Dom Sylvester Houedard

The aim of this book is to reinstate the Benedictine monk and artist Dom Sylvester Houédard as an important figure within the countercultural and transnational art movement of the 1960s and early 1970s, especially as regards kinetic and concrete poetry. Widely recognised by his contemporaries as one of the leading theorists and outstanding practitioners of concrete poetry, Guernsey-born Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–1992) is an unsung intellect of the twentieth century. 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 hand-write our lives.

He would have been delighted by the permutational possibilities offered by the 280 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.