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46-466: Brion Gysin (19 January 1916 – 13 July 1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet , performance artist and inventor of experimental devices. He is best known for his use of the cut-up technique , alongside his close friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs . With the engineer Ian Sommerville he also invented the Dreamachine , a flicker device designed as an art object to be viewed with

92-454: A 1918 poem by Raoul Hausmann , apparently also a sound poem. Schwitters also wrote a less well-known sound poem consisting of the sound of the letter W. (Albright, 2004) Chilean Vicente Huidobro's explores phonetic mutations of words in his book "Altazor" (1931). In his story The Poet at Home , William Saroyan refers to a character who practices a form of pure poetry, composing verse of her own made-up words. It has been argued that "there

138-457: A battle in Tripoli where he was a soldier, creating a sound text that became a sort of a spoken photograph of the battle. Dadaists were more involved in sound poetry and they invented different categories: Sound poetry evolved into visual poetry and concrete poetry , two forms based in visual arts issues although the sound images are always very compelling in them. Later on, with the development of

184-679: A biography of Josiah "Uncle Tom" Henson titled, To Master, a Long Goodnight: The History of Slavery in Canada (1946). A gifted draughtsman, he took an 18-month course learning the Japanese language (including calligraphy) that would greatly influence his artwork. In 1949, he was among the first Fulbright Fellows . His goal was to research, at the University of Bordeaux and in the Archivo de Indias in Seville, Spain,

230-431: A collection of homages to Gysin, was authored by Joe Ambrose, Frank Rynne , and Terry Wilson with contributions by Marianne Faithfull , John Cale , William S. Burroughs, John Giorno , Stanley Booth , Bill Laswell , Mohamed Hamri , Keith Haring and Paul Bowles . A monograph on Gysin was published in 2003 by Thames and Hudson. Prose Radio Cinema Music Painting Sound poet While it

276-412: A lifetime career, great clumps of ideas, as casually as a locomotive throws off sparks". Later that year a heavily edited version of his novel, The Last Museum , was published posthumously by Faber & Faber (London) and by Grove Press (New York). As a joke, Gysin had contributed a recipe for marijuana fudge to a cookbook by Alice B. Toklas ; it was included for publication, becoming famous under

322-719: A prestigious school for boys run by Benedictine monks. Despite attending both Anglican and Roman Catholic schools, Gysin was already an atheist when he left St Joseph's. In 1934, he moved to Paris to study La Civilisation Française , an open course given at the Sorbonne where he made literary and artistic contacts through Marie Berthe Aurenche, Max Ernst 's second wife. He joined the Surrealist Group and began associating with Valentine Hugo , Leonor Fini , Salvador Dalí , Picasso and Dora Maar . A year later, he had his first exhibition at

368-732: A very traumatic colostomy , that drove him to extreme depression and to a suicide attempt. Later, in Fire: Words by Day – Images by Night (1975), a crudely lucid text, he would describe the horrendous ordeal he went through. In 1985 Gysin was made an American Commander of the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres . He'd begun to work extensively with noted jazz soprano saxophonist Steve Lacy . They recorded an album in 1986 with French musician Ramuntcho Matta, featuring Gysin singing/rapping his own texts, with performances by Lacy, Don Cherry , Elli Medeiros , Lizzy Mercier Descloux and more. The album

414-467: Is a paucity of information on women's involvement in sound poetry, whether as practitioners, theorists, or even simply as listeners". Among the earliest female practitioners are Berlin poet Else Lasker-Schüler , who experimented in what she called "Ursprache" (Ur-language), and the New York Dada poet and performer Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven . The Baroness's poem "Klink-Hratzvenga (Death-wail)"

460-549: Is a street in the 6th arrondissement of Paris , France. In the 14th century, the street was documented under the name Gilles-Queux or Gui-le-Queux , presumably referring to a cook ( queux in Old French ) named Giles. Later names include Gui-le-Preux , Villequeux , Gui-le-Comte , and Gilles-le-Cœur . It was also known at various points as the Rue des Noyers (1423), Rue des Deux-Moutons , and Rue du Battoir (1639). The street

