
Secret Poetics by Hélio Oiticica Translated by Rebecca Kosick, Review by Zoe Contros Kearl and Interview by Tiffany Troy
Secret Poetics by Hélio Oiticica
Translated by Rebecca Kosick
Publisher: Winter Editions, Soberscove Press
Publication Date: November 14, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-940190-32-7
Pages: 120
A Review and an Interview of Hélio Oiticica’s Secret Poetics –
“O beauty! That’s already a memory.”
Secret Poetics, written by artist Hélio Oiticica and translated from Portuguese by Rebecca Kosick, is available to readers in the English language for the first time in a new collection out through Winter Editions and Soberscove Press. Oiticica, one of Brazil’s most significant twentieth-century artists, did not consider himself a poet but his body of work, along with this newly-discovered writing, make apparent a rich lineage of lyric. Poet or not—for Oiticica there was always poetry.
Written between 1964 and 1966 in longhand, in blue ink on unlined pages, the untitled stanzas of Secret Poetics flirt with the mystery of being and knowing, the erotic pain of wanting and losing, and the next-next nature of living in a world where moments are relegated to memory so quickly one can hardly register the change. As Oiticica writes early in Secret Poetics:
oh!
come what may,
what shall be,
will become,
will be,
fistful of future,
apprehension. (43)
The verses of Secret Poetics are preceded by an essay from translator Rebecca Kosick as well as an unorthodox preface in the form of notebook entries penned by Oiticica himself. The diaristic sequence of poems is followed by a selection of seven images of Oiticica’s artwork—visual, performance-based, and otherwise—whose thematics are in conversation with those explored in Secret Poetics. The book concludes with an essay from scholar and art critic Pedro Erber. Oiticica’s notebook entries serve as a fitting introduction to the concerns of the poems that follow: thoughts are bound by lines on sheets of paper held within a three ring notebook, the burnt orange stain of rust from each ring on white pages makes evident the indifferent and inevitable passage of time. Oiticica introduces his private project, Secret Poetics, and its focus on ephemerality and eternality with clarity. He writes:
“… certain paths, certain intuitions begin to bud, the flowering of the everyday. The poems that will emerge here tend to synthesize those experiences—they’ll flow, I hope, in the linear space of these pages, continuously.” (36)
Memory as theme appears early in the facing pages of Secret Poetics. On left pages the reader is granted a view of each poem reproduced from the journal in which the verses were first written. On the right pages each poem appears typed out, controlled. Left side—Oiticica’s looping handwriting roams free of borders on unlined, yellowing pages; his casual yet elegant script is on display for the reader in faded cobalt as words slant downward, playing against blank space in much the same way as fleeting lives press up against time. This stylistic openness is bridled only by careful punctuation and the dating of entries, both stylistic choices which make apparent thoughtfulness found in each poem as well as across the Oiticica’s larger body of work.
What was,
stayed,
sediment of memory. (47)
To be human is to be yoked by time undeniable; all of us pinned like butterflies to the cork board of shared, dumb mortality. In the years between beginning and end, the only promise life makes is the passing of some number of hours, days, years. Within those confines there’s sometimes pleasure, sometimes pain, but invariably there is the ticking of the clock. How that passing is experienced, however, is wildly varying, unique to each life lived. Oiticica addresses “spinning” time and again throughout Secret Poetics. In these poems, both writer and implicated reader must kneel before the inescapable triptych of existing: past-present-future.
The spinning,
becoming (unbecoming),
the implication of memory,
remembering,
the forgetting or the unforgetting,
persistence of the past,
future,
the experience of the now,
always being,
oh! (55)
The seven pieces of art photographed and included in the edition were created by Oiticica before, during, and after the writing of Secret Poetics. The sampling functions as a showcase of career progression—in these pieces the reader bears witness to a shift from adherence to the neo-concrete style of Oiticica’s early career to a more radical mixed-media and performance-based practice developed in the years that followed in tandem with the rise of conceptual art. Each piece grants the reader a tangible connection to abstract ideas and obsessions at work in the poems, as well as an opportunity to consider the place of poetry within art and vice versa.
Figure 7, B52 Bólide saco 4 “Teu amor eu guard aqui” (B52 Fireball Sack 4 “I keep your love here”) shows Oiticica himself demonstrating a work from his Bólide (Fireball) series. In the photograph the viewer witnesses Oiticica shirtless, head and torso in a clear plastic sheath with the words, “Teu amor eu guard aqui,” or “I keep your love here,” inscribed in red block print. The piece evokes the want and ache that appears in the verses towards the end of Secret Poetics, the “attraction,/object of affection,” (59), the “pain of memory,/reminder of what’s wanted;” (61) how it is “impossible to stop wanting/—all there is is my want” (61). Within the verses of Secret Poetics the experience of living is one rapt with ache, romantic-erotic-otherwise, heightened by the passage of time and still riled despite the promise of memory.
