Josep Pedrals: "The day I discovered we had the 'Kama Sutra' at home I freaked out"

BarcelonaUntil now, and for almost thirty years, we had known Josep Pedrals (Barcelona, 1979) as a poet, as a performer, as a lecturer, and as a cultural manager. With Poeticismes (Arcàdia, 2026) he debuts as an essayist with the same combination of pleasantness, erudition, and humor that abounds in his verses. In the catch-all drawer that is Pedrals' new book, we find reflections on emperors buried in honey or on the monument to Jacint Verdaguer on Passeig de Sant Joan, chronicles of some of the thousands of recitals in which he has participated around the world —like the one that took him to Macedonia accompanied by Adam Zagajewski—, vindications of authors less known to readers than they should be, and a wealth of meticulous technical speculations on writing poetry, one of his great passions, along with omnivorous reading and a love for the stage.

You have cited us at the place where you usually work, a private library in the Clot neighborhood of Barcelona with almost 30,000 volumes, a large part of which your father, Ricard Pedrals i Blanxart, accumulated and read. He was a pedagogue and a priest until he secularized in 1978.

— It's very good for me to have a space just for working, and especially for it to be this one, which connects me to my father, who is the person I've known who read the most in the world. He even walked down the street reading, even though a good part of his readings were books of deep thought.

The library is divided into three large rooms. What do we find there?

— There is one that literature occupies, which is the one I have been growing more lately, with much poetry, literary theory, history of literature and classics. In this room where we are there are a few sections: education and scouting, anthropology, politics and history of Catalonia. My father was a teacher for thirty years. I believe he was one of the first to teach Catalan language classes during Franco's regime. He always explained that one day a student's father appeared in his office, put a pistol on the table and said: "I see you teach Catalan classes". He replied: "I can talk about anything with you, but first take the pistol off the table".

In the third room I have seen essays by Lacan, Kierkegaard, Mounier, Freud, Lluís Duch...

— The idea of God was present, in your home. And in you?

The idea of God was present, in your home. And in you?

— At home we prayed constantly. My father took Christianity as a job, in a way. I have adapted it from a literary and social point of view. When I say he took it as a job, I mean that until his last years he spent hours at the parish helping out. He believed that you can have all the vocations you want and the most elaborate idealism in the world, but you have to put them into practice with those around you. Try to get along with your neighbors: it's the most practical thing in the world!

Let's talk about your father and the atmosphere you lived in at home because I would like to know where your passion for writing verses came from. When did you write your first poems?

— The father was a true intellectual. Now we are in this library, which we have had since 2000, approximately. Before, the library was our home. There were books everywhere and that influenced me. My mother still keeps the first ones from when she was 6 or 7 years old. They were exercises to make the language sound, especially. It was around the age of 14 that I inaugurated my first notebook. I wrote poems there every evening. It was almost a diary. Besides talking about the girls I liked, I tried to enrich my vocabulary and find the music in it all. In those years I already read a lot and had the habit of reading certain things, which partly came from home, because my father made me aware of books by authors like Tomàs Garcés or Clementina Arderiu.

So you liked them then?

— I have a special affection for them because I read them when I was very young. When we got up to go to school or high school, Dad had already gone to buy the bread and the newspaper and had breakfast reading Josep Carner, you know? I remember that when the Quaderns Crema edition of Poesia 1957 came out, he reread it entirely.

This book only had almost 1,400 pages...

— There was a time when he became very fond of reading Paul Éluard, and he would laugh a lot. I was educated in a library and knew it so well by heart that sometimes my father would ask me where to find books he couldn't locate. The day I discovered we had the Kama Sutra at home, I was amazed. I read it and thought it was the least erotic thing in the world.

Even so, something must have remained, because eroticism has been quite important in your poetry.

— Yes, yes, but in the line of L'ars amandi by Ovid. My eroticism is more Latin: it is not at all Hindu.

You debuted in 1999 with Els buits enutjosos, published by Associació Cultural Contàiner, where Enric Casasses had recently introduced Uh. Although you were only 20 years old, you had been reciting for some time.

— I started reciting in 1997. Next year it will be thirty years since I started. Right now I feel very old...

What made you get on a stage to read your verses? We all have a very particular story about the first time.

— . He started very early, even earlier than me. As we became friends, one day he invited me to see things that were not common in my environment. Thanks to my father I had met

In 1997 you went on tour with some heavyweights of Catalan literature at the time.

— Enric Casasses, Dolors Miquel, Pau Riba... and Noel Tatú. This is what Dolors explains in her latest book, The sleeping breast [Edicions 62, 2026]. It makes me look very good! I remember Víctor Nik [cultural promoter] telling me: "You are the hope of Catalan poetry". Everything went very fast. I went on giving recitals, I published, in addition to The annoying voids, Italian School [Edicions 62, 2003], I started Quim Porta's trilogy with The digger [LaBreu, 2006], I played in various bands, I premiered plays... At 20 years old I already had a section in the culture supplement of Avui, directed by David Castillo.

