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EL BOU DE LA TRISTESA S’EIXARRANCA
(The Ox of Sadness Goes A-Sprawling)
VIATGE A LA POLINÈSIA
(Journey to Polynesia)
(1997-2000)
Lis Costa
Because of its peculiarity, the verse that entitles this conference
could very well had been heard in any of the reading of the poetry
series Viatge a la polinèsia. It’s a verse written by
Josep M. de Sagarra during his own trip to Polynesia, in 1937, collected
in the book of poems Entre l’equador i els tròpics (Between
Ecuador and the Tropics). As it seems, there is a curious relationship
between poetry and these islands in the Pacific, whose name suggests,
to many, paradise. A remote and unknown paradise, as all dreamed paradises
are, whereto one will probably never travel.
In 1992, Carles Hac Mor talked about poetry and Polynesia in an article
titled “Polipoetes, polipaletes i polipatates” (“Polypoets,
polypallets and polypotatoes”), where he lectured about the labels
used to classify poetry, more specifically about the label of polypoetry:
Everybody is a polypoet, even unknowingly, and there are also polypallets,
among which I count myself, some believe (...)
Apparently, polypoets and polypotatoes live in Polynesia, where one’s
left hand is denied by the police. In fact, they are “polis”
(“cops”, in Catalan and Spanish) (without poets, pallets,
and only potatoes), bad taste police, of those not knowing one’s
left hand from one’s right. And if, in the end, bad taste is
to conquer the noucentista good taste of so many Catalan letters,
the distinctions between asses and donkeys will have to be abolished.
(...)
Everybody
lives, in Polynesia. Everybody is polypotatoe.
A
few months later, in January 1993, and maybe under the influence of
the above-mentioned article, we were meeting the name of these islands
again, to entitle a magazine about poetry, music and art in general,
promoted by the duet Accidents Polipoètics –Rafael Metlikovec
and Xavier Theros– and Clara Bertran.
And, in the same year 93, a group of very young artists created the
association PROPOST (Projectes Poètics Sense Títol –Untitled
Poetical Projects–) in order to channel a series of activities
concerning poetry: readings, exhibitions of visual poetry, some mail
art sessions and the issue edition of a magazine entitled “SenseTítol”
–Untitled–. They were interested in everything that could
be bracketed within experimental poetry, a world they were just beggining
to discover. From this group of youngsters, in 1997 two were still
active: Dídac P. Lagarriga and Eduard Escoffet. The latter,
aged seventeen and endowed with a very powerful poetical and organizing
streak, decided to embark in his own private Jouney to Polynesia.
Once more, the unconscious link from the overseas islands to poetry.
Eduard Escoffet explained that the name of this series “came
out from the chaos that reigned and still reigns within the poetical
expressions which stand out from the ordinary. It is a journey to
every “poli” in poetry. In fact, poetry is like Polynesia:
sounds familiar to everybody, but nobody knows exactly wherever is
located”.
Escoffet saw very clearly from the beggining that he wanted to contribute
to put some order in the poetical happennings that had been taking
place in the city in the last few years. His idea was to organize
readings of a kind of poetry that was made to be shown in public,
mainly from the voice, from the spoken word, but also from the image,
from direct action, dance or music. He didn’t want the readings
to be a literary by-product, an act held for the coming out of a book,
but an act exclusively and intentionally held to exhibit poetry, whether
or not this poetry was written or published. The paradox was that
the outer structure used to put the series in order was characteristic
of the written word: chapters and volumes.
The introductory words said: “Viatge a la Polinèsia (poetries+polypoetries
for the end of the millenium). Viatge a la Polinèsia is a stable
series of poetical schedule that begins in January 1997 and will end
in January 2000. The series will be centred on the tangential, peripheral
and/or dinamic perspectives of poetry. Through its different volumes
(and their respective chapters), the different look in the eyes of
today’s poets of poetry will be revised”.
The complete collection of this work by instalments has 25 volumes.
Some of them include one single chapter; others, two, three, or up
to four, always assembled according to their poetical orientation.
On the whole, 41 chapters, or what amounts to the same thing, 41 appointments
with poetry throught three years, that have gathered more than 150
poets and almost 4000 people. If poetical tendencies have been diverse,
so have been the sites that have welcomed its different, varied chapters.