It’s likely Oiticica didn’t intend for the verses of Secret Poetics read by a wider audience, or published at all. Intention is funny, just another thing time outlasts. Sometimes this disregard is for the better. Secret Poetics provides an illuminating window into a celebrated artist’s early poetry, all impressions and obsessions apparent and intact. This is a collection not to be missed. I’ll leave you here with Oiticica, and with the seeming impossibility of being anything at all:
memory of pleasure,
leisure of love,
what is, what will be,
oh—
the want
impossible to stop wanting,
making or unmaking,
being; (63)
“Water/ glassy surface/ plunge.”:
A Conversation with Translator Rebecca Kosick about Hélio Oiticica’s Secret Poetics, translated from Portuguese
Tiffany Troy: I am curious about your process in the introduction to Secret Poetics. Could you speak to us about how the contents, structure, and form of the introduction help provide context to Oiticica’s poetry and your translation of the same?
Rebecca Kosick: I started from the knowledge that those people who were familiar with Oiticica would have known him as a visual artist. (Actually, “plastic artist,” as they say in Portuguese, is a better fit for his multidimensional and interactive body of work.) Close followers of Oiticica will have seen that poetry has long played a role in his work, but he has not been known as a poet. So, I wanted to use the introduction to reintroduce him to readers, first by introducing him as the artist they might have known him as, and then by showing him to be a poet as well, a poet whose writing is deeply intertwined with his practices in the plastic arts.
There’s a good reason for Oiticica’s poetry being little known—it wasn’t published or circulated in book form. In that way, I bear a special kind of responsibility as the translator, which I also wanted to shed light on in the introduction. These poems were written 60 years ago, but for most readers, this is likely the first time they’ve seen them in any language. Considering that all translations are partial, but also excessive to their source texts, I didn’t want to just leave the translations there as if they were a stand-in for Oiticica’s poetry. So, I used the introduction also to talk a bit about what was informing my choices as the translator—from Oiticica’s artwork, to his play with language, his thinking on art and participation, and my own contingent background as someone who has been living in this world. I wanted readers to see my translations as my own participatory engagement with Oiticica’s lyrical practice, and not at all as its substitute.
TT: The idea of seeing translation as a form of participatory engagement is fascinating, especially in the context of “plastic arts” and “happenings” in which the act of engagement is part of the art itself.
What has most surprised you in the act of translating and engaging with Oititica’s work?
RK: My background is in poetry, though as an academic I focus on poetry’s relationships with other arts. Often, this means I research intermedia forms that propose some kind of synthesis between poetry and, say, sculpture. My early research into neoconcretism—the interdisciplinary movement Oiticica helped launch in 1959—focused on these kinds of poetic forms. Poets associated with neoconcretism like Ferreira Gullar were making “poem-objects” that incorporated things like drawers and hinges which the reader was meant to touch, open, move. These poems tended to use very little verbal language, sometimes just one word. A subset of Oiticica’s mid-1960s Bólide series (also called ‘poems’) share a lot of this character as well.
So what surprised me most about the poems in Secret Poetics was that they were not this sort of poem at all. Unlike the poetry of neoconcretism, Oiticica’s Secret Poetics poems are just words on a page. This might not be surprising for most poetry, but given the kind of poetry the neoconcretists were best known for, it’s a departure. That said, as I address in the book, there are many, many convergences between the poems and Oiticica’s wider practice at the time, even if the poems themselves are more formally traditional than both neoconcrete poetry and Oiticica’s concurrent work in the plastic arts.
TT: I enjoy very much what you said about poetry as words-on-a-page being conceived of as more formally traditional for an artist as deeply engrossed in neoconcretism as Oiticica. Speaking of words on a page, can you speak of the choice to present facsimiles of Secret Poetics in its original Portuguese side by side with a typed up version of the English translation? Specifically, can you speak to the typographical choices made? How much of it was controlled by the publisher or the physical constraints and dimensions of the page? (I, for one, am curious about the extra space before the , in the facsimile.)
RK: I knew from the beginning that I wanted to include the handwritten pages in facsimile and pitched the book that way. My wonderful editors Julia Klein (at Soberscove Press) and Matvei Yankelevich (at Winter Editions) were both really supportive of this idea. Oiticica was a superlative notetaker and record keeper, and left behind a great deal of unpublished writing that takes the form of diary reflections, plans, drawings, schemata for future work, etc. I saw these poems as belonging to that aspect of his private practice as an artist, though they differ from much of his other writing in being a discrete set, with a title and everything, and in being poetry.
But I thought it was very important to show the poems as they were left for us—in the artist’s own hand and on the different papers he used to write them down. Oiticica’s estate, managed by his brothers César and Claudio Oiticica, kindly gave us permission to reprint the images. Due to a fire the Oiticica archives suffered in 2009, the images are, as far as we know, the only surviving trace of these poems. So, the digital resolution of the image files defined the size of the facsimiles they appear as in the book.
