can yr t/writer wiggle its ?ears
Nicola Simpson
The camera pans around the room, lingering for a moment on the monochrome figure of a balding middle-aged Benedictine monk in his clerical black and sunglasses. The monk drags on a cigarette. Slowly exhales. The Wholly Communion (1965), the film of the first International Poetry Incarnation, staged at the Albert Hall on 11 June 1965 and shot by Peter Whitehead, is viewed as an ‘inaugural moment of the mass counter culture of the sixties.’1 As the writer Barry Miles explains, there was a ‘sense of constituency that was never there before […] all these people recognised each other and they all realised they were part of the same scene.’2 The prominence of Dom Sylvester Houédard on the front row, dressed every inch the ‘beatnik from the middle ages’3 that the artist David Toop describes meeting, is one of the many 1960s archetypes that Whitehead’s film captures: a polka-dot Mary Quant devotee sipping red wine; young poets in duffle coats and striped Breton T-shirts making earnest protests; flower-power girls inhaling smoke and dancing. But perhaps there is something else caught in the film’s less focused moments, when Houédard frequently comes into the field of vision. Somewhere, in between the drunken Hindu mantras and finger-cymbalclashing visionary beat rhythms of Allen Ginsberg and the playful but knowing concrete sound poetry of Ernst Jandl, lies the essence of a work by Houédard – a ‘holy wiggy’ poet working with a widely encompassing transnational ecumenical spiritual vision yet creating typestracts of a phonemical precision and graphic elegance, never seen before.
If the International Poetry Incarnation created a constituency of countercultural figures, then it was a constituency formed from a number of co-existent poetry traditions, primarily the American beat, the British neo-beat and the European concrete. Houédard’s work may be conversant with all of these, just as his address book was overflowing with the telephone numbers of the key protagonists, but this constituency was in no way limited to the poets.
The curator Andrew Wilson cites two events that defined ‘the emerging counterculture of the mid sixties’.4 The first was the four-hour long International Poetry Incarnation, while the second was the Destruction In Art Symposium (DIAS), held just over a year later and involving more than fifty artists from ten countries and various locations across London. Houédard was present at both. He is the silent, Zen-like figure captured by Whitehead’s camera, with his expressionless, unreadable face behind the black shades, and, as Wilson states, he was also one of three concrete poets on the committee for DIAS, the other two being Bob Cobbing and John Sharkey.
Houédard’s presence at both these events goes some way to demonstrating how his constituency of influence was as wide and as encompassing as that of the 1960s underground. Yet it was intensely focused on Cobbing and the artists and poets orbiting around Better Books, the bookshop and gallery that Cobbing ran at the time, as well as on Gustav Metzger, who initiated DIAS and provided a point of contact for Houédard with David Medalla and the group of international artists associated with the independent London galley Signals.
In locating how The Poetry Incarnation gave ‘visibility to a developing counterculture’ that was moving away from direct external political protest ‘towards a politics of internal liberation’, Wilson outlines the general trajectory of underground thought at this time. Houédard’s artistic methods for communicating the politics of ‘internal liberation’ and his prominent presence at significant countercultural events is of great import. As the artist and writer Charles Verey attests: ‘Dom Sylvester, deeply enmeshed in the centre ground of the putative revolution, might have had the opportunity to put his mind to becoming its prophet.’5 Can we consider Houédard as a prophet of internal liberation? As couched as these words may be in the groovy parlance of the 1960s underground, they are not as ‘far out’ as they may first appear. That the Western trans-Atlantic counterculture had its gurus is well established: Timothy Leary was advocating LSD as a way to ‘tune in, turn on, drop out’; the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi and his transcendental meditation techniques had a well-documented influence on many followers, including The Beach Boys and The Beatles; the first Western followers of A C Bhaktivedanta’s Krishna Consciousness began their Saturday afternoon high-street chanting at this time and, in the words of Miles, many of the ‘hippie-orientated groups were started by self-appointed gurus’.6 Why and in what context could Houédard have been in a position to become the guru of the British counterculture? The poet Hayden Murphy wrote