Secret Poetics

Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) was a Brazilian visual artist and sculptor who wrote a sequence of lyrical poems titled “Secret Poetics,” now translated from Portuguese by Rebecca Kosick (in a volume that includes essays by Kosick and Pedro Erber). In a short introduction to the poems, Oiticica writes: “The true lyric is immediate, that is, immediacy that becomes eternal in lyrical poetic expression, exactly the polar opposite of my plastic work.”

    Just
that it wasn’t just,
in time

Bird,
O beauty!,
that’s already a memory.

Beautiful,
               the beautiful,
               conceptless.

The beauty of the bird that instantly turns into a memory is recorded in the poem, and both the memory and the beauty are immortalized. The last stanza is also a reflection on the lyric form, which Oiticica calls “beautiful” because it can communicate a sense of eternal immediacy. Oiticica is dealing in several concepts here, not least the idea of the lyric form as transmitter of transience. The poems are rife with such elliptical maneuvers.

Oiticica plays a good game of lyric temporality—the poems are quite short; some of them are nearly gnomic; most have dates, but no title.

Water,
glassy surface,
plunge.

August 23, 1964

The dates mark the poems like timestamps. As several of these accrue in the reader’s mind, a strange sort of memory starts to crystalize. The poems are describing various sensory experiences, and, at the same time, they seem to be dropping a metatextual hint about what it feels like to be reading them.

oh,
               to make
the image again,
seen,
unseen,
indispensable!

March 23, 1966

As poems full of pain, pleasure, and desire are read in succession, these feelings stick and linger. Yet each poem insists on the immediacy of the now and the here:

persistence of the past,
future,
the experience of the now,
always being,
               oh!
oh what?,
               the always,
the nothing,
               the fire.

September 1, 1964