506-420: Is sometimes argued that the roots of sound poetry are to be found in oral poetry traditions, the writing of pure sound texts that downplay the roles of meaning and structure is a 20th-century phenomenon. The Futurist and Dadaist Vanguards of the beginning of this century were the pioneers in creating the first sound poetry forms. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti discovered that onomatopoeias were useful to describe

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552-500: The Syndicat de la Librairie Ancienne et Moderne , has been located at no. 4 since 1985. As of 2021, two bookstores remain in the street: Librairie Kronis at no. 4 and Un Regard Moderne at no. 10; the latter opened in 1991. At no. 6, a fencing club ( salle d'armes ) opened in 1886 and still operates as of 2022, claiming to be the oldest remaining in Paris. École César Franck ,

598-521: The Beat Hotel . Working on a drawing, he discovered a Dada technique by accident: William Burroughs and I first went into techniques of writing, together, back in room No. 15 of the Beat Hotel during the cold Paris spring of 1958... Burroughs was more intent on Scotch-taping his photos together into one great continuum on the wall, where scenes faded and slipped into one another, than occupied with editing

644-481: The Galérie Quatre Chemins in Paris with Ernst, Picasso, Hans Arp , Hans Bellmer , Victor Brauner , Giorgio de Chirico , Dalí, Marcel Duchamp , René Magritte , Man Ray and Yves Tanguy . On the day of the preview, however, he was expelled from the Surrealist Group by André Breton , who ordered the poet Paul Éluard to take down his pictures. Gysin was 19 years old. His biographer, John Geiger, suggests

690-509: The Master Musicians of Jajouka from the village of Jajouka to perform alongside entertainment that included acrobats, a dancing boy and fire eaters. The musicians performed there for an international clientele that included William S. Burroughs. Gysin lost the business in 1958, and the restaurant closed permanently. That same year, Gysin returned to Paris, taking lodgings in a flophouse located at 9 rue Gît-le-Cœur that would become famous as

736-561: The 1950s she became involved with the Wiener Gruppe (Vienna Group) and was an accomplished performer of sound & concrete poetry by many artists such as Alain Arias-Misson , Bob Cobbing , Gerhard Rühm , and Ernst Jandl . This was due in part to her training as an operatic singer and the fact that she was fluent in eight languages. Lingual Music , a double CD collection of her work, was released posthumously in 2007 by Paradigm Discs in

782-598: The 2013's Dreamachines album) and Brian Jones . Gysin is the subject of John Geiger's biography, Nothing Is True Everything Is Permitted: The Life of Brion Gysin , and features in Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine , also by Geiger. Man From Nowhere: Storming the Citadels of Enlightenment with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin , a biographical study of Burroughs and Gysin with

828-569: The BBC and later published in a pamphlet. I was in Paris in the summer of 1960; this was after the publication there of Naked Lunch . I became interested in the possibilities of this technique, and I began experimenting myself. Of course, when you think of it, The Waste Land was the first great cut-up collage, and Tristan Tzara had done a bit along the same lines. Dos Passos used the same idea in 'The Camera Eye' sequences in USA . I felt I had been working toward

874-511: The Baroness conveys the fluidity of gender as a constantly changing, polysemous signifier." In this way, somatic art becomes the poet's own "space-sound." Of course, for many dadaists, such as Hugo Ball, sound poetry also presented a language of trauma, a cacophony used to protest the sound of the cannons of World War I. It was as T. J. Demos writes, "a telling stutter, a nervous echolalia." Rue G%C3%AEt-le-C%C5%93ur The Rue Gît-le-Cœur

