The first English-language translation of Oiticica's "secret" poetry, featuring facsimile renderings of the handwritten poems and accompanying notes by the artist Helio Oiticica (1937-80) is widely considered one of Brazil's most significant artists, and his influence is felt across a range of disciplines including painting, film, installation and participatory art. He is well known as a key founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as Neoconcretismo, launched in Rio de Janeiro in 1959 with the collaboration of artists and writers including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape and Ferreira Gullar. Between 1964 and 1966, moving out of his Neoconcretist period, Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems entitled "Poetica Secreta" (Secret Poetics), and he reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his wider practice as an artist. Despite Oiticica's global fame, his "secret" poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This bilingual edition, with accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry for Oititica's art and shows its importance to his thinking on participation, sensation and memory.
Reviews
This book is chiefly about better understanding the artistic framework and thinking of one of the leading Brazilian artists of the twentieth century, and in this, the book definitively hits the mark. -- Elizabeth Zuba * The Brooklyn Rail *
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. -- Tiffany Troy * Los Angeles Review *
By bringing non-Portuguese speaking readers as close as possible to experiencing the original, Kosick reveals to the anglophone public a poetic cycle that is truly one-of-a-kind. -- Sofija Popovska * Asymptote Journal *
This brief collection of hand-written poems and accompanying artworks uses language as an entry point into the late sculptor's practice and spirit. -- Lakshmi Amin * Hyperallergic *
Each poem insists on the immediacy of the now and the here. -- Janani Ambikapathy * Poetry Foundation *
As this book reveals, Oiticica was interested in language as early as 1964-a discovery that will undoubtedly lead Oiticica scholars to reevaluate established perceptions of his development as an artist. -- Antonio Sergio Bessa * Author of OEyvind Fahlstroem: The Art of Writing *
Penned during the crucial years of Oiticica's artistic and personal coming-of-age, these secret poems reveal a lyrical and intimate counterpoint to the transgressive interventions the artist staged in public during this same period. -- Irene V. Small * Author of Helio Oiticica: Folding the Frame *
As this elegant volume reminds us, the experience of language as an event is key to the not-so-secret poetics Oiticica's work so staunchly enacts. -- Monica De La Torre * Author of Repetition Nineteen *



Book Information
ISBN 9781940190327
Author Helio Oiticica
Format Paperback
Page Count 120
Imprint Soberscove Press
Publisher Soberscove Press