This was, in fact, one of the basic points of this Journey from the
begginning: to hold it in a decentralized space; that is to say, not
to have fixed headquarters for each volume, but to set them, according
to contents, space characteristics and the various diverse interventions,
in different places. Its first six editions took place in the premises
of the cultural association Heliogàbal, a tiny space in Gràcia;
afterwards came Metrònom, in the Centre de Cultura Contemporània
–from mid-99–, an agreement with the Centre stablishes that
its space and infrastructures are at the Journey’s disposal–,
Raval’s streets and squares, the Casal d’Associacions Juvenils
deBarcelona (the old Transformadors), the Espai Escènic
Joan Brossa, the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, libraries,
the Hangar... up to fifteen sites in Barcelona, and one in Girona,
in the C.C. La Mercè, where two volumes have been held.
Journey to Polynesia has three clear referents of whose it admits
being heir: the poetical activity of the 80’s, with the first
readings of the poetry book O així, paradigm of counterculture
and of the poetical and political libertarian mouvement; the polypoetry
of Xavier Sabater’s school; the spontaneous, multitudinous, multifarious
acts promoted by Carlres Hac Mor and Ester Xargay, as were “Revista
Parlada” (Spoken Magazine) and “Revista Caminada” (Walked
Magazine).
Escoffet had had the first personal contact with Hac Mor and Xargay
in January 1995 in the Fundació Tàpies, as a result
of the exhibition about the mouvement Fluxus. There, toguether with
Dídac P. Lagarriga, under the name of The New Living Theatre
Project, they meant to carry out an action in the toilets of the Fundació.
It was suppressed by the police. Escoffet was then fifteen years old
and yearning to learn, to suck poetry and to channel his energy towards
tangential poetical proposals. Hac Mor and Xargay allied with him
and Dídac P. Lagarriga and, in 1996, designed Àgora
Indisciplinària, oral poetry sessions, debates, video... which
were held, almost throughout a year, at the Metrònom. Until
Escoffet decided to organize his Viatge a la Polinèsia.
A series that reaps the poetical tradition which during the 80’s
and early 90’s had acted more “underground”style, but
that now has as one of its main goals the coming up to the surface,
the attaintment of diffusion. The idea is to get to the people –not
only to poets and friends–, to be in the newspapers... and also
to have a decent infrastructure, that is, to have the necessary money
in hand to pay the poets, premises where to hold the readings in fair
conditions, and the baic technical equipment (sound, light, video...)
demanded by each chapter.
In this respect, Journey to Polynesia has acted as hinge between the
manifold underground inheritance and the present popularization. For,
on the one hand it has coherently scheduled a type of poetry characterized
by risk and experimentation, but, on the other hand, has tended to
infrastructural institutionalisation, and that has warranted –not
without efforts– the basic requests claimed for. Thus, after
years of underground management, the Journey has contributed to attain
an explosion of poetry, mainly of live spoken petry, which has become
a regular leisure option in the city. Therefore, we shouln’t
forget that this poetical boom of the 90’s has taken place, in
great measure, thanks to the powerful go of the poets who have organized
poetry acts, readings and festivals, have designed editing projects
and have published magazines. As much as to the effort of small independent
entities which have not ceased to include poetry among their scheduled
activities –such as Conservas, G’s Club or Heliogàbal–,
thus amplifying the difussion of poetry and the interreelation among
artistic practices that characterizes the present moment.
And it is well known that when fire is alight, is easy to keep it
blazing. In fact, in 1977, shortly after the begginning of Viatge
a la Polinèsia, public and private institutions that had previously
organised some blashful acts, embarked upon regular poetical series.
Thus, as an example, the Institut de Cultura de l’Ajuntament
de Barcelona (a Council institution) opened Barcelona Poesia, seven
days of poetry in the city. In September, the Fundació “la
Caixa” started the series Sense Contemplacions (nou poetes per
a la fi de segle) –“No Indulgence (nine poets for the turn
of the century)”– monographical series that scheduled, among
others, Carles Hac Mor, David Castillo, Víctor Sunyol, Enric
Casassas i Albert Roig. And in a similar line, in October 1997, the
collaboration between Cafè Central (Antoni Clapés’s
poetry publishing house) and the museum Museu Barbier-Müller
of pre-Colombian art came into being with the series Un pas a dos
–“Step for Two”–, where José Corredor-Matheos,
Esther Zarraluki, Perejaume, Ester Xargay, etc., have spoken their
poems.
Besides, as a result of this bubbling and of the genre’s popularization,
everything related to it expands: the publishing volume, punctual
initiatives of poetry schedule –that, if before had moved in
a reduced circuit of premises, now multiply in bars, clubs, theatres...–,
and likewise, it couldn’t be any other, the number of poets grows
as well, with the creation, along the decade, of a group that
binds toguether different generations. At the same time, initiatives
of poetical broadcadsting on television, the radio and internet are
being born. And this bursting is parallel to the audience’s reception,
which attend poetical appointments with growing normality. For instance,
Viatge a la Polinèsia started off by having an average of forty-five
people audience per chapter during its first year; but, in its last
two years of existence, the number had increased to more than a hundred.
