Ecopoems, Storm, & Some Fringe Benefits

When Nicanor Parra died at the age of 103 on January 23, 2018, he was memorialized in the press around the world, from El País to the BBC to The New York Times and on, while Chilean President Michelle Bachelet hailed him as “one of the biggest authors of our literature, in our history.” For over half a century New Directions has been publishing this iconoclastic avant-garde poet of the people most known as an innovator of antipoetry (“Hi to everyone,” his famous manifesto on the art ends). Parra, however, saw himself more significantly as an ecopoet, and was, in fact, one of the originators of the ecopoetry movement. “If you destroy the Earth,” Parra once famously declared in the voice of God, “don’t think I’ll create it again.”

In Ecopoems, Storm, & Some Fringe Benefits, the translator Anna Deeny Morales has collected the best of Parra’s ecopoetry, spanning his early antipoetry, his celebrated artefactos and discurcos and songs, the whole of his pivotal 1982 collection Ecopoemas, as well as the entirety of his extraordinary book Temporal (Storm), published only a few years before his death. Written during the dictatorship in the 1980s, Storm was lost for decades, only appearing like a specter in Parra’s conversations about his poetry, as he considered it among his finest work. Then some cassette tapes were discovered with the poet himself reciting the whole collection and the poems were eventually transcribed and rescued from oblivion.