that Houédard was thought of by some as a ‘dilettante guru’,7 and there is certainly an air of this in Clay Perry’s photographs of Houédard (one of them appearing in Vogue), including that taken at the opening of Takis’s ‘Of the Magnetic’ exhibition of 1964. Here, his black cape and black beret lend an air of the ‘dilettante’ in the same way perhaps that the Ray-Bans and the chain smoking captured in Whitehead’s film may be a cultural shorthand for ‘beatnik’. Both words – dilettante and beatnik – suggest a degree of posturing, a remove away from the genuine artist. But it is precisely this kind of reductionism that those who knew him well warn against. ‘Sylvester was neither a clown nor an erudite scholar.’8 It is clear, considering the way in which Houédard signed off his ‘poemobjects’: dsh or the many names by which his friends and acquaintances knew him – Dom Sylvester, the Dom, Syl, Sylvia, Sil, Silvester, Pierre, S, P – that he had ‘many selves’. One of these selves was a guru in the very real sense of the word: he was a transmitter and teacher of essential spiritual truths and practices to the wide network of a newly emerging transnational avant-garde
5 Charles Verey, A Relationship with Dom Sylvester Houédard Part 1 (1965–1977), www.beshara.org, accessed 16/09/14.
6 Barry Miles, Hippie, Cassell Illustrated, London, 2003, p.372. See Miles for a concise overview of the growing interest in alternative spiritual and mystical traditions.
7 In his article ‘Dom Sylvester Houédard’, for the Edinburgh Review, 89, p. 41, the poet Hayden Murphy writes how Houédard has been ‘regarded with some suspicion as well as admiration’ by those who knew him. ‘His appearance in the famous Times (London) advertisement in the 60s for the legalisation of cannabis (“vive voce the propots”) and his angry distress at the implications of Clause 28 (he was a self-propelled advocate for the “gladguys”) led some to dismiss him, to his personal pain, as a “dilettante guru”’.
8 Sir John Gale, in conversation with author, 10 January 2013.
9 Murphy, ‘Dom Sylvester Houédard’, 41.
10 Visual poems included in Poor. Old. Tired. Horse. (ed. Ian Hamilton Finlay), nos. 10 and 12, Available from < http://www.ubu.com/ vp/Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.html>
(accessed 24 March 2017).
11 This essay, ‘Concrete poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay’, first appeared in Typographica (ed. Herbert Spencer) 8, December 1963, pp.47–62.
12 There are a number of drafts of this essay, dating over a three-year period from 1959–62. Charles Verey has a full collection. The final version was published in the Aylesford Review (ed. Broccard Sewell), vol. 5, no.3, Summer 1963. What is interesting when comparing these drafts is the development of this ‘best-style’ prose that Houédard used. It enables an almost collage effect, as if the prose itself reflects the increasingly wider ecumenical nature of the subject matter.
13 Ibid., p.150
can yr t/writer wiggle its ?ears
in the London of the 1960s. To return again to Murphy, Houédard was ‘as he described the God he served, a “guidefriend”’.9
In the twenty or so years since his death, Houédard’s reputation and legacy still rest on the typestracts that he meticulously made on his Olivetti 22 typewriter throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s. As a literary figure, he seems to have appeared fully formed, with his first visual poems appearing in Ian Hamilton Finlay’s poetry magazine Poor. Old. Tired. Horse in 1963,10 the same year he published two essays: ‘Concrete Poetry & Ian Hamilton Finlay’,11 the first article in English on concrete poetry, and ‘Beat & Afterbeat’.12 These texts were written in a beat-style prose that managed to be at once intellectually expansive and syntactically contracted. Houédard had written poetry before 1963, but this work was lyrical, beat-inspired free verse and unpublished. As his archive at the John Rylands Library attests, he also had a collection of full sketchbooks, bursting with watercolour and pen-and-ink sketches. The visual work that begins to emerge in 1962 and 1963 seems to have little precedent. The only hint that Houédard gives to the time he must have spent honing his skills on the typewriter come from small references in his ‘bits of biography’ (see p.27) to his ‘inner release at development of typewriter arabesques’ (that led directly to the typestracts) whilst in ‘India in i-corps’ in 1945, when he had time, unrationed paper and access to a typewriter. Houédard had received no artistic training or tuition, and it is therefore interesting to consider how the ‘poemobjects’ he made in the years between 1963 and 1979, and the theoretical territory his essays outline, position this work so instantly within the constellation of interrelating avant-garde art movements of the period.
