Secret Poetics

by Hélio Oiticica

Translated by Rebecca Kosick from Portuguese
Introduction by Rebecca Kosick; Afterword by Pedro Erber

Between 1964 and 1966, in the first years of Brazil’s military dictatorship, Hélio Oiticica wrote a series of lyrical poems, entitled Secret Poetics, and reflected in a private notebook on their significance for his artistic practice. Despite his global fame as a founder of the interdisciplinary movement known as neoconcretismo, his collaborations with major Brazilian artists and writers (Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, Ferreira Gullar, etc.), and his influence across a range of disciplines (including painting, film, installation, and participatory art), Oiticica’s “secret” poems are almost unknown and have never been published as a collection. This edition, which features the original texts in facsimile reproductions along with English translations and accompanying essays by translator Rebecca Kosick and critic Pedro Erber, uncovers the significance of poetry to Oiticica’s thinking on participation, sensation, and memory. 

Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) is among twentieth-century Brazil’s most significant artists, with a multifaceted practice that included painting, sculpture, installation, performance, filmmaking, and writing. Oiticica was a leading member of the Grupo Frente of concrete artists and, in 1959, co-founded the neoconcrete movement with artists and poets including Lygia Clark, Lygia Pape, and Ferreira Gullar. Oiticica was a 1970 Guggenheim Fellow and today his work is held in collections across the world, including at MoMA and the Tate Modern.

Rebecca Kosick is a poet, translator, and co-director of the Bristol Poetry Institute at the University of Bristol (UK) where she is also Senior Lecturer in Comparative Poetry and Poetics. Kosick is the author of the monograph Material Poetics in Hemispheric America (Edinburgh) and the poetry collection Labor Day (Golias Books), and her poems and translations have appeared in literary venues such as The Recluse, Fence, and The Iowa Review. She was born in Michigan.

Pedro Erber is Professor of Comparative Literature at Waseda University, Senior Research Associate at Cornell University, and Editor of ARTMargins. He is the author of Breaching the Frame: The Rise of Contemporary Art in Brazil and Japan (UC Press, 2015).