The main difference between Viatge a la Polinèsia and the rest
of the series lies in the type of poetry scheduled. None of
its chapters has included a more conventional poetry, nor that which,
notwithstanding its experimental character, would put less stress
on the oral factor. From word to action, the range of poetries to
be shown in public has been wide.
Each edition has been devoted to a different type of phonetical expression,
including variegated proposals of oral poetry, as well as poetry of
action and poetry related to other arts, particularly music, dance
and video. A diversity bound toguether by the thread of risk and experimentation.
Poets have been mainly Catalan, but from April 99, coinciding with
the joining of PROPOST as associated entity to the CCCB, there has
been a fair share of foreign poets and of poets from the rest of Spanish
State. This was something Escoffet had contemplated from the begginning,
for, previously, there had been little occasion of being acquainted
with foreign poetry. (With the exception of few instances, like the
Polyphonix festival, or the Festival de Polipoesia de Barcelona, organised
by Xavier Sabater as of 1991.)
The majority of volumes of Viatge a la Polinèsia have been
devoted to poets of word, and there have been heard powerful voices,
which reveal the potential strength of spoken poetry, of the rythmical
aspects of language, of silence, intonation and gestuality, transmited
by some with a heavier load of staging –as it is with Accidents
Polipoètics and Noel Tatú–, and by others more
nakedly –Josep Ramon Roig, Enric Casassas, Dolors Miquel, Carles
Hac Mor, Gerard Horta, Joan Vinuesa or Jaume Cisterna–. On this
line, there have been as well some monographic volumes devoted to
poets such as Jordi Pope, Miquel Bauçà or Josep Pla,
or to poetical groups, such as O així or the Dada Mouvement.
It was in this last volume that was offered the opportunity of getting
down to the heart of the word, to the poetry that relinquishes the
meaning of words to delve into its basic components, the sounds of
language. Catalunya has, indeed, few poets dedicated to phonetical
poetry: Pere Sousa/Merz Mail is its main exponent. And it was him,
toguether with Christian Atanasiu and Rodrick Mackay, who organised
the volume consecrated to Dada, held in the Espai Escènic Joan
Brossa.
Following this line, in the volume of “Audiopoètiques”,
the XIXth, –the first of great internatinal presence–, there
was the opportunity to listen to the very particular interpretations
of the word sounds offered by Russian Valeri Schertsjanoi, delving
into the sounds of human body regardless of any given language, French
Julien Blaine and Bernard Heidsieck or Canadian Mark Sutherland. There
coincided the poet and polypoetry theoretician Enzo Minarelli with
whom has been his main propagator in the Spanish State, Xavier Sabater.
And, in volume XXVth, the one that closed the Journey, we witnessed
a good combination of phonetical poetry, action and polypoetry, by
the hand of incombustible New-Yorker John Giorno, Italian Paolo Albani,
Austrian Christian Ide Hintze, and the Catalans Carles Hac Mor, Benet
Rossell, Eduard Escoffet and Josep Ramon Roig, among others.
Viatge a la Polinèsia paid special attention to action poetry
in two monographic volumes –the XIIth and the XXIInd– and
in some other, like the XVIIth, designed in January 1999 around the
exhibition Poesia Visual Catalana, in the Centre d’Art Santa
Mònica, which became a homage from Catalan visual poets to
the figure of Brossa, who was supposed to take part in it but
died few days before. Escoffet was the one who carried on the action
Brossa should have perfomed. Besides, Bartomeu Ferrando and the exhibition
designers, J.M. Calleja i Xavier Canals also presented their actions.
All of them had already collaborated in the first monographic volume
“poesia en acció”, held in CCCB in May 1998, toguether
with Joan Casellas, Valentín Torres or Albert Mestres. The
second of these volumes about action was held in Metrònom in
October 1999, and it was among those that summoned up a larger audience.
It counted with the presence of four artists of long run in the world
of performance: Esther Ferrer –from the Grupo Zaj–, Fernando
Millán, Italian Giovanni Fontana and Portugueses Fernando Aguiar.
The Journey has also paid attention to the relationship between poetry
and music, offering, yearly, one volume solely devoted to this ancestral
symbiosis: “Acompassats, de com passant” –“Compassed,
as passing by”–, “De la nota a la paraula” –“From
note to word”– and “La paraula en solfa” –“Word
in sol-fa”–. A total of six chapters, that have offered
the opportunity of listening to poet-musicians and musician-poets
that combine or alternate both arts, such as Pau Riba, Juan Crek,
Anton Ignorant, Víctor Nubla, Oriol Tramvia, Gerard Jacquet,
Angel Petisme...; poets such as Enric Casassas, reciting with the
key music accompanist Manel Pugès, as well as poets who have
a particular relationship with music, such as David Castillo or Galician
Manuel Rivas.
