Alain Arias-Misson

Alain Arias-Misson is a visual poet, writer, critic, and artist whose multimedia works include typewriter poetry, concrete and visual poetry, stories and novels. He is particularly known for three dimensional poem objects and for happenings that he calls Public Poems with performers carrying alphabetical letters as tall as they are through city streets.
==Biography==
Born December 11, 1936 in Brussels, Belgium, his father Belgian and his mother American, he was deeply influenced by the experience of emigrating to the United States. When he was four, the family fled the Nazis approaching Belgium and came to New York City where he grew up. The dual influence of America and Europe continued to shape his life.
He attended Harvard University and graduated magna cum laude in Classical Greek Literature, Philosophy and Contemporary French Literature in 1959. During his college years, he developed an interest in experimental poetry.
After graduating, he left for North Africa, where he volunteered as a teacher in Ben Aknoun, Algiers, after the Algerian Revolution. In 1963 he married Nela Arias, a Cuban-Asturian painter studying with Hans Hofmann. The couple adopted the hyphenated name and remained in New York City until 1965, while Arias-Misson published literary criticism and stories in American literary journals including Chicago Review, Paris Review, American Book Review, Fiction International, Partisan Review and O.ARS.
After the outbreak of the Vietnam War the couple moved to Barcelona to avoid Arias-Misson being drafted. In Spain, he built up an international and intergenerational network of poets and artists, with for instance, Joan Brossa,For works and documents in the Joan Brossa Fonds that mention Arias-Misson Herminio Molero, and Ignacio Gómez de Liaño. He also collaborated briefly with the experimental music and performance art group Zaj and their members Walter Marchetti, Juan Hidalgo and Esther Ferrer. His poetic network grew to include poets from other European countries. His friends included Dom Sylvester Houédard, the British experimental poet, and , German avante-garde artist.
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Through the Zaj-Group and the New York-based gallerist Emily Harvey, who organized several exhibitions with Arias-Misson, he was introduced to many Fluxus artists, including Dick Higgins, as well as Fluxus collectors like , Luigi Bonotto and Hans Sohm, who all shared an interest in experimental poetry, and in concrete and visual poetry, and collected his work.
Together with Jean-François Bory, Julien Blaine, and Lucia Marcucci, he was a member of the poets’ group Lotte Poetica, initiated by the Italian poet , and regularly contributed to the journal that bore the group’s name and which he coedited.}} But his work was also represented in a variety of other important magazines of experimental literature such as De Tafelronde (by Paul de Vree, also coedited by Arias-Misson)}} and Phantomas in Belgium, Revue Où (by Henri Chopin), Luna Park, Doc(k)s, Ne coupez pas, Approches and L’Humidité in France, Logomotives in Italy, ASA and Geijutsu Seikatsu in Japan, Ovum in Uruguay, El Urogallo in Spain, and Tlaloc in the UK. In 1967, he helped put together the first anthology in the U.S. dedicated to concrete poetry, published by Eugene Wildman as Anthology of Concretism in Chicago Review.
In terms of literary theory and philosophy, Arias-Misson was inspired by the writings of Ludwig Wittgenstein to whom he explicitly pays homage in some of his works, and also by Ferdinand de Saussure, Henri Lefebvre, Roland Barthes, Noam Chomsky and Ernst Bloch.
The expansion of a traditional understanding of poetry and literature that Arias-Misson has practiced since the 1960s can be understood against the backdrop of literary experiments throughout the 20th century and, in particular, in the context of concepts of intermedia arts – a term coined by Dick Higgins in the mid-1960s. Arias-Misson then began experimenting with the spatiality of letters and words, creating three dimensional plexiglass boxes in which texts were arranged on transparent plastic forms. Leaving behind the flatness of the paper surface, the printed poem thus becomes a sculptural object. The use of effects of transparency, of overlayerings and distortions of letters and words is characteristic of these works.
In 1967 Arias-Misson conceived of the first of his Public Poems in Brussels, entitled The Vietnam Public Poem as a poetic protest against the war in Vietnam. Performers carried the human size white, blood-spattered, capital letters V, I, E, T, N, A, M through the streets. With this mixture between artistic happening and political demonstration he created a poetic form that allowed him to write texts in the social context of a city. 28 Public Poems have taken place until today in cities like Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Venice, Los Angeles and New York amongst others.}}
Arias-Misson frequently moved and lived in different countries. In 1970 the Arias-Missons moved from Spain to Antwerp for a few months, then to Brussels. In 1973 they returned to New York. After they separated in 1983 he returned to Brussels to work for the European Community which would become the European Union in 1992. From 1991 to 2021 he lived with his second partner, Karen Moller, textile fashion designer and author, in Paris, Venice and Antwerp. As of 2023 he has been living in Madrid since 2021.
==Reception==
Arias-Misson’s works are included in the earliest anthologies of experimental, visual and concrete poetry, like Emmett Williams’ Anthology of Concrete Poetry (1967) and Jean-François Bory’s Bientôt (1967). His work was shown in exhibitions in this field and is documented in their catalogues, such as Mostra de Poesia Concreta (Biennale di Venezia, Venice, Italy, 1969), Klankteksten – Konkrete Poëzie – Visuele Teksten (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands, 1970), Buchstäblich wörtlich, wörtlich buchstäblich (Nationalgalerie Berlin, 1987), Poésure et Peintrie (Musées de Marseille, France, 1998), and La parola nell’arte (MART – Museo di Arte Contemporaneo di Rovereto e Trento, Rovereto, Italy, 2008).
In 2018, Arias-Misson received the Prix international de littérature Bernard Heidsieck Mention spéciale Fondazione Bonotto awarded by Centre Pompidou.
In 2020 the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University acquired Arias-Misson’s archive.
Significant numbers of documents and works are also held by The Ruth and Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry, part of the Special Collections at University of Iowa Libraries, the Archivio Nuova Scrittura (Bozen, Italy) and the Fondazione Bonotto (Colceresa, Italy).
Category:1936 births
Category:People from Brussels
Category:Belgian people
Category:Visual poets
Category:Writers
Category:Artists