Visual Poem Eden II and Related Material

Alain Arias-Misson is a novelist, artist, and experimental poet known for his poetic objects and public poems. He was born Alain de Beeleu Misson in Brussels, Belgium, in 1936. His family immigrated to the United States at the start of World War II. They boarded the Siboney in Lisbon, Portugal, and arrived in January 1941 in New Jersey. The family returned to Belgium after the war and Arias-Misson continued moving back and forth between the United States and Europe. In 1959, he graduated with a degree in Greek and French Literature from Harvard University.

In the early 1960s Arias-Misson was involved in the nascent visual poetry movement in Spain with Joan Brossa, Ignacio Gomez de Liaño, and Herminio Molero. During a visit to Belgium in December 1967, he created his first “Public Poem” as a statement against the Vietnam War. For this work, he built giant letters wrapped in surgical tape that spelled V I E T N A M, and associates marched the human-size letters across a busy square in Brussels during the Christmas season. Arias-Misson stayed in Belgium and collaborated with concrete poet Paul De Vree and co-edited the journal De Tafelronde in Antwerp.

In the early 1970s, Paul De Vree and Italian artist Sarenco founded Lotta Poetica, a radical artists' magazine that became the international center of the Poesia Visiva movement. During that period, Arias-Misson collaborated with Sarenco, De Vree, Ugo Carrega, Jean-Francois Bory as well as others on wide-ranging projects that reflected their vision for a socially critical and engaged visual poetry.

Over the years, Arias-Misson developed his poetic experimentation with objects—including using laser-cutting and hologram technology for the creation of object-poems—and continued to stage public poems in urban spaces.