SOURCE: Gutiérrez-Mouat, Ricardo. “The Politics of Contemporary Chilean Poetry.” American Poetry Review 18, no. 5 (September 1989): 15-22.

In the following excerpted essay, Gutiérrez-Mouat explains the political aspects of Parra's poetry in the context of Chilean literary politics.

Parra has influenced and been translated into English by poets such as Merton, Ginsberg, and Ferlinghetti. His reputation as an antipoet was established in the 1950s and in the 1980s it has grown with Sandra Reyes's prize-winning translation of the first two volumes of the Sermons and Homilies of the Christ of Elqui (University of Missouri Press, 1984). These two volumes, published in Santiago in 1977 and 1979 (a third one appeared in 1983), are one of the most significant responses by a contemporary Chilean poet to the country's institutional crisis. Parra's Elqui poems are complex semiotic artifacts whose formal language produces an added level of (contextual) meaning that reflects the Chilean political crisis, even...