From the cutting-floor of the public poem – Alain Arias-Misson; Roger D’Hondt Gecertificeerd

In the mid-sixties, a young Belgian-American experimental/visual poet, Alain Arias-Misson, returned to his birthplace Brussels, which his family had fled during World War II for New York. Back in Brussels the poet initiated his well-known “public poems”, which predate the genre performance and are all up to today different from one another and never repeated. For Arias-Misson, the street is the page upon which the poem can be drawn. The city can be construed as a text. It is a focal point of socio-political…