“Printed Matter”: Rodrigo Lira’s Visual Antipoetics

Known as a “manipulador del lenguaje” by his contemporaries, the Chilean poet Rodrigo Lira (1949–1981) has barely made it onto the international poetry stage for his biting and striking antipoetics. While his poetry has especially been recognized for his semantic wit in his almost sardonic parodies of his predecessors and contemporaries, Lira’s antipoetic work, I propose, gathers force with his attention to the visual aspects of language on the page that both informs and is informed by language’s materiality. I argue that it is through Lira’s manipulation of language and poetry’s visual qualities that his commitment to social critique comes to the fore. The reader can interact with Lira’s poems as physical objects not only intellectually, but also by engaging multiple senses. Through close readings of exemplary poems, I consider how his manipulation of the letter, the word, the line, and the page itself contributes to his antipoetics.