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PARTISAN REVI EW
tipoetry during the dictatorial period, and it too changed revealingly. Neruda
had recognized the danger of the Manichaean attitude and proclaimed himself
"triangular," but the triangle is an image of perfection belonging to Euclidiean
geometry. Parra went a step further and explored a possibility that Neruda
himself had proclaimed in an early brief text,
Sabre una poesia sin pureza
(About a Poetry without Purity) .
I suspect that Parra, by profession a teacher
of physics and mathematics, preferred to explore the fourth dimension.
Parra and Zurita, in spite of their different poetic styles, both employ a
kind ofmathemathical thinking to distance themselves from traditional logic, to
challenge principles of identity and contradiction, and to discover, as an ulti–
mate remedy against brutality and stupidity, a natural, nondogmatic,
noninstitutional sense of worship. One poem from Parra's volume
Sermons
and Homilies of the Christ of Elqui,
translated by Sandra Reyes, evokes the
sensibility of these poets:
To sum it all up
to
mistake a leaf for a leaf
to mistake a branch for a branch
to
confuse a forest with a forest
is to be a fool
this is the quintessence of my doctrine
you're starting to get the hang of it, happily
things are becoming clear
to
you
now you can see that clouds are not clouds
rivers are not rivers
rocks are not rocks
they're altars!
columns!
domes!
it's time to say Mass.
Since the antipoetry of the fifties and sixties, and since the "artefactos,"
the brief and provocative epigrammatic texts of the late sixties and early
seventies, there has been an important new current in Chilean writing. These
writers have tried to undermine the solemn rhetoric of the old poetry, the
arid programs of regionalist narratives, by using fantasy, humor, and creative
memory that reinvents the past. Parra is one of the best examples of the
new writing. He has employed the figure of the Christ of Elqui - the sort of
mad preacher who in my generation could be found in downtown Santiago,
standing on a bench of the Quinta Normal, with a long beard, worn mantle
and flaming eyes, speaking in apocalpytic tones about the end of the world
and condemning the ways of petty politicians - as a lyrical alter-ego. Such a
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