Poema visual, 1988

The alphabet has a special place in Joan Brossa’s visual poetry. The alphabet stands out in the many formal and semantic, ironic and playful operations this author carries out in his visual poems, and the letters A, which opens the alphabet, and X, Y, and Z, which close it, appear especially frequently. Brossa mobilizes all manner of visual resources, using duplicate, displaced, broken, and inverted letters, or even letters that have been disassembled into their most basic components, with typographic variants and the inclusion of figures that conjure up the great resonating chamber that is the alphabet. As Brossa wrote in 1987, “I believe modern-day poets must broaden their field of action beyond mere books and project themselves through all the means society itself provides them with. Poets can use them as unusual vehicles while infusing them with ethical value while society does not. This is the starting point of my experiments with visual poetry which, for me, has become the experimental poetry of our time, the search for a new territory between visuals and
semantics”.