26:3 Autumn 1974

ALAIN ARIAS-MISSON

Poesia Visiva: A Visible Poetry I

The Fall 1974 issue devoted a large section to Poesia Visiva--works that combine words and images. Alain Arias-Misson, a contributor and advisor to the Concretism issue in 1967 (see the note on John Furnival's work in this issue) and the author of a "superfiction" in the Autumn 1971 issue (see that piece and the note on it in this issue too), wrote a brief introduction in which he distinguised the new poesia visiva from concrete poetry:

The concrete poem was an endgame of language; its paradigms hardened into a bony system and the skeleton couldn't dance anymore. The Visiva poets reinvent a living speech for poetry, not by a reactionary swing from the obsessive mechanics of concrete to a literary poetry but with a virtulent dialectic of visible world and semantic image.

Arias-Misson recently discused the work included here: "This is a piece from my 'visual poetry' which has often been reproduced; it's in an anthology by Charles Russell, The Avantgarde Today. My visual poetry has been exhibited widely throughout the world, most recently in my retrospective show in Italy, 'Arias Misson, Works from 1974 to 1996,' Dopotutto, Centro Culturale."

[DN, 1996]

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