By Hélio Oiticica. Edited and translated with introduction by Rebecca Kosick. Afterword by Pedro Erber.
The first English-language translation of Oiticica’s "secret" poetry, featuring facsimile renderings of the handwritten poems and accompanying notes by the artist
Hélio 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 "Poética 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.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Author of Repetition Nineteen
Mónica De La Torre
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.
Author of Hélio Oiticica: Folding the Frame
Irene V. Small
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.
Author of Öyvind Fahlström: The Art of Writing
Antonio Sergio Bessa
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.
Poetry Foundation
Janani Ambikapathy
Each poem insists on the immediacy of the now and the here.
Hyperallergic
Lakshmi Amin
This brief collection of hand-written poems and accompanying artworks uses language as an entry point into the late sculptor’s practice and spirit.
Asymptote Journal
Sofija Popovska
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.
Los Angeles Review
Tiffany Troy
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.
The Brooklyn Rail
Elizabeth Zuba
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.
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Published by Soberscove Press/Winter Editions. By Hélio Oiticica. Edited and translated with introduction by Rebecca Kosick. Afterword by Pedro Erber.
The first English-language translation of Oiticica’s "secret" poetry, featuring facsimile renderings of the handwritten poems and accompanying notes by the artist
Hélio 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 "Poética 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.
