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.
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f genious is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration, Closky fits the formula. He works with an energy some call «obsessive-compulsive». But he also inverses the genious ratio, as his book Coloriage (onestar press, 2001) shows. Since his early days with The Frères Ripoulin, a Parisian art/music collective of which he was part in the 80s, Closky has worked his way in hard conceptual pursuit of the absurd in the logical and the logical in the absurd. He has also put together a CV festooned with ministerial ribbons above a highly respectable tally of exhibitions and publications. 