920-529: The UK. Her archive is now held at Goldsmiths, University of London. The United States has produced accomplished sound poets as well: Tracie Morris , from Brooklyn, New York, began presenting sound poetry in the mid-1990s. Her live and installation sound poetry has been featured in numerous venues including the Whitney Biennial in 2002. Experimental vocalist and composer Joan La Barbara has also successfully explored

966-462: The arbitrary expulsion "had the effect of a curse. Years later, he blamed other failures on the Breton incident. It gave rise to conspiracy theories about the powerful interests who seek control of the art world. He gave various explanations for the expulsion, the more elaborate involving 'insubordination' or lèse majesté towards Breton". After serving in the U.S. army during World War II, Gysin published

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1012-450: The collection Galgenlieder . Zang Tumb Tumb (1914) is a sound poem and concrete poem by Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti . Hugo Ball performed a piece of sound poetry in a reading at Cabaret Voltaire in 1916: Kurt Schwitters ' Ursonate (1922–32, "Primal Sonata") is a particularly well known early example: The first movement rondo 's principal theme being a word, "fmsbwtözäu" pronounced Fümms bö wö tää zää Uu , from

1058-487: The eyes closed", the flicker device uses alpha waves in the 8–16 Hz range to produce a change of consciousness in receptive viewers. In April 1974, while sitting at a social engagement, Gysin had a very noticeable rectal bleeding. In May he wrote to Burroughs complaining he was not feeling well. A short time later he was diagnosed with colon cancer and began to receive cobalt treatment. Between December 1974 and April 1975, Gysin had to undergo several surgeries, among them

1104-521: The eyes closed. It was in painting and drawing, however, that Gysin devoted his greatest efforts, creating calligraphic works inspired by cursive Japanese "grass" script and Arabic script . Burroughs later stated that "Brion Gysin was the only man I ever respected." John Clifford Brian Gysin was born at the Canadian military hospital in Taplow , Buckinghamshire , England. His mother, Stella Margaret Martin,

1150-464: The history of slavery, a project that he later abandoned. He moved to Tangier , Morocco, after visiting the city with novelist and composer Paul Bowles in 1950. In 1952/3 he met the travel writer and sexual adventurer Anne Cumming and they remained friends until his death. In 1954 in Tangier, Gysin opened a restaurant called The 1001 Nights, with his friend Mohamed Hamri , who was the cook. Gysin hired

1196-544: The landscape of American literature . Gysin helped Burroughs with the editing of several of his novels including Interzone , and wrote a script for a film version of Naked Lunch , which was never produced. The pair collaborated on a large manuscript for Grove Press titled The Third Mind , but it was determined that it would be impractical to publish it as originally envisioned. The book later published under that title incorporates little of this material. Interviewed for The Guardian in 1997, Burroughs explained that Gysin

1242-544: The magnetic tape recorder , sound poetry evolved thanks to the upcoming of the concrete music movement at the end of the 1940s. Some sound poetics were used by later poetry movements like the beat generation in the fifties or the spoken word movement in the 80's, and by other art and music movements that brought up new forms such as text sound art that may be used for sound poems which more closely resemble "fiction or even essays, as traditionally defined, than poetry". Das Große Lalulá (1905) by Christian Morgenstern , in

1288-466: The monster manuscript... Naked Lunch appeared and Burroughs disappeared. He kicked his habit with Apomorphine and flew off to London to see Dr Dent, who had first turned him on to the cure. While cutting a mount for a drawing in room No. 15, I sliced through a pile of newspapers with my Stanley blade and thought of what I had said to Burroughs some six months earlier about the necessity for turning painters' techniques directly into writing. I picked up

1334-460: The name Alice B. Toklas brownies . In a 1966 interview by Conrad Knickerbocker for The Paris Review , William S. Burroughs explained that Brion Gysin was, to his knowledge, "the first to create cut-ups": A friend, Brion Gysin, an American poet and painter, who has lived in Europe for thirty years, was, as far as I know, the first to create cut-ups. His cut-up poem, Minutes to Go , was broadcast by

