SOURCE: Mejia, Adelaida Lopez. “Nicanor Parra and the Question of Authority.” Latin American Literary Review 18, no. 36 (July-December 1990): 59-77.

In the following essay, Mejia discusses Parra's work after 1968 in the context of the transition from surrealism to postmodernism in Latin American poetry.

In the years between 1954 and 1968, Nicanor Parra published various poems that refer to the humorous, aggressive, and deliberately mundane nature of his own “antipoetry”.¹ During that same period many European and North American artists were gravitating towards what is currently termed a postmodern aesthetic, in what Fredric Jameson describes as a reaction “against the established forms of high modernism”.² In Spanish American literary criticism, “high modernism” proves a confusing and awkward term. Parra's “antipoetry” came as an exasperated response, not to the modernista school of Rubén Darío, but to the visionary, surrealist voices of the 1920's and 1930's in Spanish American poetry, most notably those...