Poems and Antipoems

Front Cover
New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1967 - Poetry - 149 pages
The Chilean poet Nicanor Parra is one of those significant figures who appear from time to time in all literature and through a profound originality and sense of the Pound/Confucius principle of "Make It New" revitalize the poetry of their language. Just as the Imagists and William Carlos Williams rechanneled the course of American poetry, so Parra's "antipoems," with their directness of metaphor and rejection of rhetoric and "poetic" decoration, are influencing poets throughout Latin America. "Anti-poetry," Parra has said, "seeks to return poetry to its roots." The reader may judge from this collection, which is drawn from all of Parra's published books, how well he has succeeded. -- From publisher's description.

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Contents

NineteenThirty
3
SelfPortrait
11
Ode to Some Doves
17
Copyright

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About the author (1967)

Nicanor Segundo Parra Sandoval was born in San Fabián de Alico, Chile on September 15, 1914. He received degrees in mathematics and physics from the University of Chile in 1938. He later studied mechanics at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and cosmology at the University of Oxford in England. He taught theoretical physics at the University of Chile for decades. He was a poet who pioneered the literary movement that became known as anti-poetry. He published his first book, Singer Without a Name, in 1937. His other books include Poems and Antipoems, Emergency Poems, Artifacts, and The Sermons and Teachings of the Christ of Elqui. In 1963, he spent six months in the Soviet Union translating the work of several Soviet poets into Spanish. He received Chile's National Literary Prize in 1969 and the Cervantes Prize in 2011. He died on January 23, 2018 at the age of 103.

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