In 1972, Chilean poet Nicanor Parra published his latest collection of poetry: a cardboard box containing 242 postcards, entitled Artefactos (Artifacts). At the time, Parra was well known in Chile for having made an enormous and then-controversial splash in the country's literary scene with his Poemas y antipoemas (Poems and Antipoems), published almost two decades earlier in 1954. As Chile's famous antipoet, Parra had already forwarded an irreverent, aggressively down-to-earth approach to poetry in the 1954 collection, but the Artefactos took Parra's challenge to the norms of poetic production and distribution considerably further. These postcards continued to employ the colloquial, humorous, and at times vulgar language characteristic of the antipoems, but they also incorporated drawings by artist Guillermo Tejeda and, most radically, left behind the codex structure of pages bound together into a single volume.Loose and nonsequential, each postcard's face shows either a drawing alongside a text written by Parra or a facsimile of text written in the poet's own hand. The words themselves are often few, and take the style of slogans, brief ironic commentaries, and what José Miguel Ibáñez Langlois refers to as "poetic jokes." 1 The back of each card (figure 1) looks exactly as a postcard would be expected to look, with horizontal lines where the address would be written, an outline of a square in the upper right corner where the stamp would go, and blank space on the left side for a message yet to be recorded. In the top, centered, are the words "TARJETA POSTAL," and just below them, in a smaller but darker font, their English translation, "POST CARD." In two languages, these cards announce that they don't just look like it-they really are postcards.
