The Ninth Poem of Cristina Irian

Five years have already passed since the eighth poem, and in 2026 we approach a full decade since the beginning of this experiment in tracking the flow of information on my old Facebook wall, from which the first seven poems emerged. What more could be said after all this time? Is it still worth descending once again into the belly of the whale, and writing a ninth poem?

The end of 2025 brings with it an ever more insistent murmur, composed of two dominant voices that overlap and collide. The first is the voice of the users: those who post texts, opinions, photographs, those who display their successes, and at other times their very lives - placed without hesitation and, sometimes, even to the point of exhaustion, on a digital platter. The second voice belongs to the business sphere, which buys space and time from that of the user, forcefully pushing forward advertisements, most often for applications bearing the emblem of artificial intelligence.

And as the ads become more strident, more colourful, more saturated, and as AI is praised through paid banners to the point of informational violence, the user on my wall seems to respond through quiet resistance and distance: injecting into the whale’s belly analog images, most often in black and white, or bringing to light colorized photographs of a material, palpable past, establishing fragments of dialogue with real people whom that past once held within itself. The informational wall of the social network carries with it texts, fragments, thoughts from an older world that still breathes beyond the digital flow, yet one that, his way, ends up being formatted into its own body of pixels.

The Ninth Poem of Cristina Irian continues the experiment initiated in 2016, taking the form of an artist’s book premiered at Versopolis Expo Poetry.

The Publicity Voices is an animated excerpt from The Ninth Poem by Cristina Irian, conceived as part of the Facebook Poetry series and built directly from advertising slots inserted into the social network’s interface. These publicity fragments are embedded within the poem itself, functioning as intrusive, algorithmic voices that interrupt, overwrite, and distort poetic language.

The project is part of the subtheme Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild.