In his 1963 poem 'Can Yr Typewriter Waggle its Ears', the artist, writer and Benedictine monk Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–1992) celebrated a new kind of work which he had just started making, inhabiting the cusp of artistic and literary form in an utterly unique way.
my t'writer
s got real inside
interiority
it types the logos into smudges
thru ribbon images
with a feeling of assurance
writes innerness poetry
with a note of authority
performs poetrygraphs
& eyepoems
with absolute unrepeatability
Exploring the visual possibilities of written language while taking advantage of his typewriter's capacity for grid-based composition, Houédard was creating strange geometrical forms using the full range of letterforms and diacritic marks available on his Olivetti Lettera 22 Series portable typewriter.
bija
1967, typed page by Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–1992) 
The pieces were initially created in two dimensions but quickly spread to three, resulting in architectonic forms that seem to float in a white void of page-space, built up from repeated dashes, slashes, and/or other grammatical marks. The Scottish poet Edwin Morgan christened these works 'typestracts' in a 1963 letter to Houédard, combining the words 'typewriter' and 'abstract' to sum up what he felt his friend was attempting to achieve. The title stuck.
Houédard's typestracts, the subject of the current exhibition at the Estorick Collection in London, and of a new book from Atelier Editions, Dom Sylvester Houédard: FrOg pOnd plOp, were a contribution to the international movement of concrete poetry. A phenomenon of the 1950s–1970s, concrete poetry activated the graphic possibilities of writing in response to contemporary discourses around architecture, computer technology, advertising culture and much more.
To understand Houédard's unique contribution to the style, we first need to learn a little more about his life and religious calling.
Inaccurate, Hysterical and Dangerous
1971
Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–1992) 
Born in Guernsey in 1924, Pierre Thomas Paul Jean Houédard studied at Jesus College, Oxford from 1941 to 1949, his degree interrupted by a period of time spent working for military intelligence in Asia. Whilst in India he discovered traditions of abstract Arabic calligraphy that would influence his future interest in the non-semantic possibilities of language. Returning to England, he became a novice monk at Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire following his graduation, taking his vows in 1951 and being ordained as a priest in 1959.
From 1951 to 1954, Houédard studied at Sant Anselmo Benedictine College in Rome, completing a thesis on Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. As a native of the Channel Islands, he had grown up fluent in French as well as English, and Francophone literary and philosophical discourse was a significant part of his creative and intellectual hinterland.
During the 1950s and early 1960s, Houédard composed a kind of freewheeling, beat-influenced poetry, often dealing with his relationship with God. Already, he was part of poetic movements and discussions stretching across the UK and beyond. He would later welcome beat poets such as Gregory Corso to Prinknash Abbey, as well as denizens of the counterculture, 'pilgrims in... holyblue atheist pants', as he describes them in his 1965 poetry collection Kinkon.
Dsh, as he referred to himself, was also developing his theological ideas at this time, which can be described as apophatic in impulse, concerned with the essential impossibility of describing or evoking the nature of God, and therefore deeply preoccupied with the inadequacy of language. He also believed in forging ties between Catholicism and other world religions and belief systems, including Buddhism and Sufism, as well as the new spiritual impulses he associated with the growing sixties counterculture.
In or around May 1962, Houédard read a letter printed in the Times Literary Supplement on the 25th of that month, by the Portuguese poet E. M. de Melo e Castro. It referred to a new style of poetry called 'concrete poetry', described as 'a visual, compact, ideogrammatic way of bringing about and conveying complex and subtle relations among ideas, images, words, things, &c'.
This new genre had originated in the early 1950s in Latin America and northern Europe, in the work of the Brazilian Noigandres poetry group and the Swiss-Bolivian writer Eugen Gomringer. Over the subsequent decade it had been adopted and adapted all over the world, forming one of the first truly transnational literary and artistic movements of the post-war period.
