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

Order here

Catalogue published in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition held at Malmö Konsthall from 22 March to 7 May, 1978.

Order here

OEI # 90-91: Sickle of Syntax & Hammer of Tautology offers the first English language overview of the history of concrete and visual poetry production in socialist Yugoslavia between 1968 and 1983. By focusing on mass-produced examples of concrete poetry, this publication presents these poetic experiments as organically linked to social movements, critical theories, and youth cultural revolutions. In his extensive introduction, Sezgin Boynik, the guest editor of this special issue of OEI, discusses concrete and visual poetry in socialist Yugo-slavia as an uneven and combined development, and emphasizes its confrontational and organizational aspects. By means of interviews, translations, reproductions, and theoretical and historical statements, OEI # 90-91 offers a picture of a very lively scene of concrete and visual poetry in Yugoslavia, which unfortunately is not as recognized interna-tionally as it would deserve. Hoping that OEI # 90-91 could contribute to this task in a substantial way, we present episodes from the early years of OHO formation and its complex theories of words and things; an interview with Rastko Močnik on programmed art and political formalism; militant polemics of Goran Babić; Signalist contradictions; subjective structural devices of Judita Šalgo; zaum experiments of Vojislav Despotov; detective meta-texts of Slavoj Žižek; poetic self-management studies of Vujica Rešin Tucić; a feminist historicisation of Ažin school for experimental poetry; democratisation of visual poetry by Westeast; selections from special issues of the journals Pitanja, Problemi, Ulaznica, Dometi, Delo, Koraci, Vidik, Pegaz, and many other materials translated here for the first time and presented in one publication.

Order here

 

In this artist book the Argentinean artist Cristian Forte presents a system of poetic writing based on fingerprints that goes beyond conventional alphabets and allows him to explore concepts such us identity, memory and literature.

Limited edition of 70. Including original fingerprints and silk-screen printings.

Language: Español – English

Price: €28.00
Buy it

An Anthology of Concrete Poetry (in braille). Rachel Simkover (Ed.). Motto Books.

An Anthology of Concrete Poetry was first edited and published by Emmett Williams and Something Else Press in 1967.

In 2013, artist Rachel Simkover chose a selection of poems from the anthology to have transcribed into braille.

Contents

Friedrich Achleitner, 1959
H.C. Artmann, 1954
Claus Bremer, 1964
Haroldo de Campos, 1958
Bob Cobbing, 1965
Bob Cobbing, 1966
Reinhard Döhl, 1966
Ian Hamilton Finlay, “The Horizon of Holland,” 1963
Ian Hamilton Finlay, 1964
Pierre Garnier, “Grains de Pollen,” 1962
Ilse and Pierre Garnier, 1965
Eugen Gomringer, 1954
Bohumila Grögerova and Josef Hiršal, “Iaska” (love), 1960- 62
José Lino Grünewald, 1959
José Lino Grünewald, 1959
Dom Sylvester Houédard, “for raoul hausmann”
Hansjörg Mayer, 1965
Franz Mon, 1966
Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, 1965
Hans-Jørgen Nielsen, 1965
Yüksel Pazarkaya, “the donkey cycle: 1”
Yüksel Pazarkaya, “the donkey cycle: 2”
Décio Pignatari, 1956
Décio Pignatari, 1957
Gerhard Rühm, 1954
Gerhard Rühm, 1954
Gerhard Rühm, 1955
Aram Saroyan, 1965-66
Adriano Spatola, 1966
Paul de Vree, 1966
Emmett Williams, 1954-55
Emmett Williams, 1965

30 €

Buy