In 1962 the Times Literary Supplement published a letter by the Brazilian artist E M de Melo e Castro. In it, he describes the origin of ‘poesia concreta’ as ‘an experiment in ideogrammatic or diagrammatic writing and poetic creation’. As Wilson states, it is this letter that ‘alerts Finlay, Houédard, Anselm Hollo and Edwin Morgan to the existence of concrete poetry’.13 Houédard, in his article ‘paradada’ (see p.65) confirms this: ‘ian h finlay/ anselm hollo/ myself all came to concrete directions out of different places thru TLS letter 250562 on international movement from de melo e castro’, also drawing attention in ‘bits of autobiography’ to how he was ‘open for scenery set’ by this letter in in 1962. By 1963, Cavan McCarthy had published and distributed Houédard’s translation of the concrete poet Pierre Garnier’s ‘Spatial Poetries Position 1’, a statement that was then signed by Houédard, Finlay, John Furnival, Hollo, Morgan and Herbert Read. A British concrete poetry movement now existed and Houédard was quick to articulate its position. In ‘paradada’ he lists each one of the twenty-six signatories to the manifesto, from an extensive list of countries, emphasising just how transnational this movement was becoming. And he doesn’t stop with names: Houédard provides information on the ‘machinepoems’ and ‘scrollpoems’,
September 1939, the month that the Second World War was declared. Louis became guardian to both the Houédard boys, but Peter was offered a room by Florence’s younger, unmarried sister, Madeleine. Madeleine was proprietor of her own business, selling wines, spirits and tobacco from premises at the lower harbour end of the Bordage. It was a relationship that worked well. Madeleine lived to be ninety, dying in 1982, less than a decade before her nephew, keeping her spare room over the shop as his room, for his use whenever he came to Guernsey.
The two years during which Peter was at Elizabeth College straddle an event that shook the face of Guernsey. In June 1940, amid the continuing evacuation of British troops from mainland Europe after Dunkirk, Churchill declared that the bailiwicks of the Channel Islands would be left undefended and open. The Rev W H G Milnes, Peter’s headmaster, set his mind to the evacuation of all the Guernsey school children. Forbidden from speaking about the negotiations, he took the risk of setting preparations in motion, a decision that was justified when the Channel Islands’ authorities brought in a Dutch cargo-boat to transport the children with the shortest of notice. On 20 June, around a thousand Guernsey children undertook the eightyone-mile Atlantic sea journey to mainland Britain. Louis, as a schoolmaster with responsibilities, was free to take all his family, including Madeleine. They transferred from Weymouth to Oldham in Lancashire, where Louis’ States Intermediate School remained throughout the war. Peter joined the school when term began. Most of the other Guernsey children had been separated from both homeland and family.
Dom Sylvester Houédard: to widen the context
Peter’s ambition was to follow Clem to Jesus College, Oxford, with a King Charles scholarship. By early 1941, however, Oxford was seething with uncertainty and it was clear that the following year would bring radical changes. Clem had decided to abandon his physics degree course and join the RAF: he had already gained all the experience that was possible with the university air squadron. In May, Peter was offered a scholarship place at Jesus College as a seventeen year-old entrant and wrote to his uncle for approval, which was granted. Clem joined the RAF in July 1941, and was sent to train for six months in the US; he was fortunate that his course was run by the RAF rather than by the US Spartan Air Schools. In June 1942, he caught up again with his younger brother when he went down to Oxford for the St Hilda’s dance. ‘Saw quite a bit of Peter who seems to have carved quite a niche for himself in Oxford – being universally known as “Pierre”.’3 In July, he was in Oxford again and found that his brother had been up all night fire watching.
