Picasso was always sensitive to writing and to the beauty of words. Yet this form of expression did not really emerge for him until 1935. While the moment happened to coincide with a personal crisis and the reorientation off his visual production, his writing is not circumstantial, instead testifying to a deep and ongoing connection to his artistic concerns. Anxious to experiment with this new material, Picasso began to write a drawn-out text on his native tongue with no punctuation, which took up more than 30 pages of Arches paper. Picasso the poet, confident in his role as a man of letters, sketched out his first notes on various grounds, including in a highly sensitive blue notebook, a kind of x-ray in which he openly explains himself. It speaks of the writing process, and deals with translation and some of his favourite subjects: love, bullfighting, time, food…. The most varied range of poems arose from his writing laboratory: poems winding like a river, in loops and variations; rhizomatic poems and other more classical poems, with their rhymes and verses.