Il Gambero Cosmografico 1965, Il Granchiolino Immamorato 1967 1968-2018
Posted in poetry, Sound on March 10th, 2024Tags: avant-garde poet, Concrete Poetry, Fondazione Morra, Henri Chopin, poetry of space, sound-poetry, Stelio Maria Martini, typography
Henri Chopin (18 June 1922 – 3 January 2008) was a French avant-garde poet and musician: he is widely considered to be a pioneer in the recognition and distribution of sound-poetry. Besides poetry and music, his practice includes paining, graphic design, typography, independant publishing and filmmaking; Chopin’s work is a barometer of the shifts in European media between the 1950s and the 1970s.
In 1964 he created OU, one of the most notable reviews of the second half of the 20th century, and he ran it until 1974. OU’s contributors included William S. Burroughs, Brion Gysin, Gil J Wolman, François Dufrêne, Bernard Heidsieck, John Furnival, Tom Phillips, and the Austrian sculptor, writer and Dada pioneer Raoul Hausmann.
Chopin spent a lot of time in Naples from the beginning of the 1980s due to his collaborative projects with Peppe Morra, founder of Fondazione Morra, one of the most renowned spaces for contemporary art active within the city. Morra and Chopin worked closely together up until the final years of the French artist’s life. During this time they produced numerous publications, a large number of which were based on his stunning production of “typewriter poems”. Chopin found a new possibility for poetry both within sound and the written form; with a formal approach he constructed a new alphabetical narration that actually had no responsibility for communication.
His personal production — consisting of typewriter-poems and sound performances — is an inspired attempt to open the medium of poetry into a form described by Chopin as ‘a poetry of spaces’: demonstrating ‘the sensory superiority of sound as opposed to normal speech, and […] free man from the straightjacket of words and letters and from his obedience to didactics.’
This book contains a text by Stelio Maria Martini.
Author: Henri Chopin
Publisher: Edizioni Morra
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