Contrasting group photographs show Pierre in 1940 with the local home guard in Derbyshire and in 1941 sitting in the front row of Jesus freshmen. In the first, he is in loose-fitting khaki kit with a look of chubby boyish amusement, and in the second he has exchanged his rimmed glasses for a neat clipped moustache, a studious air; his thick black hair is intensely wellgroomed. In November 1942 Pierre was elected President of the Newman Society, reflecting his capacity to network and his commitment to the Catholic chaplaincy. In March 1943, Clem, visiting with his fiancée Mollie Turner, reported: ‘Witnessed Peter in all the dignity of his Presidency coping diplomatically with a meeting of the Newman Society at which Shane Leslie spoke.’4 In early May, Clem married Mollie in Southport. But then, three weeks later, Louis and Pierre each received telegrams informing them that the flying boat on which Clem was second pilot had been lost on a mission over the Bay of Biscay. After an interval of uncertainty, it was confirmed that a German U-boat had brought down his craft. Pierre was now the only surviving Houédard. The war had completed the destruction of his immediate family. But it continued and had to be faced: si vis pacem para bellum – peace is a consequence of war.
5
There was a strangeness in being the only Houédard alive. Pierre’s grandfather, whom he knew as LaLa, was born ‘Gouédart, a name that derives from the Breton dialect and means ‘river of blood’. LaLa changed the spelling of his name when he migrated to Jersey because the pronunciation that he used was closer to an aspirated ‘h’ than to the guttural ‘g’ that an English reader would give it. But each name is distinct and belongs to the person who carries it. Pierre suggested that Houédard should sound like ’wed are’. He was three-quarters French, and a quarter Irish whereas Louis’ sons
were three-quarters Irish. For him, Guernsey was his country, his pays and potentially a migrant’s stepping-stone to a better life. He was himself, in this sense, doubly migrant. Arriving in Oxford in wartime, it became his adopted home. As a Guernseyman he was British but he never became ‘English’.
In 1943, Pierre was just nineteen. In the wake of Clem’s death, an invitation came to stay the summer at his cousin Dollie Brown’s home in Bromsgrove. Now, in the context of the freedom of Oxford, removed from the regulation of life on Guernsey, and doubly migrant, new questions about himself arose. At Clem’s death he might have decided to study for the priesthood, but he did not. If he had any feeling in that direction he had opportunities to talk about it to his cousin Tom, Monsignor Newsome, when he was staying at Dollie’s.
On his return to Oxford Pierre signed on for work with the local office of the Ministry of Food.5 His time with the Newman Society had opened up connections with the Catholic life in Cambridge, and his social life continued to revolve around the chaplaincy. With new confidence in his sexuality and his natural inclination for active networking, he found that he was attractive to other men who shared his feelings. His social involvement in the minority activities of Catholic life and his yet unspoken homosexuality lent him a distinct identity.
Through the chaplaincy, Pierre had met Victor Brooke, nephew of Churchill’s leading general, Field-Marshall Alan Brooke, later Lord Alanbrooke. An undergraduate at New College, Oxford, at the outbreak of war, Victor became an active pacifist and in 1943 he joined the Roman Catholic Church. He spent the war working in a market garden in Oxford. Pierre and Victor’s friendship was based on a common search for spiritual values and ecumenical principles. Pierre visited Prinknash Abbey for a weekend in March 1944, with friends from New College. Victor was not among them on that occasion, but in 1946 he was the first of the two to join Prinknash as a postulant. It is unclear how, after abandoning his degree, Pierre managed to excuse himself from military service. He was after all already twenty years old in 1944. It is likely, however, that is was because the MoF was considered to be vital work. In due course, he registered for army service and was assigned to the Intelligence Corps. But first he was taken for drilling and basic training to Rhosneigr in Anglesey and in the summer he was sent to Bangalore in southern India. He remained in the Far East for more than two years; from Bangalore he was sent to Ceylon and finally to Singapore. Always curious, he was deeply struck by the natural gait and presence of ordinary people in India and Sri Lanka, the ease that was commonly displayed in relation to the affairs of life. His experience of the East came to seal the way in which he thought about the differentiating forces that separate men and the realities that unite them.
