A fascinating lecture on poetry, calligraphy, asemic writing, and visual art — from northern Argentina to the experimental scenes of New York City
By Pablo Félix Jiménez | 25/07/2025
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| Mercedes Roffé and Alejandro Acosta (Norte Natural) - Norte Natural Poetry Festival - Catamarca 07/25/2025. |
Acclaimed poet and essayist Mercedes Roffé, one of the most respected voices in contemporary Spanish-language poetry, recently delivered a captivating lecture in San Fernando del Valle de Catamarca, Argentina. The event took place during the Norte Natural poetry festival and marked Roffé’s first visit to this Andean province, where her presence left a strong and lasting impression.
Her talk, titled Scrivere (Latin for “to write”), offered a personal, literary, and aesthetic journey through the intersections between written language, calligraphy, drawing, and gesture as poetic expressions. With historical and contemporary examples, Roffé built a compelling case for how writing can become image — and how a mark, even without semantic meaning, can still communicate, still breathe.
A genealogy of artistic crossover
Throughout the lecture, Roffé — born in Buenos Aires and living in New York City for several years — revisited artists who worked across disciplines: William Blake, Lewis Carroll, Charlotte Brontë, Paul Klee, Victor Hugo, Odilon Redon, among many others. She also highlighted contemporary figures like Raúl Zurita and Patti Smith, who continue to blur the lines between word and image.
One of the most provocative threads was her exploration of asemic writing — a form that resembles written language but doesn’t aim to communicate specific meaning. Far from being a purely aesthetic experiment, asemic writing responds to a deep tradition rooted in Eastern calligraphy and, as Roffé noted, even neurological phenomena such as the Midnight Disease, a compulsion to write studied in contemporary neuropsychology.
She also shared her personal creative experiences with Native American pictographs, particularly from the Chippewa (Ojibwa) tradition, which inspired a series of poem-drawings initially titled Michaux (in homage to poet-artist Henri Michaux) and later retitled to acknowledge its Indigenous American sources.
A poet between languages, cities, and disciplines
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| Catamarcan writer María del Rosario Andrada and New York-based writer Mercedes Roffé - Norte Natural Poetry Festival - Catamarca 07/25/2025. |
For more than a decade, Mercedes Roffé has lived in New York City, a place she describes not just as a cultural hub, but as a space where languages, archives, and creative paths intersect. More than inserting herself into the “New York literary scene,” Roffé has chosen to build her own space between worlds — between poetries, between forms. She runs an independent press (Ediciones Pen Press), coordinates transatlantic projects, translates, writes — and most importantly: builds bridges.
This transitory condition — moving between Buenos Aires, New York, Latin America, and Europe — is also reflected in her poetic approach: a writing that is open to image, silence, gesture, and voice. What Roffé offered in Catamarca was not simply an academic lecture, but an intimate map of affinities, readings, visions, and artistic obsessions that have shaped her work over time.
Illustrators, calligraphers, and visual poets
The closing section of the talk paid homage to three key figures: Aubrey Beardsley, Henri Michaux, and Victor Hugo — all of whom Roffé admires for their ability to bridge literature and the visual arts. In the case of Odilon Redon, she personally helped bring his lesser-known fiction into Spanish-language circulation before it was ever published in France.
She also spoke of Victor Hugo’s extraordinary visual works — ink drawings and mixed media pieces created during his exile using brown washes, watercolor, graphite, and charcoal — which, in many ways, anticipated surrealist aesthetics. Roffé first encountered this body of work during an artist residency at Civitella Ranieri Castle in Umbria, Italy.
Word, gesture, and silence
If this event confirmed anything, it’s that Mercedes Roffé doesn’t just write poetry — she embodies it. She listens to it, observes it in the folds of art history, traces it in graphic gestures, and discovers it in places where few would think to look. Her lecture Scrivere was not just a masterclass — it was a generous invitation to rethink how we write, what a poem is, and where language resides when it no longer says, but still speaks.
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| Writers: Hilda Angélica García (President of SADE, Catamarca branch), Alfredo Luna, María del Rosario Andrada, Mercedes Roffé, and Pablo Félix Jiménez - Norte Natural Poetry Festival - Catamarca 07/25/2025. |
Tags
Mercedes Roffé, visual poetry, asemic writing, poetry and art, calligraphy, Victor Hugo, Henri Michaux, Odilon Redon, Catamarca, New York City, Norte Natural, Latin American poets
Hashtags
#MercedesRoffé #Scrivere #VisualPoetry #AsemicWriting #PoetryAndArt #LatinPoets #NYCArts #mydespacho
This article is based on the transcription of an audio recording of the event, captured by Pablo Félix Jiménez. The content was reviewed and structured with the help of ChatGPT to identify transcription errors and facilitate the editorial process. Final editing was done using LibreOffice by Jiménez.
By Pablo Félix Jiménez
Digital Journalist | Culture and Technology
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