Lettrism, Lettrist poetry
The essence of lettrism is, well, the letter. Its founder, Isidore Isou, believed that poetry must be deconstructed, down to its most basic element, a single letter. Letters, as mere visual symbols, would be the basis of a new poetics and art. Isou's ideas and influence spilled over into the visual arts, film, architecture, even mathematics, psychiatry and politics.
Maurice Lemaître - Lettre Rock
Taken from the EP "Maurice Lemaître présente le Lettrisme"
Pathé Marconi 1960s
Lettrism, Lettrist poetry
The writing and symbols used in Lettrist works are not to be seen as carrying a useful message, but solely as the object of art, as a third visual material after the figurative and the abstract.
This movement was named Lettrism because in its historic phase it was first of all involved in upsetting poetry, which was judged to be exhausted when it was conveyed by words and concepts. Poetic Lettrism clearly and systematically for the first time (after a few hints, for example, by Dada) proposed a new conception of poetry entirely reduced to the letter, thus eliminating all semantics. The use of new letters, symbolized by the letters of the ancient Greek alphabet, and then by numbers on the scores of this music-poetry, calls on all the sounds that a human body can produce, integrated into a sort of super-score, anticipating the later movements of sound poetry and performance art.
Lettrist
Isodore Isou
The Beginnings of Lettrism
Lettrism, founded in the late forties by Isidore Isou, was as much a reaction against Andre Breton's dictatorial control of Surrealism (and Surrealism's movement away from its conceptual origins in Dada towards that of mysticism), as it was an attempt the get poetry back into people's lives and on the 'hit parade.'
In his attempt to rewrite all of human knowledge, Isou had discovered that the evolution of any art was characterized by two phases: 'amplic' and 'chiseling.'
In following the development of the art of poetry for example, Isou saw the Lettrist at the end of a long chiseling phase which had begun with Baudelaire reducing narrative in his poetry to anecdote, then Rimbaud disregarding anecdote for lines and words, Mallarmé reducing words to sound and spaces (particularly in Un Coup de Des), and finally the Dadaists destroyed the word altogether.
Isou saw at the end of this phase the new beginnings of an amplic stage for culture, from which a whole host of new arts, ways of working, and social institutions would eventually spring, with Isou at the center of all creative work.
The Lettrist worked on the level of the letter at the heart of what they believed to be an experiential language that was to be the basis of their new culture.
Their Lexique Des Lettres Nouvelles, for example was a sonic alphabet of a 130 or so sounds from which a new natural language was to spring from and from which they composed their poetry.
Isou along with his chief lieutenant, Maurice Lemaitre, worked out a notational style that resembled that of traditional, 'common-practice' music, sometimes even with staffs, bar lines, and dynamic markings. Lettrist poetry was also often performed by choral groups.
http://switch.sjsu.edu/switch/sound/articles/wendt/folder4/ng441.htm
Lettrism
