hen Bernard Heidsieck delivers his categorical judgment of “sound poetry,” starting with the 1950s, he gives us a healthy lesson: “Don’t,” he says, “let the machine consume you.” He’s talking about the computer, of course, the all-in-one machine, accessible to everyone. The machine can’t do anything by itself, we know: “Before using such a machine,” Heidsieck continues, “you have to know what you want to do with it. You have to have an idea that the machine may be able to help you realize. You shouldn’t throw yourself at this kind of machine too easily.” Fifty years of practicing the art of sound poetry renders you lucid. Or maybe it’s the opposite: lucidity makes sound poetry possible. Lucidity, for example, may be abandoning “written poetry” when you realize that poetry books don’t sell, that even the term poetry has fallen upon hard times or that, in every sense of the word, the poem remains eminently passive, waiting wisely on the page for its reader. Lucidity means thinking about the support for production, communication and diffusion of poetry in general and finding a way out of its dead end. It means wanting to exit poetry from its double ghetto (“poetry” book + plus small distribution within micro-circles) and resolutely envisioning an alternative that reactivates poetry and finding a material consistence adequate to the modernity of its epoch. Lucidity is also giving oneself the technical means to reach one’s goal. It is reinvesting from the moment of a text’s conception in its oralization, previewing from the moment of writing, which then resembles a simple notation, a score, the way in which the text should be read. It is including in the text itself the possibility for the poet to incarnate this oralization and to share it with a public. Lucidity is knowing to resort to a machine in its time, the tape recorder, and to experiment with different effects trying to put his voice in perspective by confronting it with a contemporary sonic diversity capable of activating in the listener the awareness that he in turn can be an actor with a body, eyes and ears. It means finding the concrete means to twirl words around a public, which thus becomes the co-producers of an as yet unrealized work, taking form among them, with them and for them. It means creating a zone of musical complicity with contemporary musicians (Boulez & Stockhausen & Cage) who, in their respective fields, set the tempo. It means working directly with sonic poetic material in such a way as to discover and generate a new space for listening. It means bringing together art and technology by opening poetry to the social sphere without necessarily saying that technology is the goal. Lucidity finally means escaping the isolation that has been the poet’s privilege without losing oneself in collective meandering. It means refusing the authority of a leader, a pope who, as recent literary history shows, excludes or calls to order. It means actively preaching for an opening in which on the same platform can co-exist “an agglomeration of lines, various movements, sometimes adjoining, parallel, sometimes contradictory” and which are there for each person to decide to participate or not. It means constituting a sort of “franc-maçonnerie underground” that knows how to get around the obligatory trends and established distributors to transmit information directly both to colleagues and the public. It means replacing poetry in the public realm by multiplying its manifestations, readings, collective and individual performances.
It means, in a more personal way, for the poet to try to see better what’s happening around him/her and allow without balking the transformation of things by refusing a priori the rights of naïveté and ignorance. It means being conscious of making a simple proposition that worth what it’s worth, but that shows in any case that “we’re all in the same boat.”
Bernard Heidsieck tells the story of this lucidity in his book “nous étions bien peu en …”.
So: take it easy: read it, enjoy it and be sure of something: it’s up to you to be lucid too!
Interview by Philippe Buschinger (Paris)

Bernard Heidsieck
Nous étions bien peu?
Published February 2001

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