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    Poetry is in the streets, walls, benches, panels. It’s all around us. Cities are canvas, pages of a common diary where citizens are poets and readers at the same time. Street Poetry is an intermedial artistic expression: the crossroad between poetry and street art. It involves short poetic compositions in the urban context, engaging a lyrical relationship with the city. Street Poetry has different features: it is short, catchy, often satirical, visual and multilingual, and it gives voice to many social-political issues of our contemporary age. Capitalism, sexism, consumerism, artistic communication, urban revaluation… Street poetry shapes in a poetic and political way the idea of the otherness, but how does it happen?

    THE PROJECT  

    “Street Poetry and Socio-Political Engagement in Contemporary Western Europe” 

    I’m collecting and digitising poems in different European capital cities: for the moment, my case studies are Rome, Brussels and London. I am currently working on maps that will collect and visualize the poems and all the related information, such as authors, content, setting, etc.

    I am going to analyse these compositions following a tailor-made intermedial frame, composed of a material, spatial, linguistic and literary perspective. This four-perspectives analysis is essential to the understanding of street poetry as a genre. I will subsequently interpret its results through a sociological and political lens, in order to understand how stylistic, formal, thematic and spatial features are connected to socio-political issues such as revaluation, denunciation and insurrection. I will then make a comparison between the case studies in order to draw common trends and differences within the three cities, without omitting their own specific features. Expressions of street poetry need to be read as a network of relations, in order to understand and analyse contemporary European urban culture as an international phenomenon, characterised by transnational crossings, contacts, and reciprocal influences. 

    As in its content, this research is participative in its methodology too… 

    Have you seen a poem, a sticker or a poster in the streets? Then take a picture and send it to my contact with the geographical coordinates and author (if applicable). 

    Do you know an Instagram or Facebook page about Street Poetry?  

    Are you a poet, an artist, interested in Street Poetry? 

    If you want to participate let’s get in contact!  

    I will make sure that your contribution will be added to the corpus and to the maps.

    Would you like to stay updated on the research outputs? Have a look at the blog!