It is difficult to define what visual poetry is. For many it is a suggestive, intuitive mix of image and text where the image predominates. For me it consists of inciting, provoking the invention of a small story through some image, almost always accompanied by a short text, sometimes a single word. That is, a challenge to the imagination and creativity of the reader .
I think it all started when I was a child, in the 1950s, I started reading comics - comics in Spain, dolls in Cuba - in industrial quantities. A very dear aunt distributed the press in the small town of San Luis, in the province of Pinar del Río. An area of Vegas tobacco where I spent my summer and Christmas holidays with my grandparents and some uncles who lived nearby.
The comics that were not sold stayed there. Thousands and thousands. I don't know why, but they were not returned. And I, from the age of seven or eight, became fond of reading all: from Little Lulu and Donald Duck to Superman and Batman . From 1960 I started going to the movies a lot. American films were no longer seen in Cuba, but all the best in Europe were. Polanski, Truffaut, Fellini, Kurosawa, Bergman and a long etcetera. He also drew a lot at that time as a teenager and young man. I tried to enter the National School of Art, which in the 1960s was wonderful from the pedagogical point of view. For various reasons I could not study there.
I think that comics, movies and my love of drawing were fundamental to stimulate in me a way of seeing the world. When I write, I give a fundamental importance, intuitively, to action, to rapid dialogue. I always try to advance the story with a dynamic that causes reading speed. The reflections caused by the text are made by the reader. I only do fifty percent of the work. The rest is put by the reader .
Then, starting at age 23, I started working as a journalist. Many years on radio, on TV and in a news agency. That more accentuated that inclination of mine to expressive minimalism. Go straight to the point and never give long and tedious detours. We already know that in these times, every day more vertiginous, nobody has the spirit and disposition for parabolic readings.
I wrote the first poem at age 13. For a girlfriend she had in San Luis. A summer girlfriend . But I, romantic, wrote an acrostic from his name, Maria Elena. I gave it to him with a flower. And it worked. She was amazed. I kept writing poems all my life. At thirty-something he had written hundreds of poems, but all remained unpublished. Some, the shortest, seemed very good to me. That is essential in a writer: encourage, be stubborn, select and save what you think is best and try to publish it.
Then it occurred to me to take a sheet, paste some figures, write some of my poems, photocopy on DIN A4 sheets and mail my friends. I almost always applied some color to the photocopies, so that they had more enhancement. And little by little, without consciously proposing it, the images gained more space. And the texts were getting shorter. At some point I made larger photocopies, about 80 centimeters by 40. A painter friend saw them and loved them. He was responsible for organizing exhibitions in art galleries in Havana, Matanzas and Pinar del Río. And later, in 1987, to publish a book with the reproductions of my visual poems. It is titled Roaring Reality and is a curiosity. A print run of only 200 copies was made.
So, I don't remember how, I learned that in Cuba only Fayad Jamis and Samuel Feijóo, two excellent poets, had an interesting and scarcely published work in visual poetry. I was the third Cuban in this modus operandi . I visited Fayad at his home in Havana. I went to Santa Clara to meet Feijóo. And it was very stimulating. They were old people and shortly after they died. In a Biennial of Art of Havana I saw several works of a Mexican group called Núcleo Post-Arte, directed by César Espinosa. I sent him some pieces of my visual poems in the mail . We had correspondence and attended the biennials organized by César in Mexico City in the years 1986, 1988, 1990 and 1992. Also at the First International Exhibition of Visual Poetry, in Sao Paulo, in 1989. I liked to play, have fun with my visual poems . Only that. But in those events I learned that I was a cutting-edge artist. An experimenter That's how they considered me. Then I met a little history and theory. The background: Dadá, the surrealists, the lyricists, the European avant-garde, Fluxus. Anyway, I discovered a magical world that dates back perhaps to the European Middle Ages and to Chinese, Japanese, Indian cultures, among many others. In every great ancient culture we can find this need of the human being to express himself and communicate his feelings , his stories, his inner world, and leave a mark.
For decades, creation in visual poetry has been closely linked to art-mail. There is an international network of post-art or art-mail. They are creators from all over the world who exchange their pieces by postal mail. It is a movement that develops outside the great circuits of art. No Super Stars, no museums, no galleries, no Mainstream. However, I always consider that the rules exist to be violated. So in June-August I made a good exhibition with my latest visual poems at the National Museum of the Republic, in Brasilia. And we go on. It's fun. I like it.
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