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"It is not enough to write books of poems to be a poet. It is necessary to understand the life of another form, to have the antennas sharpened well, the spirit is alert, to help people wake up." With these words Brossa defined his artistic work.
Joan Brossa was born in Wagner street in Barcelona, on 19 January 1919 and died, in the same city, 79 years later. His father was recording and his mother an ancient singer of operetta. Nevertheless, little Joan was feeling more identified with his father, who took him often to the theater. Pero Brossa remained an orphan much too young and this fact forced him to grow in the ambience of his maternal family, of conservative tradition. Surely for this reason he did not preserve a good memory of his infantile learning stage; in several interviews he affirmed that what they taught him in the school was a "culture of operetta" and that "the important things are learned but are not taught", a phrase that he remembers Oscar Wilde.
When the Civil War exploded he was 17 years old and he was sent by the republican army at the head of Lleida. There he began the poetical production of the young Brossa, writing that years later would be gathered in the book "Tercera Divisió" (Third Division). During the postwar period Brossa tried to continue the job of his father, engraver, but he had no success and chose to work selling books censured by the Franco period, which at the time was following his poetical career. His first serious poems are of 1941, date in the one that met the painter
Joan Miró and the poet
JV Foix, two great figures of Barcelona that would have a decisive influence in his work. Also in this epoch Brossa started being interested in romantic music, especially, Wagner and Brahms. On one occasion he went so far as to assure: "listening to music stimulates me more than reading".
It was Brossa who had the idea, in 1948, of creating the magazine "
Dau al Set " together with
Antoni Tàpies,
Joan Ponç,
Modest Cuixart,
Arnau Puig i
Joan-Josep Tharrats. The publication, which last number went out in 1956, has turned with the years into an art reference of the city in the XXth century. The magazine was trying to revitalise the cultural ambience of Barcelona, which had been interrupted by the civil war.
Without ever abandoning poetry, in these years Brossa penetrated into almost all the corners of the artistic creation. Painting, theater, music, opera and one of his passions: cinema. Many years later, in the 90’s, it was habitual to see him in the evenings in the Filmoteca (Film library). In these years the most prolific and heterogeneous Brossa was formed. Although he stopped the artistic activity of Brossa, it was not until the appearance of the volume "Poesia rasa" (Level Poetry), in 1970, that his work started leaking out beyond the minority sectors to enter directly the public recognition. From this book, the author started publishing gradually, and alternating with editing his recent poems, all his unpublished work written during the Franco period. This way, in the decades of the 70’s and the 80’s, Brossa published 86 works of theater, 61 books of poetry, four small books of poetry and two poetical anthologies. This late recognition can be explained from this fragment of the proper author included in "Anafil":
"The laws of the poetry change in time. There cannot be culture without emulation of transformation, freedom of creation and possibility of news searches, although that, at the moment, makes the acceptance of the poet difficult and removes them from the official honours. But the men who truly do the history are those that break the vices of the history although they suffer the aggressiveness of the defensive mechanisms of the powerful ones and, therefore, their acceptance is slowed down".
The first retrospective exhibition of the work of Brossa took place in
Fundació Miró in 1986. After his success, five years later the Centro de Arte Reina Sofía (Queen Sofía Center of Art) of Madrid dedicated a sample and also did it, in 1994, in the
Palau de la Virreina of Barcelona under the name of "Joan Brossa, entre les coses i la lectura" (Joan Brossa, between the things and the literature)". At the same time his poetry came to the street with several visual poems in public spaces from Barcelona as the "Poema visual transitable" (Visual transit poem) located in Velòdrom d'Horta, the lettering "Barcino" in the Plaça of the Cathedral, "Homenatge al llibre " in the corner
Passeig de Gràcia with Gran Via,...
And the fact is that in 90’s the poet did not stop receiving awards and public recognition. Nevertheless, he was affirming: "The scenery has changed but I keep on being the same".
The poet was always a friend of the austerity (practitioner of his maxim: "in art, less is more") and militant of the antiauthoritarianism, the anticlericalism and the antimilitarism. In 1999 Fundació Brossa was constituted with the intention of promoting and of preserving his work.
He died on October 4, 1998 after falling down from the stairs of his house.
Joan Pla i Vivoles.