Voice Over Eduard Escoffet Infrastructural Poet by Simon Friel

Eduard Escoffet is a son of Barcelona who has been writing poetry since he was 15. He is now internationally recognised as one of Europe’s most interesting poets, and is the driving force behind the PROPOSTA organisation. I met up with him at his office on Tallers to traverse linguistic boundaries.

SF: Eduard, I know you are a poet, but reading up on you I came across your name in relation to polipoesía. What exactly is polipoesía?

EE: Polipoesía is nothing more than a term used to encapsulate poetic expression that goes beyond text or book form to utilize all possible media, from sound to performance, via body language or technological elements. What’s most important is that, given its nature, it requires an audience. Beyond that, you can include a lot of different forms under this same name and thereby actually dispose of the label, given that poetry is always poetry, whether in book, experimental audiovisual, or live-performance form. I don’t like to anchor myself to terms. They’re useful only in that they place things in a sphere more mental than real, allowing you to reflect upon different practices that try to escape from labels in search of freedom.

SF: Is “polipoesía” then an attempt to keep poetry vital and relevant in an age where the rise of mass media has meant people are overloaded with immediately accesible information, and therefore less likely to find the time to sit down with literature and poetry in their basic written form?

EE: It’s clear that live poetry is thriving, and I think it’s because, in an increasingly virtual world, the physical presence of the poet enhances the experience and excites you. At the same time, technological advances are helping poetry develop and pursue its enduring aim of moving beyond the text itself. It also makes sense that poetry be perceived through multiple channels, not just one (the written), given that we are now very accustomed to decoding multiple different sources simultaneously (sound, image, text… audiovisual communication).

SF: It’s interesting that, despite presenting your message through multiple channels and in countries throughout Europe, you only ever read in Catalan. Why do you stick so doggedly to la llengua catalana?

EE: It’s possible to do poetry in Catalan and have it be understood and enjoyed by people who don’t speak my language, which is the vast majority of the planet. I perform abroad more often than I do in Catalunya, which shows that using this language doesn’t cause me many problems. In fact, since the fifties, sound poetry (one of my biggest influences) has championed a type of poetry that can be perceived beyond linguistic boundaries (through sound elements, not books). The Flemish and Swedish sound poets (speakers of minority languages), are good examples. In the seventies they began doing some sound pieces (the Swedes also call it text-sound) that, while anchored to their particular languages, had an international audience in mind. This is what working with sound (and all the current tools for recording and editing voice) allows you to do. The poem plays simultaneously in complimentary textual and audio terrains, facilitating the comprehension of the text’s meaning. At the same time, the form is made more complex by employing a variety of media, but this is precisely what helps to reinforce the framework of the meaning. Boundary- crossing is a question of attitude, but, above all, it is built upon a theoretical foundation that takes its inspiration from the vanguard and a medieval tradition very rich in examples, rather than adapting itself to external linguistic codes. These external codes (using the English language, for example) may seem easier for the majority of people to understand, but they can distance you from the intensity of the original content. So it’s not about stubbornly tying oneself to a language, but rather about working in the language in which one feels most comfortable and which one knows best. The aim is to travel along two lines that for me are essential: the strength of the content and the experimental linguistic work whose objective is modern translinguistic communication.

SF: So, how important, if at all, is Barcelona to your work?

EE: It’s very important, but not in the typical sense. That is, the city isn’t depicted in my poems. But they are born in a very specific context, Barcelona, and they are flooded with that influence. For example, I draw strength from a very intense Barcelona poetic tradition that has developed poetry recitation into an art form in its own right. There are many poets who, especially in the past few decades, have opened ground that is very fertile in this sense. I draw inspiration from all of them, and my discovery that poetry lives outside books is due to them. I also think that, in my poems, the strong link apparent between the poetic and the political is an element that springs from having grown up on the streets of Barcelona.

SF: Proposta was/is successful, and you are internationally known as an influential poet. From which of these achievements do you take pethe most personal satisfaction?

EE: I’ve always believed that working as an organizer (or agitator) can be understood as a way of doing poetry – as a creative act. Setting a place and a time at which different poetry practices can share the same roof in front of an audience is, for me, more of a creative challenge than a simple resolution of technical issues. And so I’d say that I enjoy both organizing and reciting. I just try to create space and time for both activities (both of which I need), although it’s true that organizing events ends up taking more time. You can see that I always like to go in two directions that oppose one another (but which, for me, are complementary). I need to maintain a dialogue with the city (the work of being a cultural agitator and observer of my surroundings) and know what’s going on in other cities (thereby connecting spaces to one another). Live Barcelona (and its networks) with intensity and establish international networks of cultural exchange. Poetry is the ideal terrain in which to do this.

More information at propost.org/escoffet.