Pierre’s duties for the Intelligence Corps meant that, for the first time, he found himself asked to use a typewriter. With his poor eye-hand coordination,
5 In the Second World War, every aspect of life came under tight regulations. The task of ensuring that the nation was fed fell to the Ministry of Food (MoF). In 1943, some 50,000 people were employed through 1,300 local offices, dealing with every aspect of food availability and economy, from rationing to supply, distribution and information.
his handwriting was terrible, but here was a machine that made graphic impressions through the simplest of actions and a minimal waste of physical effort. When Pierre began to experiment with the typewriter in a camp Nissen hut in Singapore in 1946, he became aware of the formal grid potential of the typewriter and the mathematics behind its structures and movements. If, however, he wanted to go further than simple geometrical shapes, he is unlikely to have progressed beyond the scrolls and arabesques of the borders and settings of engravers’ copybooks.
The image of Dom Sylvester as a pallid monk is never contradicted as defiantly as in some photographs of this period, in which he is tanned to a copper tone, at least above the waist, a tone that still held fast when he returned to England towards the end of 1947. The camera that caught the last of these images was at a party in Paris given by Jean Cocteau. The sunburnt Pierre is dressed like a flâneur: another recognisable figure here is the writer and historian Brian Fothergill, who also appears in earlier photographs taken in camp in Bangalore and remained a lifetime friend and correspondent.
Christmas 1947 was Pierre’s first in Guernsey since the death of his father eight years earlier. Back in Oxford, with permission from Jesus College, he took rooms at 27 St John Street. Here, an air of accumulating decadence pervaded his study. Between 1941 and 1943 he had completed the first two years of examinations towards his degree: readmitted for the Hilary term in 1948 he was allowed a further year and a half to complete his course. His main tutor now was Professor Albert Goodwin, who was old-fashioned in his approach to teaching, preferring tutorials in a smoke-filled room to open
paradada
dom sylvester houédardA G poetry scene 1964 begins 1st decade post concrete –motorized poems – concrete world already existed waiting eugen gomringer’s entry 1953 (CF 1st internat expo concrete art (basel 1944) and concrete art 50 years of development (zurich 1960) both organized by gomringer’s friend max bill) w/ noun poem avenidas y mujeres and near entry of augusto de campos w/ his poetamenos unpoems – earlier beginnings – the 1949 peter fison resistentialist poem by peter fison (nowly rector of padworth college) – or series of asemantic poems typed w/ brian fothergill for WO 1945 my earliest typestracts – or our wordless plays then – true poesia concreta world only got viably geboren in mental symbiosis at ulm meeting 1955 gomringer plus pignatari (one w/ augusto & haroldo de campos of the brazil noigandres) – isolation the antibiotic w/ all poets come to concrete out of other scenes –hence founding of international movement of spatial poetry by pierre garnier paris 1963 – & international kinetic poetry fund by mike weaver cambridge 1964 that makes the poet-artist hookup in kinetics desiderated typographica-8
c.1960 gomringer started kp (10 nos so far) – has pbd diter rot / oswald wiener / claus bremer / ferreiro gullar / jose lino grünewald / ronaldo azeredo / kitasono katue / wladimir dias pino / theon spanudis / haroldo & augusto de campos / decio pignatari / friedrich achleitner / gerhard rühm / carlo belloli / emmett williams / next ? number british (em / ihf / dsh &c)
