The Postcard Poetics of Nicanor Parra’s Artefactos

• In Event: Materias, memorias, historias: el libro como objeto en el Cono Sur

Abstract

This paper considers Nicanor Parra’s 1972 collection of poetry, Artefactos, in light of its publication on and as 242 individual postcards in a box. These poems combine brief printed and handwritten phrases with illustrations by Guillermo Tejeda. Together, the text and images make use of popular, political, and borrowed speech and iconography to provoke readers and challenge the conventions of poetry and good taste. Combining the grotesque, the absurd, the profound, and the everyday, Parra has commented that the Artefactos “result from an explosion of the antipoem.” As a rejection of traditional poetic form and lyrical subjectivity, Parra’s famous antipoems favored an irreverent, aggressively down-to-earth approach to poetry, something that, in the Artefactos, is both concentrated and exploded into many postcard-sized fragments.

While scholars have commented on the relationship between the Artefactos and antipoetry, this discussion expands the critical reception of these poems to include a sustained focus on their materialization as postcards. In doing this, this study examines the interplay of text and image in the Artefactos and theorizes the poems’ status as material “artifacts” that poetically capture not just the sights and sounds of lived experience, but the material structures of its popular communication. The productive engagement with, and poetic appropriation of, the conventions of the postcard form reconfigure the modes by which poetry communicates. As a result, the Artefactos help to reconstitute both lyrical and readerly subjectivity and materialize the relation between these poles.

Author

• Rebecca S Kosick, University of Bristol