Archivio Conz

Alain Arias-Misson is one of the poets who created the concrete/visual poetry movement in the early Sixties. Born in Belgium to an English mother, his family members were refugees from World War II to the U.S. where he grew up and was educated, graduating from Harvard University with high honors in Greek and French literature. Arias-Misson's early interest in sound poetry in '59 derived from his love of classical Greek poetry. He has published in many anthologies, reviews and magazines – and published the first anthology of Concrete Poetry in the United States in 1967 with the Chicago Review. He has had hundreds of exhibitions in galleries and museums in the U.S., throughout Western and Eastern Europe, South America and Japan, and his works are in numerous major museums as well as many private foundations and collections. He is also known as the inventor of the Public Poem in 1967, bringing human-sized letters and other linguistic forms into the street to occupy cities in the U.S. and Europe – not as performance but as a way of "writing on the city as on a page". He has published a dozen novels in the U.S.A..