When Sound Ends, Vision Endures

I prefer the sun, I'm fond of the night, I'm fond of my noises and of my sounds, I admire the immense complex factory of a body, I'm fond of my glances that touch, of my ears that see, of my eyes that receive.... But I do not have to have the benediction of the written idea. I do not have to have my life derived from the intelligible. I do not want to be subject to the true word which is forever misleading or lying, I can stand no longer to be destroyed by the Word, that lie that abolishes itself on paper.

—Henri Chopin, January 17, 1967

Henri Chopin Performing
Yesterday, the following message appeared, via Joachim Montessuis, on the Sound Poetry list:

“I am Henri's daughter and I regret to inform you that Henri died yesterday (03/01/08), at home, with his family, peacefully. We will miss him greatly.”

With those few forwarded words, forwarded again to my inbox, the music of Chopin came to an end. This Chopin was best known as a sound poet, for his decades of word making wordless and even worded sounds into aural experiences different from song or talk or paged word. He was the composer of the tape recorder and the musician of the mouth and body. But Chopin was also a master typewriter poet, though his work—like the work of so many visual poets before the efflorescence of the Internet—has always been too difficult to find, thus serving to silence his voice, his the cleverness of his eyes, the dexterity of his fingers on a machine.

Henri Chopin, “egalité” (2002)
I spent a little time tonight searching for interesting examples of Chopin’s typewriter poetry, and I’ll start with his “egalité,” which is a good example of a densely packed typewriter poem. Chopin doesn’t allow himself to be constrained by rigid gridspace when working on a typewriter poem; he moves the platen up and down and left and right a notch to make his effects. He understands the machine he is using, and he makes the best use of it. As simple as this sounds, an artist must always master the tools of art. One of the tenets of any artist must be “Understand your equipment.”


Henri Chopin, “adorable construction”
The poem “adorable construction” shows how Chopin continues to uses heavy imbricated overtyping to create his effects and how he struggles against the typewriter’s tendency to turn everything into a rectangle of some kind.

Henri Chopin, “préface à le croisade attardée américano-british du XXI° century”
His complex “préface” incorporates asemic typing, handwriting (the diacritical marks), running syntactic text, collage, and color into a rich mise-en-page. Beginning with a study of overlapping parentheses that create a bit of op art cross-hatching, the poem funnels itself through a fan shape into a bit of humorous text referencing my namesake Geoffrey Chaucer and ending with gifts to the Gauls, the Scots, and the English. Simple as this is, this deepens the range of typewriter poetry, expanding it beyond the rectangular bounds of concrete poetry and its usually limited syntax into a world of greater possibility.

Henri Chopin, “Toupie” (1984)
I’m assuming that “Toupie” is the correct reading of this dagger-like poem, which types “1984” over and over again using just the right typewriterface to give the poem an open and inviting look even as its sticks to constructing a rigid, and wonderfully overtyped, typescape.

I wrote about Chopin once before, on 13 December 2005, in a review of the exhibit “Looking at Words: The Formal Presence of Text in Modern and Contemporary Works on Paper” at the Andrea Rosen in New York City. My few words about his work there provide some sense of the beauty and ingeniousness of Chopin’s typewriterly works—especially such works that I had no luck finding:

Among my favorites in the show were a couple of typewriter poems by Henri Chopin. The simpler of the two was “Vite: Poeme-Graphiqe pour un cerf-volant” (“Quick: Graphic Poem for a Kite,” 14 Aug 1966), a simple panegyric to childhood. The word “vite” (“quick”) repeats over the page, creating the shape of a kite, and leading to the single word “vivons” (“we live”) at the tail end of the kite. But Chopin’s best work is a bicolor typewriter poem entitled “Poi” (1966). The base of this poem is a set of interlocking z’s typed in interlocking lines of red and black, but these lines break to allow the insertion of an oval (maybe pear-shaped) necklace created out of a series of poi’s. Near the bottom of this necklace, a “poi” meets up with a “re” to form “poi re” [sic], or “pear”—and to suggest “poivre,” or “pepper.” But what is better than this ending pun is the beauty of this piece: the careful typing, the way Chopin mixes colors of type, the way he uses a piece of paper to sculpt the type and allow just bits of some letters to appear on the page. In person, this is a masterpiece of typewriter poetry but [also] a master of the printer’s fist.

Henri Chopin at Home
Born in 1922, Chopin left us just at age 85, a good age to reach for any artist. Time doesn’t always provide an artist enough space to create, but without time creation is impossible.

ecr. l’inf.