The first English-language translation of the “secret” poetry of Hélio Oiticica uncovers a crucial chapter in the development of one of Brazil’s most significant twentieth-century artists.
Between 1964 and 1966, in the first years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems, entitled Secret Poetics, and reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his artistic practice. Despite his global fame as a founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as neoconcretismo, his collaborations with major Brazilian artists and writers (Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Ferreira Gullar, etc.), and his influence across a range of disciplines (including painting, film, installation, and participatory art), Oiticica’s “secret” poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This edition, featuring the original texts in facsimile reproductions along with English translations and accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry to Oiticica’s thinking on participation, sensation, and memory.
Secret Poetics will be published in November 2023 by Winter Editions.
From Secret Poetics
August 4, 1964
The smell,
new touch,
restarting of the senses,
absorption,
memory,
oh!,
come what may,
what shall be,
will become,
will be
fistful of future,
apprehension.
The shadow,
possible re-encounter,
old encounter,
just;
hey!
lost beauty
there’s so much, dear,
needed,
just;
secret desire
inexpressible,
unspeakable,
just, in the incommunicable.
August 4, 1964
What was,
stayed,
sediment of memory.
August 5, 1964
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!
oh what?,
the always,
the nothing,
the fire.
September 1, 1964
Bitter taste of what’s sweet,
I felt,
I feel,
the whip that wounds,
caresses;
pain,
bitterness of the caress,
body that burns —
inside;
memory of pleasure,
leisure of love,
what is,
what will be,
oh —
the want
impossible to stop wanting,
making or unmaking,
being;
love
sword that wounds,
sugar that sweetens — ;
bile.
March 30, 1966
