), p. 67

7. T. E. Hulme, Speculations, ed. Herbert Read, 2nd ed. 1936, rpt. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1949), p. 162.

8. Hulme, Speculations, p. 112.

9. Selden Rodman, South America of the Poets (New York: Hawthorn Books, Inc., 1970), p. 253.

10. Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will (New York: Delta, 1969), p. 14.

11. Octavio Paz, Corriente Alterna (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1967), p. 74.

12. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).

13. Jorge Luis Borges, “Up from Ultraism,” New York Review of Books, 13 Vol. XV No. 3, Aug. 13, 1970.

14. Sontag, p. 18.

15. Jorge Luis Borges, “A Yellow Rose” in Selected Poems, (New York: Delta, 1973), p. 258.