Houédard was one of a number of poets and artists, which included the Glasgow-based Edwin Morgan and his friend in Edinburgh, Ian Hamilton Finlay, to respond with enthusiasm to this new development in the global avant-garde.
Why? There had been creative movements associated with the visual presentation of language stretching back as far as the Greco-Roman world, from the Technopaegnia (pattern poems) of Simias of Rhodes to medieval and early modern pattern poetry, and even the language games of Victorian nonsense verse, such as Lewis Carroll's 'The Mouse's Tail'.
During the early twentieth century, the Dadaists and Futurists had created wild, chaotic forms of visual verse under the banners of 'simultaneism', Parole in Libertà ('words in freedom'), and other terms. What was so fresh about concrete poetry?
Many artists and, especially, poets were gripped at this time by the possibility of rediscovering the utopian promise of the early twentieth-century avant-garde: the capacity for art and literature to create new kinds of meaning that might have revolutionary political potential. In the wake of devastating global conflict, many creative movements seemed gripped by inertia. The UK literary scene of the 1950s had been dominated by the timidity and social conservatism of the so-called Movement writers, such as Philip Larkin.
And yet, within popular culture, the world was becoming a more vibrant and exciting place. The growing US dominance of the global economy was birthing new, colourful expressions of consumer capitalism through TV, radio and billboard advertising: a realm of bright, flashing language-forms in concise, visually arresting forms. Television ownership was skyrocketing, increasing access to this kind of multi-sensory experience of language.
Meanwhile, modernist architecture was enjoying a renaissance in the context of post-war social democracy, with tower blocks and brutalist civic structures sprouting up across the capital cities of Europe.
Here were bold new expressions of the contemporary world that were primarily visual and multi-sensory in emphasis, and that poetic culture – at least in the UK – was simply failing to account for. Here was the new, 'electric' age prophesied by media theorist Marshall McLuhan in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962). Here, potentially, was the avant-garde spirit of which literature had been drained.
To look at Houédard's typestracts from the late 1960s and early 1970s is to be immersed in the spirit of the time. The hallucinatory other-worldliness of these pieces is somehow at once utterly redolent of its context. This is partly a matter of linguistic annotations which gesture towards the New Age spiritualities of the hippie movement ('I Become the Moon and Supply the Juice to Vegetables' [a reference to the Bhagavad Gita], 'Mist Bones'; 'Iceflame', etc).
It's partly the labile, peppy quality of the visuals, which often seem like the product of some particularly life-affirming, universe-unlocking drug-trip.
I Become the Moon and Supply the Juice to Vegetables
1970
Dom Sylvester Houédard (1924–1992) 
But the unique aspect of Houédard's concrete poetry is in a more precise and erudite kind of religious consciousness. The use of language-forms as purely visual entities implies a kind of withdrawal of literary expression regarding that which cannot not be described in words: the nature of God, and therefore the nature of human consciousness which has an awareness of and connection to the divine at its core (or so Houédard believed).
In this sense, it is instructive to think of the true object of contemplation in the typestracts not as the fantastical visual form floating in the centre of the page but the encompassing void that is implied by that presence: the white, the silence, all that which cannot be spoken of.
Houédard was an aficionado of Wittgenstein as well as Sartre, and from both philosophers he took a sense of the inherent unknowability of existence, turning this awareness towards a Christian mysticism aesthetic. The phrase attached to one of his typestracts, 'slipping sideways into God', gets the idea across nicely.
When he died in 1994, having spent his whole life at Prinknash Abbey, Houédard left behind a lifetime's work that has only just begun to receive the widespread acclaim it deserves. The collection of works by Houédard available on Art UK provides a marvellous introduction to this most singular of artists. Turn on, tune in, and slip sideways into language.
Greg Thomas, writer and editor
'Dom Sylvester Houedard and Concrete Poetry in Post-war Britain', part of 'Breaking Lines', is at the Estorick Collection, London until 11th May 2025
This content was supported by Jerwood Foundation
