Landscape of a pissing multitude

"Landscape of a pissing multitude" is a poem by Federico García Lorca written during his stay at Columbia University in 1929. It is part of his most mature work: "Poet in New York". García Lorca inaugurated his antiartistic poetry with these compositions. He was not concerned with the rigorous structure of the composition, nor with the verbal beauty. The language, direct and surreal, described New York in a crude way, with dark lines and pervaded with funereal presages. A city without a future, neighborhoods without light or tomorrow, people without ties to nature, victims of western capitalism. Against this anguished vision of the metropolis, there was only the vitality of the oppressed. In the void of the Big Apple the real human element was the life of ethnic minorities who made places like Brooklyn, Harlem and Coney Island the cradles of diversity. Only in these places, according to the poet, were signs of hope. Thanks to these suggestions I understood that this story made of poetry deserved to be told also through images. I wandered through the ghettos and suburbs described by the poet, with the purpose of creating the vision of the contexts that inspired the art and culture born from the bottom and from the apparent ugliness of normality. Because if poems are written, the merit is always of the life that happens around us. Now as then.