Given that the poems were written by hand and not edited professionally, we did make a few choices to standardize them when typesetting. There are a couple of instances of nonstandard spelling in Portuguese which I didn’t try to replicate in English. Brazilian Portuguese made some changes to orthography in the mid-20th century, but Oiticica can be seen using older conventions. So to Brazilian readers, the poems will have, for example, accent marks that are no longer used, whereas the English doesn’t obviously show such a movement through time, at least not at that level. Particularly in Oiticica’s prose comments, it was occasionally hard to make out his handwriting, so there is at least one place where I had to make a guess based on context. Also, we changed the dates to follow the American format. It’s interesting you picked up on the space before some of the punctuation in the handwritten texts! I actually did include that in the early drafts of the translations, but we ended up standardizing the spacing (removing extra spaces) because, on the one hand, there was a lot of variation around spacing in the handwritten texts, and on the other, the editors felt that wide spacing may have been a holdover from the typewriter era, and not something Oiticica was specifically emphasizing. I’ll leave it with readers to decide!
TT: That’s so interesting, in thinking about how living in the typewriter era may have influenced Oiticica’s handwriting, especially with the context of him still following older conventions in his writing. Secret Poetics feels so special because it also includes selections of artworks of Oiticica, including his collaborative works with other artists. To you, what are some of the similarities in the art of curation versus translation and how does one inform the other here?
RK: Curation and translation are both interpretive modes of selection and presentation. Here, I picked the artworks that I felt most strongly demonstrated links with ideas circulating in Secret Poetics (especially those that Pedro Erber and I commented on in our essays). I mostly went for quite famous examples of Oiticica’s work, in part because I wanted to show that these well-known works might have started out as ideas Oiticica developed in poetry before he ended up making them in 3D. So, if readers look closely at the dates, they’ll see that oftentimes the poem was written before the artwork it might be said to relate to. I hope this will spur followers of Oiticica’s work to reevaluate the great depth of his engagement with poetry.
You’re right that many of the artworks included are collaborative. This is true in terms of their authorship (Oiticica and Lygia Clark together creating Dialogue of Hands) and of their deployment in the world (Oiticica’s collaborator Nildo embodying his Parangolé). The poems, as far as the evidence tells us, were written by Oiticica without an additional co-author. But, I think they also fall under the umbrella of Oiticica’s generally collaborative and participatory practice. For one thing, like all of his work, they would have arisen out of the deep and highly active social worlds that Oiticica moved in as an artist and a person. So there are presences of other influences even if they may not be legible to us now under the rubric of ‘author.’ But also, the poems as they are written are overwhelmingly open to the experiences and subjectivities of others. There are some places where the first-person structures a line or two, but often the poems are written without the organizing force of a lyrical subject at all. Rather, they take the form of articulating experiences anyone can bring to the poem—memories, desires, smells, touches, tastes, forgets. These sensations are frequently present without much description at all. So, we aren’t told what to taste or feel or remember. We get a say.
TT: Yes, I think what you said captures the sense I got out of reading Oiticica’s poems, which is that it is very much about articulating experiences that the reader can then interpret/ react to. I’m curious about what you wrote about the relationship between hand-object-subject. Do you think Secret Poetics has or wants to have that same relationship with its readership?
RK: Kind of following on from the above, I think that so much of Oiticica’s work contains an opening for us to step into, and that this is as true of Secret Poetics as it is of some of his haptically participatory works. So, if we put on the Parangolé, or put our hands into one of his Bólides, we (subjects) become part of the object, as do our sensations. Now, poetry can’t do this in quite the same way. It can talk about a smell, for instance, but it cannot make the smell actually come into being for the reader, at least not through language alone. So what I see Oiticica doing in Secret Poetics is asking readers to bring all their experiences and sense memories to the poem, bring them into the poem itself, so that if the poem says something about a feeling, it’s not Oiticica telling us how to feel, but rather the reader’s own memory of a feeling that fills the space the poem leaves for us. This is how it will, on my reading, continue to stage the “persistence of the past” that Oiticica mentions in a line from September 1964. Every past, even pasts that are future to the poems themselves, will continue to shape the poems, as long as we keep reading them.
TT: Do you have any closing thoughts with your readers of the world?
RK: Just thank you. What a generous thing it is to read.
Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) was a multifaceted Brazilian artist and theorist whose practice included painting, sculpture, performance, filmmaking, and writing. Oiticica is known for his work with concrete art and as a founding member of the neoconcrete movement in 1959.
Rebecca Kosick is a poet, translator, and co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute at the University of Bristol (UK). She is the author of Material Poetics in Hemispheric America (Edinburgh University Press) and the poetry collection Labor Day (Golias Books).
Zoe Contros Kearl is a queer writer and editor raised in Texas and based in Vermont. Writing appears in Action Books Blog, Be About It, Entropy Magazine, G*MOB Mag, Hobart, Kenyon Review, Maudlin House, Neutral Spaces, The Quarterless Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. ZCK currently serves as nonfiction editor for American Chordata Magazine and holds an MFA from Columbia University.
Tiffany Troy is author of Dominus (BlazeVOX [books]) and co-translator of Santiago Acosta’s The Coming Desert /El próximo desierto (forthcoming, Alliteration Publishing House), in collaboration with Acosta and the 4W International Women Collective Translation Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She is Managing Editor at Tupelo Quarterly, Associate Editor of Tupelo Press, and Book Review Co-Editor at The Los Angeles Review.
7 February 2024
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