12 April 2018

Poetry Thursday - object poems by Juan Brossa

Joan Brossa, Eina Morta [Dead Tool]
Eina Morta [Dead Tool], 1988

Although he is known primarily as an artist, Juan Brossa’s object poems are only one branch of his wide conception of poetry. He believed that the idea rather than the medium was of central importance. Brossa began making object-poems in 1943, and they are typically perverse, ironic and humorous, either made by combining two unusual objects, or transforming an everyday item so that its function is removed. Here, a pair of scissors literally became a ‘dead tool,’ unable to be put to their intended use. Brossa’s love of magic and conjuring tricks can be connected to his playful object-poems. He explained that "Poetry and magic are the same thing. Art is a metamorphosis, basically, and magic too." (via)

Juan Brossa (1919-1998) was born in Barcelona. He began to write poetry while fighting in the Spanish Civil War in 1938, and later became interested in the power of the unconscious. This led to his association with the Surrealist movement.  A key figure in the Catalan avant-garde, Brossa was one of the founders of the art and literature review ‘Dau al Set’ and was a friend of Joan Miró and Antoni Tàpies. Brossa regarded himself primarily as a poet, although his definition of poetry was broad, encompassing theatrical work, cinema, visual poetry, automatic writing, installations and object-poetry. His object-poems use everyday objects in a surprising manner, in the tradition of Dada and Surrealism.

After the Civil War Brossa supported himself by selling banned books - mostly imported illegally from Argentina - and doing magic tricks. It was through the books that he met the painter Joan Miro. When Miro died in 1983, they were working on a third book together - Brossa said that meeting him was "almost a justification for being in the world".

He first showed the visual poems in 1951. He also created more than 150 works for the theatre, many presented in private houses and others disastrously disfigured by the censor.


More images are here; see what you make of them.

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