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A
PROPOSAL
It
sounds farfetched to say that Barcelona is one of Europe’s capital
cities of poetry. And everyone has doubts about this piece of information.
What is, nevertheless, undeniable is that Barcelona has established
a very particular relationship with poetry. Despite being a minority
sector, the audience gathered by poetry readings is always numerous;
and more remarkable yet is the fact that it leaves vast room for what
could be called "the risk practices" of poetry.
In the course of the last three years, from January 1997 to January
2000, PROPOST (Projectes Poètics Sense Títol, or Poetic
Projects Untitled) has been organizing the stable programme "Viatge
a la Polinèsia", or "Journey to Polynesia",
which is devoted, precisely, to this kind of more risky, frontier
poetic proposals. I think that this initiative has helped to assert
the existence of an audience highly interested in this sort of poetry,
although the institutions and the literary stablishment continue to
regard with both suspiciousness and contempt everything that, bearing
the name of "poetry", identifies with other than a book
written in short lines.
Presently, we have decided to start a new adventure, one that comes
in a markedly different format: a yearly festival. Of a strongly international
and interdisciplinary character, it aims at being something more than
the poets’ performances. More open and more tightly related to
our times, we want it to become a point of reference, both for the
audience and the poets, in a new way of understanding poetry. Far
from trying to create yet another focus of attention which would stump
the previous ones, what we pretend with it is to complement Barcelona’s
poetry landscape.
Notwithstanding good will, the struggle to get hold of an appropiate
setting for this kind of proposals is usually hard. Personally, I
don’t understand why we have to keep on arguing with political
and literary-minded figures about the fact that the oral, visual,
or interdisciplinary conceptions are perfectly valid in poetry. Even
more so when nobody could consider as intrinsically avant-garde or
terrorist practices which have their own audience and are guaranteed
by a long historical run.
We want this to be the starting shot of the festival. And we hope
that, besides accomplishing its primary function as a fun-providing
expression, it will contribute to delve deeply in extremely variegated
practices, whose common feature is to originate in the periphery,
in areas very far from the centre, of the irremovable, goodwilled
poetry.
I would like to point out that this first edition is dedicated to
the Brasilian poet Philadelpho Menezes (1960 - 2000), who has recently
died. Apart from being a travel companion for many of us who pay attention
to the world of the experimental poetry, he can be considered as a
key figure when it comes to the study of these sort of practices,
in Brasil as well as everywhere else. He even had time to develop
his own creative work. We think is fair to bear him in mind. Given
that we will never have the pleasure of sharing with him the common
experience of this festival, we want him to be with us in one way
or another.
Last, but not least, we wish to thank all of those who have made possible
the opening of this festival’s pages.
Eduard Ecoffet
Director of PROPOSTA
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