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[b]ecause artefactos attempt to suppress the distance between art and life, and a most immediate consequence of this suppression is to cancel the difference between the public and the private. In this way, Parra appeals to the unavoidable democracy of speech, to its shared and communal property. The elimination of hierarchies of speech, along with the liberation of all the creative potential of language, all of its desacralizing and, simultaneously, enchanting power, causes us to see a common ground where human beings, like words, are, ultimately, profoundly equal. Those who discredit Parra’s artefactos—dismissing them as juvenile jokes, for example—always share a belief in a hierarchy of language, one that projects itself like a reflection of the “natural” division of men into social classes. But that’s precisely the symbolic and democratizing role of artefactos: they liberate the worker words, the words that each day ground the lives of human beings, from the submission imposed upon them by sacred words.

--raul zurita on the antipoetry of nicanor parra