SOURCE: Parra, Nicanor, and Miller Williams. “A Talk with Nicanor Parra.” Shenandoah 18, no. 1 (autumn 1966): 71-78.

In the following interview, Williams and Parra discuss major influences on Parra's work and his development of the surrealist school of poetry in Chile.

Nicanor Parra is one of the best known poets writing in Spanish today. Perhaps it would be better to say, the Spanish of today. Because no one has done more to give the language the freedom of the streets, to push the language to its limits, than Parra has. And not even Vicente Huidobro was so much a symbol of decadence to his enemies or a cause celebre to his defenders as Parra was after the publication of Poems and Antipoems in 1954.

Born in 1914 in Chilean, in the south of Chile, Parra grew up there, playing with his brothers and sisters around the school where his father taught, or...