ABSTRACT
Somewhere around 1950, the French poet – or the soon-to-be sound poet – Henri Chopin puts his writings in a bag and burns them on the banks of the Seine. In his ‘inevitably incomplete’ autobiography, he vividly recalls the event: ‘All of them bar twenty or so were washed away in the waves. This was the author's first big move in poetry’. Despite the clear similarities between Chopin’s work and that of his composing contemporaries, he himself always insists on the distinctiveness of sound poetry – an art form that should not be understood as merely extending an earlier sound-oriented poetics either. In an interview with Zurbrugg, Chopin notes how he ‘gradually abandoned the written word’ between 1955 and 1957 and started to research ‘vocal values in their own right’.