increase borderblurs inter art-art & artist-public & mindunmind & non-nonnon / “supercool aesthetic of nothingness”/ concrete spatial 4-d kinetic-these 3 ambiguities as creativity now- not art-poem as creationis imitatio (to copy outsideinside worlds/ nature/ impressions of nature/ sou-psychesubconscious) – but artist-poet as imitator creatoris (cf vat-2 liturgy constitution §127) – art & poetry towards the ex-nihilo – poems not copies of but additions to the selfdiversifying cosmos poem – hence egoless involvements w/ ch’an-zen/ communication problems / shrunkenearth end/ classless non- bossmanship & anarchy – 4-D poetry logically closes 1st cent modern art from 1863 napoleon III salon des refusés – & logically postwittgenstein treats language as matter. poems looked at not thru – not cleanwindow poems to poet mindscape – poems that sound poemly not just hmv – this defined 1st decade concrete (static
/ dynamic / kinetic) – postexpressionist/afterbeat poets had no new private messages to impose- were/are concerned abt now started vol-II of human history – decompartmentalised planetarised & offtheearth – language épuration over- due – national languages overanomolous in global village kulchurcontainment of newsociety builtin divine madness – hence un-un & cool nothing paradada (surdada) out- growing sticky fears of inner néant – 1954 in france post métapoésie of altagor post lettrisme & post ultra-lettres of the hépériles éclatés- & independently- came bernard heidsieck & henri chopin – audiopoesie taped verbophonics – vocal noisic on bande magnétique – also sound poems in aristophanes/ schwitters tradition – brekekekex to W – barriers scramle between all visual (static/kinetic) arts & eyeverse – between all aural arts (all-human like control of 3 parameters in EM like content of audiopome/part-human like systematic-stochastic selecting &/or collage of data) & earverse – photophon barrier scramble in eyear is next yabyumwardly poetstep
nonautonomy of any art – simultaneity (in arts of arts of artists) – this spacetimecontinuum consciousness – nonpressionism unpressionist – all make current scenery & matrix of todailiness in creativity & poēsis & point where now drips thru surrealist/sottoconsciousness hairsieve in épurationof presurreal – satori letgo of freudian moi – low temperature serene (no épater-the- bourgeois) ch’an-zen of supercool je nothingness – suchly identification & distinction dada/ paradada – consciousness of antecedents in & sobornost w/ ball-tzara 1916 &c has been plutôt formative – fi hausmann arp albertbirot arturpetronio in OU? (ex 5e-saison) w/chopin / brion gysin / jn furnival / ihf / jn sharkey &c – pierre garnier’s review les letters aims at centering spatialists everywhere see manifesto position-1 current number (plus réponse by chopin – both trans in link) signed by 26 poets on 101063 from austria belgium brasil czechoslovakia england finland france germany holland japan portugal scotland switzerland usa –mario chamie / carlfriedrich claus / ih finlay / fujitomi yasuo / jn furnival / i & p garnier / eugen gomringer / b grögerova / j hirsal / a hollo / s houédard / e jandl / kitasono katue / f van der linde / e m de melo e castro / frans mon / edwin morgan / ladislaw novak / herbert read / toshihiko schimizu / lc vinholes / p de vree / emmnett williams / jonathan williams / plus (partially) f kriwet-totals 6 from britain & 2 usa – w/ it read brasilian pilot
plan manifesto (eng trans in cleft) since it was augusto de campos made suggestion to garnier – poetries mentioned position-1 can tabulate as concrete & visual (aesthetic structures doing to language & words as much as / more than / or instead of thru them) / phonetic & phonic (vocal noisic processed on tape – & pretape verbophonics) / cybernetic serial & permutational – ie eyeverse (painted printed typed filmed &c) / earverse (soundpoems- audiopoems –overflow into EM) / mindverse (or analytical) this analytical poetry of communiation theory & language mechanism doyened by stuttgart group – max bense / franz mon / härig / henneberg / doehl / plus heissenbuttel & (vienna) jandl – crossfertilises w/ noigrandres (de campos bros / pignatari / azeredo / grünewald / edgard braga / ferreiro / gullar / marcelo moura / wladimir dias pino / pedro xista / mauel bandeira) who combine now their own (musical typographic semantic sociological) original inspiration w/ the concreta pura of gomringer (now deepening in his current work to phan chi’like crystalline contemplatives) & the stuttgart technische hochschule where haroldo is 1964 lecturing
