Pleased to post this review (from the current Christian Science 
Monitor) of Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris' book of Pablo Picasso's 
writings published by Exact Change. Note that the other translators who 
contributed to the book are David Ball, Paul Blackburn, Maunel Brito, 
Anselm Hollo, Robert Kelly, Suzanne Jill Levine, Ricardo Nirenberg, 
Diane Rothenberg, Cole Swenson, Anne Waldman, Jason Weiss, Mark Weiss, 
& Laura Wright.

from the March 18, 2005 edition - 
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/0318/p12s02-alar.html

The poetic side of genius
Pablo Picasso's writing - done in the raw, unpunctuated style of the 
Surrealists - receives its first major translation into English in a 
new volume of poetry.

By Timothy Cahill | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

  ALBANY, N.Y. - Near the end of his life, Pablo Picasso predicted to a 
friend he would be remembered as a "Spanish poet who dabbled in 
painting, drawing, and sculpture." The most famous artist of the 20th 
century was certainly joking. Picasso (1881-1973) knew he would be 
forever identified as the figure who rejected Renaissance traditions, 
ushering in a complex new relationship of the artist to the visible 
world and the audience.

The comment is meaningful, for it provides a glimpse into a 
lesser-known side of the protean master. From 1935, when he was 54 
years old, until 1959, Picasso devoted himself to a body of writing 
that was boldly and consciously poetic.

"I abandon sculpture, engraving and painting," he wrote to Spanish poet 
and boyhood friend Jaime Sabartes in 1936, "to dedicate myself entirely 
to song." The result was a series of notebooks, sketchbooks, journals, 
even napkins filled with prose poems that, like his paintings, are 
dense in imagery, relentlessly energetic, and frequently enigmatic.

Now the poems are available in English for the first time with the 
publication of a comprehensive volume of Picasso's writings, "The 
Burial of the Count of Orgaz & Other Poems." Coeditors Jerome 
Rothenberg and Pierre Joris collected the writings from the original 
Spanish and French.

Picasso's literary output has been little more than a footnote to 
public awareness of his artistic contribution, but "it's the work of an 
accomplished poet," says Mr. Rothenberg. "It was not trivial work. It's 
part of the history of experimental poetry in the 20th century."

The painter began writing seriously at a time in his life when a 
divorce impelled him to take a break from painting. Rothenberg explains 
in the book's preface that through 1935 and 1936, Picasso largely 
ignored paint and canvas and immersed himself in written expression. 
Afterward, over more than two decades, he often returned to writing, 
producing three plays in addition to the 300-plus texts in "Burial."

"He didn't feel like painting, but the creative rush was still coming 
through, so he wrote,'' says Mr. Joris. "It became one of the ways he 
expressed that energy."

The writings are unlikely to remake Picasso's image into that of a 
poet, at least in the conventional sense. His poems are not deliberate 
constructions of meaning, but rather rippling Surrealist wordplay. They 
could just as well be called literary paintings. They unleash a 
dazzling, allusive torrent of sensory description and dreamlike action 
in such images as "wings of forgotten colors," "the sundrop falling on 
the tip of the knife," and "white blue white yellow and rose white of 
an apple green." Nearly all the writings were created as prose blocks, 
rarely in traditional verse lines, and dated rather than titled.

Picasso wrote in a stream-of-consciousness style, without punctuation 
or capitalization, following the counsel of poet André Breton in his 
1924 "First Surrealist Manifesto," to "write quickly with no 
preconceived subject." The aim, for Breton and Picasso, was to bypass 
literal meaning and sweep the unconscious for unexpected riches of 
expression. A Picasso entry dated May 4, 1935, begins, "All the 
shredded shadows peel off the bodies with haste of the start of a 
journey and faithful to their appointment with light...."

"It's a kind of writing at top speed. The pencil does not leave the 
paper," explains Joris. Picasso, he ventures, may be "the most 
accomplished Surrealist poet. In terms of going for the absolute 
Surrealist process of breaking all syntactical barriers and eliminating 
the [intellectual] policeman who prevents you from saying things."

Surrealist writings provide insight into Picasso's art, art scholar and 
curator Richard Kendall observes.

"They are of interest," he explains. "Not frivolous or foolish. A lot 
of people don't realize how engaged Picasso became with Surrealism, 
what a big part the tormented, the macabre, the dreamlike, the 
fantastical played in his work. His writing is of a piece with that."

Picasso provided art for Surrealist journals, and was close friends 
with writers and artists associated with the movement. "The Surrealist 
strand is always there, but it comes through in the 1930s," Mr. Kendall 
says. He cites Picasso's great antiwar painting "Guernica" as "the 
picture of a nightmare." The poetry "brings something to our 
understanding of 'Guernica.' "

Rothenberg and Joris, who collaborated on the book from their 
respective homes near San Diego, Calif., and Albany, N.Y., are best 
known for "Poems of the Millennium," a 1,600-page, two-volume anthology 
of avant-garde, alternative, and postmodern poetry. It was while 
compiling that project that the two men, both accomplished poets in 
their own right, first published Picasso.

The present collection was translated by Joris, Rothenberg, and more 
than a dozen contributing poets from a 1989 French volume, "Picasso: 
Writings." While both editors hope publication of the English version 
will be regarded as a literary event, they are aware that Picasso's 
seminal importance as a painter is the main interest.

"It's more likely to be an event for artists and art historians," says 
Rothenberg. "It's hard to break through those boundaries."

Kendall agrees. "We're interested in almost everything Picasso did. If 
he had not been an extraordinary artist, his writings might then have 
disappeared. They're a minor aspect of his extraordinary career."

Joris, for his part, argues that the writing stands on its own merit. 
"These are live poems. These are not museum pieces," he says. "They may 
be more alive at this point, fresher - they have not been framed, like 
the paintings, by tons of critical discourse."

While their relative merit may be debated, the writings nevertheless 
give voice to Picasso's intent as an artist. Whether as pictures or 
words, his art aimed for the same effect. "Everything you find in these 
poems," he insisted, "you can also find in my paintings. So many 
painters have forgotten poetry ... and it's the most important thing."
26.1.37

orange blossom jasmine cabinet perfumed with pine scent little sugar 
cube stuck sentry-like on point of bayonet drawn from his gaze and 
bleeding honey from his fingers on the dove's wings burning at lake 
bottom in the skillet of his eyes shows up exactly at the happy hour 
with its flower needle pin prick poised to touch the sea's snout blue 
bull wingèd incandescent spread out at the ocean's rim

- Pablo Picasso
2 July 38

drop by
drop
hardly
pale blue
dies
between
the claws of
green almond
on the rose
trellis


- Pablo Picasso



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"Lyric poetry has to be exorbitant or not at all."  -- Gottfried Benn
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Pierre Joris
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c: 518 225 7123                                                 	
o: 518 442 40 85                                                        	
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