Poetry
"I believe the poet today must broaden his field, get out of books and put himself forward with all the means provided by society itself and which he can use as unusual vehicles, infusing them with an ethical content which society does not confer on them. That is the starting point of the experiments in visual poetry which, in my opinion, has become the experimental poetry of our time. The search for a new ground between the visual and the semantic."
Joan Brossa, 1987
In this podcast we talk to Luz Pichel about languages that ache in the body and about the poetry that returns this pain to the world in the form of a challenge. Between readings of her poems and first-person stories, we reflect on the margins of voice and language, the class conflict that Spanish-Galician “Castrapo” reveals, the danger of giving voice to the voiceless, Galician migration, and the displaced status of writers.
Let's talk about... Polypoetic Accidents 2020, with Xavier Therós. Polypoetic Accidents was a polypoetry duo active between 1991 and 2017, when one of the two members, Rafael Metlikovez, passed away. During the years of their activity, they gave recitals in Catalonia, Spain, Italy, France, Germany, Portugal, the United States, Colombia and Mexico, as well as at the Georges Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Bowery Poets Club in New York. On this occasion we will listen to their classic poems, now recited in just one voice.
Charles Bernstein is a poet, essayist, editor, and professor emeritus at the University of Pennsylvania. Together with Bruce Andrews, he edited the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, which gave its name to a movement of more than a hundred poets interested in the radical exploration of writing that flourished in the late 1970s and the 1980s on both the east and west coasts of the United States.
![Passió i cartografia per a un incendi dels ulls [Passion and cartography for an eye fire]](https://img.macba.cat/public/styles/width_600/public/imagen/2022-02/2022_panoramagris_1.jpeg?itok=5hEp9bgV×tamp=1645705186)
The publication Passió i cartografia per a un incendi dels ulls will mark the closing of the group exhibition Notes for an Eye Fire, the first in a new series of transdisciplinary projects entitled Panorama, focusing on mostly local aesthetics and artistic practices.
The book reproduces a poem by Gabriel Ventura that, decomposed into a plurality of voices and points of view, draws up a textual cartography for Notes for an Eye Fire. The publication also features a selection of images of the works in the museum galleries.
Joan Brossa (Barcelona, 1919-1998) was first and foremost a poet, but we believe it is necessary to see this in relation to his way of working, his poiesis. The Brossa Poetry exhibition established a dialogue and confronted Brossa’s work with the artists Marcel Marien, Nicanor Parra and Ian Hamilton-Finlay.
Brossa was a poet, but his works stood at a crossroad of languages. Frequently collaborating with other artists, musicians, filmmakers, dancers, comedians and even magicians, his work constantly went against the grain and beyond the limits between disciplines.
'Language is the cheapest technology.' Under this premise, the poet María Salgado delves into the abundance of meanings that are produced in the interaction between audio, graphics, and gesture when you operate below the radar of the demands of words and discourse. In her hybrid, syncretic practice, words and sentences are the material and the practice of 'lenguagjeo' ('languaging'), that is, the 'liveliness or movement by which languages take on diverse, defiant forms, different or lovely on the tongue, the eye, the ear and the memory of those who emit them and also those who receive them each time.' You can see, feel, and hear this in the four books of poetry she has published to date, her blog, her sound project with Fran MM Cabeza de Vaca, her research with Seminario Euraca (and adjoining) and... on stage.
Idiorhythmias, a programme centred on work around performative practices and driven by the poetic desire to build, from the institution and through action, an imperfect, ephemeral and unstable community; to theorise collectively and to reflect on the potential of the body in a public domain dominated by the word.
Video of the performance at MACBA in 2017:
- Itziar Okariz, Capítulo 2, V.W. En sustracción (2013)
- María Salgado, Lírica / 3 (2017)
- Marc Matter, Language-Monsters
In this podcast, Roberto Jacoby opens up his poetry books and talks about writing, inspiration, plundering and dematerialisation; about blacks and whites, sofa-beds, politics and activism. Referring to the South, he makes a distinction between soft and hard dictatorships and talks about the neo-fascisms that are on the horizon. Also from the South, he conjures up the spaces of political imagination that opened up with the Argentinean avant-garde, the Instituto Di Tella, and the collective experience of Tucumán Arde.
A poet, playwright and visual artist, Joan Brossa (1919–1998) produced an extensive body of work. In the 1940s he met the poet J.V. Foix, who would become one of his literary references, the philosopher Arnau Puig, and the artists Modest Cuixart, Joan Ponç, Antoni Tàpies and Joan-Josep Tharrats. Together they founded Dau al Set (1948), an avant-garde group and magazine to which Brossa contributed Surrealist texts consisting of dreamlike and hypnagogic images close to psychic automatism. It was the beginning of a significant literary oeuvre that used language as a means of experimentation and led the author to embrace visual poetry, dramaturgy, sculpture and performance.
Actual recording was not an option until the twentieth century, when technology made it possible to record, play back, process and multiply the voice of the poet. One source, infinite layers. A machine for expressing the multiplicity that exists in every voice, in every person. This led to the birth of a new genre, a new path that is in reality simply a revival of the original poetry which existed before print: voice and repetition. In this mix we capture some of the infinite instances of voice and repetition in Eduard Escoffet's sound poetry collection.
«Brossa does not create; he selects», says Roger Bernat. And, indeed, Brossa works with scattered poems, ideas noted in margins, sentences, press cuttings, theatrical and paratheatrical plays. Poetry Brossa presents the artist’s work against the grain, beyond limits, and between disciplines through his books, visual investigations, theatre, cinema, music and artistic actions.