Italy’s streets carry a kind of alternate beauty that slips between the cracks of its historic facades. Away from the museums and guided tours, walls speak another language. Among the graffiti, municipal notices, poster for concerts and local events, smaller fragments appear: printed poems pasted to walls, weathered by rain and time.
They are poems not signed with names, but with short codes and belong to a movement known as the Movimento per l’Emancipazione della Poesia (MeP), or Movement for the Emancipation of Poetry.
Formed in Florence around 2010, MeP is made up of anonymous poets who see words as something meant to be shared freely, outside the walls of institutions… among people, in public, without price or having to fit into a commercially viable model or permission. Their poems are printed simply, taped up quietly, and left to speak for themselves.
Conceptual Apocalypse by A.246
My Italian vocab is still a work in progress but here’s a translation to English using Google translate:
Returned from interplanar geography
experimented through chemical compounds
Lying in bed I felt a dimensional agoraphobia.
At that point the journey shifted
from overwhelming to profoundly unpleasant.
I tried to change what was happening.
It took willpower to let my neurons compress
down to true reality.
This collapse opposed my identity: from above to below.
As I lay there I thought of all those I loved
and who loved me.
And I used those thoughts as a guide
to anchor myself,
pushing my identity back and forth,
vertically and horizontally.
Title Unknown (S.161)
This paste-up was torn, and overwritten so here’s a rough, reconstructed translation:
I ask myself…
To remember a photo, of a time gone by,
That “was” which can never return.
In the name of the beauty that once existed,
legitimised by its birth,
consacrated to its death.
A mausoleum in which to lay flowers, like in every photo I find in
this cemetery for which I hold the keys.I enter from time to time,
it makes me feel alive, aching in the melancholy of that “was.”
Of rebirth and of death,
like multiple lives.
Before me, that “will be,”
which I barely manage to cling to.
And then remains the disgust
of a hope gone dim.
S.161
Movimento per l’Emancipazione della Poesia
Discovering MeP has made me rethink the differnt ways poetry can exist. It doesn’t need to be published, praised, or bound in some fancy pulication to have impact. It can live among us in daily life, surprising us in passing (if we take thee time to look). The street becomes a page, and the city is full of connection and communication in ways that are not always obvious.
For me, these encounters echo what I’ve always loved about street art: the unexpected interruptions, the dialogue between artist and passerby, the small moments of reflection that pop up in the midst of everyday chaos that are not dictated by status or existing only for the purpose of commodification. MeP takes that ethos and applies it.
