What about shooting the "Anti-Poet" on sight ? Or better still: Crucify the the Poet who engendered the Anti-Poet...and mug and castrate the guy who translated the Anti-Poet's Poem for not knowing what either was or could be...
"The Test" by Nicanor Parra: Translated by T Wignesan
What’s an antipoet:
a trader in urns and coffins ?
a priest who does not believe in anything ?
a general who entertains doubts about himself ?
a vagabond who laughs at every thing
...until old age overtakes him unto death ?
an interlocuter of bad faith in a dialogue ?
a woman who dances at the brink of an abyss ?
a narcissist who loves everybody ?
a bloody humourist deliberately miserable ?
a poet who dozes off in a chair ?
...a modern-day alchemist ?
......a pocket revolutionary ?
.........a small-time bourgeois ?
............a charlatan ?
................a god ?
..................an innocent ?
a peasant of Santiago de Chile ?
Underline the sentence you consider correct.
................What is antipoetry:
............a storm in a tea cup ?
........a sleeve of snow robed round a rock ?
......a shallow tray full of human excreta
.........as Father Save-the-Earth believes ?
.............a mirror that tells the truth ?
...............a big slap on the face
.......of the President of the Society of Authors ?
..........( May God preserve him in his Holy Kingdom )
...............a warning to younger poets ?
.................a coffin in river rapids ?
........a coffin of centrifugal force ?
........a coffin of paraffin gas ?
........a burning chapel without a corpse ?
............Mark with a cross
.....the definition you consider correct.
Like you, Ron, Nicanor Parra first struggled to get an education: won a scholarship to do engineering at the University of Chile. True, it's rather frustrating not to know what the devil all the hullaballoo is about over anti-poetry and the anti-poet, etc. You know, too, he was a professor of physics and mathematics for some forty years after studying at Brown University (physics) and Oxford University (cosmology). Now, think of "matter" and "anti-matter", and associate the two with poetry - as simple as that ! But, there are further conclusions to be drawn from anti-poetic texts and "artefactos" (drawings and pithy axiom-like sayings as commentary):
"anti-poetry" doesn't annihilate "poetry" when they "collide"; rather it should serve to enhance and complement "poetry". (Don't ask me what "poetry" is supposed to do to "anti-poetry", though !) At best - and most likely - "anti-poetry" serves to tease, mock and ridicule the staid practitioners of straight-jacketed traditional stuff, and hence to assume the satirical role in jolting upstanding poets of all traditions working within given conventions and well-grounded practices, those - one might say - who fear to stray from the usual and beaten paths in the use of tropes and schemes, etc. You are not wrong in registering your astonishment, though ! All forms of artistic endeavour always arrive at junctures where some form of "gimmickry" serve as "contrepois" for further explorations: some fruitful, some end in cul de sac... Witness Salvador Dali and his sheer good-fun antics ! Don't despair as yet ! Every good wish. Wignesan.
“The woman or man who is a poet, or fiction writer, or playwright, or all of these, is engaged constantly in a jazz ballet of vocabularies, passions, genders, histories, perspectives, death, love, and life. The music of revelation announces itself to
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"anti-poetry" doesn't annihilate "poetry" when they "collide"; rather it should serve to enhance and complement "poetry". (Don't ask me what "poetry" is supposed to do to "anti-poetry", though !) At best - and most likely - "anti-poetry" serves to tease, mock and ridicule the staid practitioners of straight-jacketed traditional stuff, and hence to assume the satirical role in jolting upstanding poets of all traditions working within given conventions and well-grounded practices, those - one might say - who fear to stray from the usual and beaten paths in the use of tropes and schemes, etc. You are not wrong in registering your astonishment, though ! All forms of artistic endeavour always arrive at junctures where some form of "gimmickry" serve as "contrepois" for further explorations: some fruitful, some end in cul de sac... Witness Salvador Dali and his sheer good-fun antics ! Don't despair as yet ! Every good wish. Wignesan.
Ron