FIRST WEEK: NICANOR PARRA & IDENTITY

We'll be writing poems that explore and interrogate this notion of "individual identity"--our own and/or some aspect of identity, generally--inspired by and in response to Nicanor Parra's "The Individual's Soliloquy" (original in Spanish here) and "Something Like That" (Spanish original on same page, beneath translation).

Two brief essays on Parra may help put his work into a broader context: see this and this.

Relative to this, Nada Gordon and I have posted about half of our talk on "the Autré," which includes examples from all over the world of artists of various kinds playing with "identity" in various ways, here, here, and here.

For those wanting a more traditional (not to mention Eurocentric) sense of the history of satire, see this essay and what Wikipedia has to say.