If to suppose that our existence consists of “only bodies and languages”, then poetry draws parallelly (or perpendicularly) from sociolects of different competing social forces and history of poetic experimentation.

When poetic text enters the public and physical space beyond the page — without the sanction of or collaboration with the (municipal) authorities — the activation of the materiality of the text unfolds in parallel to its social performativity. For documenting something that didn’t yet became archive and at the same time could be easily lost in clash of historiographies, it would be useful to look at the recent history of russophone poetic actionism, to provide materials for its (counter)archive.

While it was systematic ‘assault on the frontiers’ of allowed – both in street politics and textual art, — its history or the most intense period could be limited to 2008-14. It opens with the first actions of Street University and ends with the violent repressions against activists and unleashed war. Starting from the year when “the state becomes the main punk” and begin to transgress its own frontiers, violate own written rules (constitution) and neglect the letter of international law, russophone experimental poetry leave the form of public action and enters in its more documentalist, dissident and finally often exilic turn.

The first poetic actions in XXI century, based on utilitarian-oriented texts, were coined as ‘direct action poetry’. Since these actions could be expectably quickly stopped by the police, they started to be increasingly documented by different gadgets. Due to such technological actor as camera and political (counter-)actor as police, poetic actionism soon developed in more statuary, immobilized and finally non-human objects, holding the text.