Another discipline tightly related to music, dance, has had a specific
volume devoted to it, made in collaboration with the group La Porta
and entitled “La paraula en dansa” –“The word
in dance”–. By means of variegated resources, dance, music
and poetry mingled in seven different choreographies, such as that
of poet Joan Teixidó with Ona Mestre, that of dancer Imma Sàrries
based on two of their own poems, or the one that combined Concha García’s
texts with Raquel Sánchez’s dance and Chefa Alonso’s
and Bàrbara Meyer’s musics. A constant mouvement of words
and bodies that gathered two hundred and fifty people per chapter
in the hall of the CCCB.
In the end, the links between poetry and image have been put on record
in several volumes, but particularly in “Poesia a la vista”
–“Poetry at sight”–, the one before the last of
this Journey, which was held in CCCB’s Mirador room. In its two
chapters two basic types of video were seen: those reproducing the
recording of some poetical act and the creation videos, which either
had elaborated images from texts, or else, without the text anchorage,
versed on a subject close to poetry. The display included videos from
all round the world, such as that of Japanese Nobuo Kubota, Brasilian
Philadelpho Menezes, Italians Massimo Mori and Enzo Minarelli and
Canadian Mark Sutherland... As well as and endless variety of videocreations
of Catalan authors; for example, Eugeni Bonet’s Visió
smaragdina, one of the five parts of his work about the poet J.E.
Cirlot; Faroner (Foix Collage), by Josep M. Jordana, from a text by
J.V. Foix; Conjuro, by Julián Álvarez, centred on the
hononimous poem by García Lorca; or Más triste es robar,
a rhythmical recreation of the poems by Accidents Polipoètics,
carried out by André Cruz and Luis de la Madrid.
Viatge a la Polinèsia was born in January 1997 with several
proposals and goals that have gradually been achieved in the course
of its three years of existence, that converge in the research and
disclosure of experimental poetry. It has meant, for a vast part of
the audience, the opportunity of getting to know new voices, of seeing
by themselves that poetry has the potential of interrelating to other
artistic expressions, such as dance, image, music or action. And that
the influences from one to the other suppress the frontiers and labels
so frequently used to talk about art.
It can’t be denied that Viatge a la Polinèsia has contributed
to leave behind old prejudices and has displayed a gallery of poetical
formulas that many now consider usual. It was one of Escoffet’s
goals from the begginning, when he said that he wanted to gather every
tendency in poetry within one single vehicle of expression, “but
clearing it up, not as a muddled tangle of poetical proposals”.
Now that we are able to go over this three years schedule, it’s
easy to confirm that the voices heard during this Journey cover a
vast range of proposals, representatives of a wide sector of experimental
poetry. All things considered, and even if unintentionally –for
surely Escoffet is conscious that one shouldn’t mark the boundaries
of something which starts off as a leaking point–, its layout
has represented an exhaustive display, almost a didactic guide of
the boldest poetical expressions.
Therefore, diversity of spaces, voices and proposals, to where one
should travel on, if only to become aware that paradise can be at
any corner, and that only curiosity and restlessness are needed to
visit them. Sagarra travelled to geographic Polynesia in search of
adventure, leaving war behind, but he came back quite disappointed
from this dream paradise, and that was clearly reflected in his two
books: a logbook and the poetry book wherefrom I have extracted the
verse that entitles this conference. Ourselves, we have travelled
to a much closer Polynesia, the poetical Polynesia, that one Carles
Hac Mor put forward in his article; and we have been immersed in paradisiacal,
verbal and non-verbal luxuriances which have left us wanting more
of this plunge into oceanic waters.
Barcelona, October 2000
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LINKS:
Find more info about it:
http://www.iii.it/3vitre
Contains the ’"Archivio di Polipoesia", with information
from all numbers of Baobab magazine.
http://www.abaforum.es/merzmail
Experimental poetry and mail art activism..
http://members.es.tripod.de/Saba/home.html
Xabier Sabater and Sedicions homepage.
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Lis
Costa is professor at the Catalan Philology department from the Universitat
de Barcelona, teaching at the teacher Training faculty and Audiovisual
Comunication. Her research work covers the fields of experimental
poetry, language in advertisement and textual linguistics. Likewise,
she’s one of the members of Habitual Video Team, a videographic
team devoted to recording and production in creation videos since
1991.
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