Later we have been able to read you in El País, Cavall Fort, Esguard... and for three years you wrote a little sonnet every day in l'ARA.

— I started with the first issue, at the end of 2010, and I wrote almost a thousand of them, until 2013. I published one every day, yes, and most of them were connected to current events, but there are some that aren't, like the one I've included in one of the texts of Poeticisms, which begins like this: "If they have borrowed my yeast, / out of spite: judgment! / Of gold orphaned, Phoenician neither, / I migrate there (grotesque outburst)".

In this specifically we see your fondness for word games.

— Some say that wordplay has nothing to do with poetry and that it brings it closer to a joke, to cacophony or to mere artifice. I think the opposite.

I remember that in many recitals, where humor of all kinds abounds —crude, sophisticated, ironic, satirical— you used to say: "Make humor and not war".

— I love humor. For a while, at my recitals, I used to repeat the slogan "make humor and not war," which I really like, as a tribute to Jaume Perich. Perich influenced me a lot. I remember that joke where some guys look at the sky and one says: "Do you think there are intelligent worlds beyond?" And the other replies: "Well, not all of them have to be like ours, right?" It's incredibly silly and very good at the same time.

Poeticismes dedicates a prologue to explaining the book's title. You speak of how Novalis invented the term within the Fragments to respond "to pure rationalism while seeking a complexity that includes the irrational, cultivated from the impalpable, emotional and spiritual, paradoxical and mysterious".

— From there I move on to poeticism as a movement of the second Mexican avant-gardes, which contrasted the meditated work of art with the liveliness of the inspired poet who sings spontaneously.

Instead of taking the suffix -ism as a school –in the book you cite Dadaism, Conceptualism, and Decadentism–, you say you approach the writing profession "as a festive mischief".

— I always try to have a good time and for the reader or the audience to also have a good time reading or listening to me. A poem or a recital can be as entertaining as a novel.

I remember how last December you won over the audience at the Guadalajara Fair by reciting some of your poems and the translations into Spanish that appear in the anthology Insinuando la incógnita (El Ángel Editor, 2025).

— Thank you! In Poeticismes I talk about some of the trips I've made to perform around the world. I'm not much of a traveler, but for work I've moved around dozens of countries.

In the book I missed the adventure in Japan in 2009.

— It was a surprising and fun experience that I might explain in a second volume of Poeticismes. In 2009, I was offered the chance to participate in an international poetry slam in Osaka and I went. 400 Japanese people were voting from the audience... and I won! The ones who came off worst in the votes were the Japanese poets. I thought that the less they understood you, the funnier you must have been.

You recited in Catalan, right?

— Yes, yes. I think the Iberian r sound, which does not exist in Japanese, greatly influenced my victory. That's one of the theories I have. That and that it must have also helped a bit that I wrote the poem about dictators.

It's the one where you recite the names of dictators from all over the world, right? I remember the moment "Fujimori Pol Pot, Fujimori Pol Pot".

— It is a poem that brings together two curious virtues. The first is that it is only made up of anthroponyms from very distant and distinct places: it generates a cadence that you don't quite know what it is, it seems like a spell. The second is that it allows for a subtle critique, by merely mentioning each dictator's name.

Since 1997 you have participated in thousands of recitals and have participated in about fifteen books. You also hosted, for thirteen years, the weekly poetry cycle at bar Horiginal, on Ferlandina street.

— I started in 2001. At that time, I believed that Barcelona needed a space that would bring together people of very different ages and sensitivities who wanted to listen to or recite poetry. The approach we chose was lively and tavern-like, with the intention that everyone who wanted to join would do so. After some time, we renamed L'Horiginal to Orinal thanks to Jordi Prenafeta, who wrote very well-crafted satirical poetry. Our motto was: "All poets end up going through the urinal," with the aim of taking the poet off the pedestal.

Veterans like Francesc Garriga, Carles Hac Mor, Ester Xargay, Enric Casasses, and Jordi Vintró often came here, but also young authors like Martí Sales, Max Besora, Blanca Llum Vidal, Laia Martínez i López, Ivette Nadal...

— There was a whole magma that was concentrating there and that, later, in a way has dispersed. L'Horiginal continues to be alive, the weekly recitals are now held at La Deskomunal, and they have a different function, which is also very good, which is to connect with a younger generation of authors and audiences.

You have brought poetry wherever they have let you: to crowded festivals, local festivals, athenaeums, civic centers, museums, schools, and institutes.

— Every year I give a series of commented recitals in schools and institutes. I used to do them with David Castillo. Now Núria Martínez-Vernis accompanies me. In all the classes I go to, there is one, two or three students who like poetry. In some there are up to six. That's a lot of people, if we added them up.

Is there hope for the future of verses, then?

— Poetry is less of a minority than they try to make us believe. It's not as followed as football, but it has an audience, and it's not exactly small. If poetry has allowed me to make a living all this time, there must be a reason, right?