Public Poems. 50 años de escritura en la calle - Alain Arias-Misson

Why not writing on the city as if it were a blank page? Alain Arias-Misson, experimental poet and personal multimedia artist, invented the Public Poem in 1967 to answer this question. Since then he has made more than twenty of them in different cities around the world, to wich almost always the forces of public order have put the “end point” to them.

The Public Poem is a radically original avant-garde poetry format that considers public spaces as a blank page on which to write but also as a text that must be read to interpret the world. From this point of view, the power of the poetic word, meaningful, renovating, alive, genuine, causes the breaking of codes and landscapes with the aim of recovering the human sense of the polis by reintroducing the inaugural power of the logos.

Clearly differentiated from actionism, performance or body-art, in the Public Poem, the personal intervention of the poet and his eventual acolytes —sometimes coordinated, sometimes spontaneous— transforms their bodies into hands that write, punctuate, mark, indicate or point. By precisely locating linguistic signs of different registers or codes (letters, typographical characters, phonetic spellings, masks, costumes, comic book bubbles...) Alain Arias-Misson generates an urban grammar that brings out a new semantics of the public activating collective representations of the city understood “literally” as a theater of language, while establishing a dreamlike territory with an electrifying atmosphere. And everything, the reappropriation of the street, social criticism and even the exercise of freedom beyond conventions and common places, for a few hours, seems possible.