1380-634: The persons of Greta Monach (Netherlands) and Katalin Ladik (Hungary), who released an EP of her work, "Phonopoetica", in 1976. In England, Paula Claire has been working with improvisational sound since the 1960s. Lily Greenham , born in Vienna in 1924 and later based in Denmark, Paris and London, developed a so-called neo-semantic approach during the 1970s. She coined the term 'Lingual Music' to describe her electroacoustic experiments with tape recordings of her voice. During

1426-500: The property became known as the Hôtel de Luynes until its partitioning in 1671. Parts of the 1671 rebuilding are preserved in the courtyard of no. 5. Nos. 10 and 12 are built on the former location of another prominent mansion, which in the 14th century belonged to the Counts of Artois , thus known as the Hôtel d'Arras , with main entrance at what is now no. 30 rue Saint-André-des-Arts. It

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1472-502: The raw words and began to piece together texts that later appeared as "First Cut-Ups" in Minutes to Go (Two Cities, Paris 1960). When Burroughs returned from London in September 1959, Gysin not only shared his discovery with his friend but the new techniques he had developed for it. Burroughs then put the techniques to use while completing Naked Lunch and the experiment dramatically changed

1518-1114: The realm of sound poetry. Composer Beth Anderson has been featured on several sound poetry anthologies such as "10+2: 12 American Text Sound Pieces" (1975) and the Italian 3vitre series. Other women practicing sound poetry in the US were, for instance, the Japanese artist Yoko Ono, Laurie Anderson and the Australian poet Ada Verdun Howell . The online mixtape "A Sound Poetry Mix Tape" (2021) features excerpts by over thirty female sound poets. Later prominent sound poets include Henri Chopin , Bob Cobbing , Ada Verdun Howell , bpNichol , Bill Bissett , Adeena Karasick , William S. Burroughs , Giovanni Fontana , Bernard Heidsieck , Enzo Minarelli , François Dufrene , Mathias Goeritz , Maurizio Nannucci , Andras Petocz , Joan La Barbara , Paul Dutton, multidisciplinary artists Jeremy Adler , Jean-Jacques Lebel , John Giorno , Henrik Aeshna, Steve Dalachinsky , Yoko Ono and Jaap Blonk . The poet Edith Sitwell coined

1564-692: The same goal; thus it was a major revelation to me when I actually saw it being done. According to José Férez Kuri, author of Brion Gysin: Tuning in to the Multimedia Age (2003) and co-curator of a major retrospective of the artist's work at The Edmonton Art Gallery in 1998, Gysin's wide range of "radical ideas would become a source of inspiration for artists of the Beat Generation , as well as for their successors (among them David Bowie , Mick Jagger , Keith Haring , and Laurie Anderson )". Other artists include Genesis P-Orridge , John Zorn (as displayed on

1610-529: The second quarter of the 16th century, it was acquired and rebuilt by King Francis I for his chief mistress Anne de Pisseleu d'Heilly , who stayed there until her exile following Francis's death in 1547. The same location then became the mansion of Pierre Séguier (1504–1580)  [ fr ] , later occupied by various members of the Séguier family  [ fr ] . In 1641, Louis Charles d'Albert de Luynes married Louise Marie Séguier, Marquise d'O, and

1656-525: The street was a hub of the Parisian bookstore business. A bookshop affiliated with the Maoist Union des jeunesses communistes marxistes-léninistes operated at no. 6 from 1967 to 1978, bankrolled by the wealthy grandmother of activist Tiennot Grumbach  [ fr ] , and gave its name to the short-lived far-left publishing house Editions Gît-le-Cœur . A trade association of sellers of ancient books,

