dom sylvester houédard

Author: dom sylvester houédard

Editors: Andrew Hunt and Nicola Simpson

Publisher: Ridinghouse (2024)

Widely recognized by his contemporaries as one of the leading theorists and outstanding practitioners of concrete poetry, Dom Sylvester Houdard (192492) is an unsung intellect of the 20th century. This elegant oversized hardback monograph reinstates the Benedictine monk and artist as an important pioneer in the countercultural and transnational artsive series of Houédard's highly personal "typestracts" for the first time. Houédard is deeply relevant to our digital age: we may no longer use an Olivetti Lettera-22 typewriter, as he did, but we all increasingly type rather than handwrite our lives. Houédard would have been delighted by the permutational possibilities offered by the 140 characters in a tweet, or the visual shorthand of emojis and hashtags. For this monk, everything connected and was interconnected. The opportunity for the individual to compose 'machinepoems' or text-works that 'move thru the air' in a 'global kinkon' is now greater than ever.