Loading...

Poema visual per a l’exposició del Prat de Llobregat, 1990

Visual Poem for the Exhibition Held in El Prat de Llobregat, 1990
Graphic material, 65.5 x 49.7 cm

You have cultivated visual poetry exhaustively. Do you think visual poetry has its own characteristics, or is it just a specific way of looking at things?

Visual poetry means a change of code: it’s experimental poetry for our time, since images are so important in our society. Images are everywhere, you can travel miles and see lots of indications where the literary code is neither here nor there. Of course they’re only used in a practical sense, but I don’t see why a poet cannot transform them and give them an ethical dimension. Just think of the importance of this new and eminently visual art: the cinema. I think it has been a transforming element for literature, although, for commercial reasons, it has also contributed to the proliferation of bad literature. I’m thinking of doing visual poems as video clips. But my poems won’t publicise anything, on the contrary. I’m interested in the medium, it has speed and synthesis. It’s an interesting tool and I don’t see why the poet should be a prisoner of the book. Poetry is everywhere and a poet with antennae and sensibility should be able to try all the new forms present in our society. In fact, they should be a challenge. We don’t necessarily have to write verses, with all due respect to the verse. I do visual poetry but I can also write sestinas, which is something not even old-fashioned poets can do. Not to speak of the hundreds of sonnets and Sapphic odes I’ve written. What I mean is, poetry is not exclusively literature.

Gual, Antoni; Ruiz, Carles: ‘Joan Brossa: l'alternativa poètica’, Carrer dels arbres: trimestral de cultura. 2nd period, no. 1. (Summer 1986), pp. 14–23


Technical details

Original title:
Poema visual per a l’exposició del Prat de Llobregat
Registration number:
4559
Artist:
Brossa, Joan
Date created:
1990
Date acquired:
2011
Fonds:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium
Object type:
Graphic material
Media:
Screen print and lithography on paper
Dimensions:
65.5 x 49.7 cm (height x width)
Edition number:
H.C.
Credits:
MACBA Collection. MACBA Consortium. Joan Brossa Fund. Long-term loan of Fundació Joan Brossa
Copyright:
© Fundació Joan Brossa, VEGAP, Barcelona
It has accessibility resources:
No

The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.

For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.

If you need a high resolution image of the work, you must submit an image loan request.