1702-520: The term abstract poetry to describe some of her own poems which possessed more aural than literary qualities, rendering them essentially meaningless: "The poems in Façade are abstract poems—that is, they are patterns of sound. They are...virtuoso exercises in technique of extreme difficulty, in the same sense as that in which certain studies by Liszt are studies in transcendental technique in music." (Sitwell, 1949) An early Dutch artist, Theo van Doesburg,

1748-408: Was "the only man that I've ever respected in my life. I've admired people, I've liked them, but he's the only man I've ever respected." In 1969, Gysin completed his finest novel, The Process , a work judged by critic Robert Palmer as "a classic of 20th century modernism". A consummate innovator, Gysin altered the cut-up technique to produce what he called permutation poems in which a single phrase

1794-687: Was a Canadian from Deseronto, Ontario . His father, Leonard Gysin, a captain with the Canadian Expeditionary Force , was killed in action eight months after his son's birth. Stella returned to Canada and settled in Edmonton , Alberta where her son became "the only Catholic day-boy at an Anglican boarding school". Leaving that school at the age of fifteen, Gysin was sent next to Downside School in Stratton-on-the-Fosse , near Bath in England,

1840-586: Was another prominent sound poet in the early 1900s. The comedian and musician Reggie Watts often uses sound poetry as an improvisational technique in his performances, used with the intent to disorient his audience. In their essay "Harpsichords Metallic Howl—", Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo review the theories of sound by Charles Bernstein , Gerald Bruns, Min-Quian Ma, Rachel Blau DuPlessis , Jeffrey McCaffery and others to argue that sonic poetry foregrounds its own corporality. Thus "the Baroness's sound poems let her body speak[;] through her expansive use of sound,

1886-472: Was created by recording a gun firing at different distances and then splicing the sounds. That year, the piece was subsequently used as a theme for the Paris performance of Le Domaine Poetique , a showcase for experimental works by people like Gysin, François Dufrêne , Bernard Heidsieck , and Henri Chopin . With Sommerville, he built the Dreamachine in 1961. Described as "the first art object to be seen with

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1932-431: Was later used by Paris Bishop Gérard de Montaigu  [ fr ] ; by Thomas Montagu, 4th Earl of Salisbury , in 1422; by Louis II de Luxembourg , Bishop of Thérouanne , in 1428; and was eventually partitioned in 1535. Most of the street's current buildings date from the late 16th to late 18th centuries. The whole street was inundated during the 1910 Great Flood of Paris . From the 18th to late 20th centuries,

1978-588: Was opened around 1200 on former vineyards of Saint-Germain-des-Prés Abbey . In 1300, a large property on the northeastern section of the street between the Rue de l'Hirondelle and what is now the quay (then the Rue du Hurepoix ) was the Paris residence of the Bishop of Chartres . In 1394, it belonged to Louis de Sancerre , in 1397 to the Archbishop of Besançon , and in 1418 to Jacques de Montberon  [ fr ] . In

2024-526: Was published in The Little Review in March 1920 to great controversy. Written in response to her husband Leopold von Freytag-Loringhoven's suicide, the sound poem was "a mourning song in nonsense sounds that transcended national boundaries". The Baroness was also known for her sexually charged sound poetry, as seen in "Teke Heart (Beating of Heart)", only recently published. Europe has produced sound poets in

2070-562: Was reissued on CD in 1993 by Crammed Discs , under the title Self-Portrait Jumping . On 13 July 1986 Brion Gysin died of lung cancer. Anne Cumming arranged his funeral and for his ashes to be scattered at the Caves of Hercules in Morocco. An obituary by Robert Palmer published in The New York Times described him as a man who "threw off the sort of ideas that ordinary artists would parlay into

2116-459: Was repeated several times with the words rearranged in a different order with each reiteration. An example of this is "I don't dig work, man / Man, work I don't dig." Many of these permutations were derived using a random sequence generator in an early computer program written by Ian Sommerville. Commissioned by the BBC in 1960 to produce material for broadcast, Gysin's results included "Pistol Poem", which

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