Wachit@ (Evidence-based poetry)

 Wachit@, the book's title, is a ludic act of rhetoric that plays with the English verb to watch, the Chilean slang for orphan, and the asperand (the @ symbol). The latter creates gender ambiguity in Spanish, where (most) male nouns end in "o" while (most) female names end in "a". Thus, Wachit@ evokes that the poet can be watched as an influencer using the gender-neutral they/them pronouns. Interesting, this reference to queer, nonbinary, and feminism preceded, almost by a decade, the Chilean 2019 outburst, where they became frontline fighting causes. Evidence-based poetry conveys that poems are based on real-life observations, collected documents, book covers, emails, and protest pamphlets. In other words, poetry based on information belonging to reality in opposition to fiction or imaginary events. Literature consists in answering the following questions: What to write? Why to write? How to write? To whom to write? How much to write? None of this has a simple answer. Wachit@ is an attempt to respond to them with the crudity of flesh and at the cost of mental insanity. The book contains sections with old emails to a cherished dead editor; an exchange with a journalist discussing the publication of a test to assess what makes someone a poet. Also, it has a set of visual poems using stacks of books' backbones with the word Chile on them as each text line. Additionally, one blended-expanded page that you can unfold from the book as a caterpillar juxtaposing belligerent aesthetics with communist propaganda against fascism and fascism propaganda against communism. It also includes condonmancy, a divinatory art based on scanned images of used condoms. And photos of the poet surrealist sailing on a boat in Santiago's central park during extreme flooding with the whole park underwater. At the same time, the first protest pamphlets of the current political cycle are found and presented as prospective archaeology of mass behaviour where the poet, as a committed observer, captures social trends at their very beginning. Finally, it concludes with some pictures of Chulos chunchules chilenos, which can be translated as Shady Chilean Chitterlings. It includes a photo of one hundred years of anatomical genitals collected at the anatomy museum. Photographs are by the Chilean Tate Modern artist Paz Errázuriz and the awarded Chilean photographer Álvaro Hoppe. The image presented here is the book's back cover by Paz Errázruriz.

https://www.d21virtual.cl/2018/09/04/comunicados-chulos-chunchules-chilenos-de-piero-montebruno/