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