Poèmes urbains

First of all, I wanted poetry to get out. I wanted poetry to be at anybody’s reach, on the walls of the cities, where everybody walks, runs and sometimes, stops by and think and read. I always assumed people would stop walking to read them. They would also write on them, change verses, draw things on it, tear it from the wall… People would re-write my poems. I had a PhD project in mind about urban writings (comparative literature/semiology). I wanted to study the Theory of textual cooperation by Umberto Eco.

I wrote a manifesto. I thought about three criteria to paste my poems : The poster had to be

* Simple (no design)

* Readable (big letters)

* Accessible (a child, someone in a wheelchair could write on the poem).

My poems had to be short, efficient.

I would paste everywhere at anytime. I started doing this in Paris, summer 2013. I haven’t stopped since then. I’ve pasted around France and the world. You can read them as far as Montevideo, Papeete, Capetown, Berlin…

Nathalie Man, aka NM (#nmpoetesse on Instagram), is a poet, writer and street artist. She sticks her first poem in the streets of Paris in August 2013. She currently sticks in France and elsewhere on the walls of cities and villages. She is the author of Impressions de Pékin (ed. Les Xérographes, 2014), Le journal d’Elvire (ed. Le bord de l’eau, 2019) and Perceptions (ed. L’éphémère, 2020). She carries out animations and mediations around her project of urban poetry with all types of audiences.