Visual Text: Encoding Challenges in Picasso’s Poetry

Around 1935, Pablo Picasso started writing poems, almost completely abandoning his career as an artist. This sudden change of emphasis may have been provoked by a number of personal and social causes. Picasso did not perceive this as an illogical shift in his output and always saw a clear connection between visual and verbal composition. His interest in alternative methods of expression might have already started with his fascination for linguistic structure as a whole with his cubist paintings. Encoding Picasso’s poetic manuscripts provides an interesting case that needs to be addressed in the pedagogy and practice of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) Guidelines. In this paper we will discuss how Picasso’s poems present a challenge for the expressive capabilities of the TEI Guidelines and offer a solution to encode graphic features and stratified text in machine-readable form.

 Keywords: Picasso, poetry, visual text.