the brazilian non-noigrandres postneoconcrete praxis group (mario chamie / cassiano ricardo / a-c cabral / yone fonseca / armando freitas filho) aim to hunaise stuttgart make poemmaking poems (cf sharkey’s bristol poem-kit) – controlledstochasms – rubbersheet poetry – synthesis of the eye-earcybernetic trinity of spatialist manifesto
spatialist humour from prague – josef hirsal / b grögerova job-boj (& ladislav novak’s phonetics) current developemts of japan’s VOU & SENTO groups (kitansono katue / fujitomi yasuo / toshiniko schimizu / niikumi seiichi / lc vinholes) so far close to gomringer / noigrandres concreta pura will manifest in? next no of les letters – hans g helms germany has got known to gb manyways eg thru newdepartures – joshua reichart paralleling furnival thru jasia reichardt in typographica – the poet-typographer cloisons evaporate – not only in ihf’s poetoypography but in eg bruno munari / pierre faucheux / edward wright ( & first things first manifesto signatories –furnival’s openings/unfolders a response to that appeal) in spain one (young fine) known concretist enrique uribe finally great britain – 1st eyeconcrete pbd was scotland 1963 by ihf in his POTH & fishsheet (moura / xisto / a de campos / hendry / hollo / morgan / ihf / jonathan williams / mary solt) – in england was ihf pbd in aylsford review 1963 – still not quite everywhere apart from fi j & b advts in punch 1962 & current pp runproof leg in tatler (both uncredited) it is + level w/ syntactic olson-zukofsky &c. blackmountaineer as felt influence here tho various lacks not muns only hold some
advances frustatingly up = 1962 edwin morgan / ian h finlay / anselm hollo / myself all came to concrete directions out of different places thru TLS letter 250562 on international movement from de melo e castro in re article poetry prose & the machine TLS 040562 – sir herbert read (vocal avowals 1962) / jn furnival / jn sharkey independently – stefan themersen had preceeded us w/ starpoems in bayamus 1949 – then (ear-concrete) wm stone / margaret lothian / charles cameron / mike weaver – thru gomringer contact w/ garnier – thru him w/ chopin & 5e saison now OU? group & links w/ dada & otherways w/ eg locus solus poets harry mathews / rbt lax / emmett williams / brion gysin (halluncinating stroboscopic giftpoem in plympia-2 ? first step to mechanized poetry: machine poem fi I am w/ geo macbeth) / wm burroughs (cf poem silent sunday in budd / burroughs / brown peinture-poesie-musique rencontre at stadler marsavril 64) projects in gb include kinetic – fi ihf’s poemorama – sharkey’s wordfilm – an OU? film w/ chopin audiotrack to my typestract – furnival’s abacuspoem – weaver’s motorized BOMBpoem edwin morgan’s motorizables – the courier 1963 movement in art article & RCA 1964 random/planned art in motion expo helped dissolve huminodynamistpoet frontier over-here- 1st? moving poem furnival’s origami mobilization of FROG-POND-PLOP* – cf too his deviltrap & priesthole & deckchair poems sharkey’s scrollpoems my infolds & space-invasions by fi diter rot’s boks & bruno munari’s mobile paperfolds – vis –à- vis kinetic (&dynamic) artists are fi aubertin / boto / pol bury / calder / jn healy / hoenich / michael kinder / gyula kosice / frank j malina / group MU paris / group N padua / julio le parc / bridget riley / nicholas schoeffer / sobrino / j r soto / steele / group T milano / v tarkis / jn tinguely / gregorio vardangea / victor de vasarély / yavaral / &c june 1964 foundation of international kinetic poetry fund at cambridge by mike weaver & hookup w/ popper schoeffer malina &c -& planned ?autumn expo cambridge – plus?osiris expo oxford – 3 autumn bbc-3 talks
first decade wasn’t that art (concrete 4-D kinetic) edged thru gutenberg galaxy to poetry but that poets as poets completed the scene
2nd decade 64-74 shaping to total fusion poet-painterplayer in brain controlled machine creation (l’important c’est d’avoir vaincu la machine – sleeve to 1st OU?disk) – coexistential scramble man/tool barrier like to electronic tautology in clunk of innerlit poesie.
*my translation of matsuo bashō’s haiku furu ike ya / kawazu tobikomu / mizu no oto – also cf morgan’s motorsizables.
