Alain Arias-Misson – The Public A MADRID Poem

In 1969, the poet-artist Alain Arias-Misson (born in 1936 in Brussels) staged The Public A MADRID Poem in the Spanish capital. He had friends carry the human-sized, white cardboard letters A, M, A, D, R, I and D through the streets to generate words in an anagrammatic fashion from this matrix at various precise locations: in front of the parliament and imposing churches, in busy streets and on popular squares. The performative and ephemeral literary form of the Public Poem, which he had invented shortly before, allowed him to write a text in the social context of a city. He describes it as an ‘enactment of language – fluid, enmeshed in the real-street processes’.

In a country that was still dominated by the Fascist regime of the dictator Francisco Franco, such a poetic guerrilla action appropriating urban space, neither announced nor officially authorised, was a risky undertaking. For this reason, it had to be ‘capable of vanishing, while preserving its eminent public, spectacular character’.

This is the most complete documentation of this significant event ever published. It consists of thirty-six photographs with statements by the artist on their reverse sides that give insight into what happened in the course of the Public Poem. They are accompanied by two manifesto-like texts and the reproduction of a collage from 1969 based on a map of Madrid on which the stations of this Public Poem are marked.