Bernard Heidsieck

From rediscovered orality to machined sound

“Poetry, yes, so fragile, near asphyxiated, almost dying, enjoying the whole thing, did not even feel numbness overtake her, in the depths of this page, where her fear of the reader had taken her, her thirst also, at times, for the absolute.”¹

Bernard Heidsieck made this observation after his first and only poetry collection, Sitôt dit, was published by Seghers in 1955. He considered the field of poetry to be moribund. To bring it back to life, he had decided to push it off the page. He reoriented it toward orality in order to regain an audience and relocate it in communication and social interaction. While his approach resembled that of the Dadaists, Heidsieck later recalled that by the 1950s, the avant-gardes had been suffocated by the surrealist movement and were inaccessible. “Sound poetry,” Heidsieck said in 1980, “was not taken from Futurism or Dadaism. However, it did happily rediscover a shared way of thinking, exploring, taking action. In this way, it […] elevated their avant-gardism.”²

The first step in this revolution was to write poetry that was to be heard, rather than read. This shift in paradigm diminished the importance of print matter as a vehicle, which he underlined with the title he gave his new work, Poèmes-partitions (1955-1965). His “score poems” took a queue from music, where the work exists fully only when a score is performed. As scores, however, Heidsieck’s works contain only the most scanty of notations, written for his benefit alone. This contrasts with the scores of Isidore Isou and the “Letterist alphabet” he created to index and notate sounds emitted by the body and voice. Heidsieck’s scores stayed within the possibilities offered by verbal language and the typewriter. He used spacing, upper- and lowercase letters, line breaks, and overlaps to indicate superpositions of vocals and other sounds, and to regulate the intensity, speed, duration, and rhythm of speech.

In 1959, he acquired a one-track tape recorder and began recording his early productions in view of releasing a record. He began “sound writing” in earnest in 1961, with Poèmes-partitions J and D3Z. These works adopted procedures akin to those being developed at the same time in musique concrète and electronic music on tape and vinyl. Heidsieck worked with the recorded text, cutting the tape, suppressing breaths, and inserting external sounds — shouts, voices, noises, music, and radio recordings — which he combined with his own voice. This made possible a new kind of mechanized sound: the tape recorder was no longer simply a device for recording the poem, but an instrument for writing it.

All of the poems gathered under Poèmes-partitions reflect this techno-poetical evolution, though in different ways. Some pieces were never recorded; others were conceived solely for the poet’s recorded voice; others combine his voice with captured sound; and still others overlay several takes of his voice, with or without additional sound elements.

The action-poem, or “minimized performance”

This technological shift marked a decisive turning point and became a cornerstone in what Heidsieck would call his “centrifugal research work on the poem and its communicative capacity in performance.” It allowed him to conceive of the poem as something unfolding in space and time — two dimensions traditionally associated with music.

Around this time, he was a regular attendee at the Domaine Musical concerts presented by Pierre Boulez, first at Le Petit Marigny and later at the Salle Gaveau between 1955 and 1973. There, he encountered the music of Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and Olivier Messiaen (Boulez’s teacher), as well as Iannis Xenakis, Luciano Berio, Luigi Nono, Edgar Varèse, and John Cage. The influence of these composers is especially visible in Poèmes-partitions V (1956) and La Cage (1965).

Among these discoveries, however, none affected him more profoundly than Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, which he heard performed on 15 December 1956. There were two reasons for the force of this impact: it was the first electroacoustic piece he had ever heard, and it was built around the voice. Hearing that voice circulate through the performance space by means of four loudspeakers surrounding the audience, he immediately grasped the possibilities opened up by the new spatialization of sound. “Without conflating it with music, poetry should, in an identical way, use a space and be projected into it,” he declared.

Gesang der Jünglinge thus became the point of departure for his own performance-readings. In these, he sought to saturate both stage and audience space by combining live recitation with a simultaneous diffusion of a recorded version of the same poem over loudspeakers placed across the room.

His pieces also owed a creative debt to evenings organized at the Domaine Poétique, the organization founded by Jean-Clarence Lambert that presented a series of poetry performances in 1962-1963, several of them directed by Jean-Loup Philippe. The first of these, on 28 November 1962, featured works by Gherasim Luca, François Dufrêne, Brion Gysin, and Robert Filliou. It was restaged at the American Center in Paris as the closing event of Festum Fluxorum (3-8 December 1962), the first Fluxus tour of France.

Heidsieck immediately recognized a link “between this poetry that had become stagecraft, poetry that had become ‘action,’ and the Fluxus pieces.” About the Fluxus movement, he noted, “I immediately loved their work, admired their economical stagecraft. […] In contrast to the happening, which had a tendency toward the overblown and the overflowing, […] Fluxus proposed, but discreetly. [It] never imposed, despite its provocative force.”⁴

This occasion introduced him to Brion Gysin’s Endless Permutations, which left a lasting impression. Gysin used the play of light generated by his Dream Machine to destabilize spectators’ perception. He multiplied his stage presence with slides projected onto his body, while recordings of his voice layered with his live vocal performance. Heidsieck adopted this vocal approach for Poème-partition B2B3, presented during a Domaine Poétique event at the American Center in May 1963.

The Domaine Musical and the Domaine Poétique each played a formative role in shaping Heidsieck’s conception of performance poetry, which in 1963 he began calling “poésie action.” In these works, he embodied the text through minimal actions and means, whether technological (lighting, sound system, microphones), material (accessories, flexible “scores”), or physical (stances, gesture, voice). These “minimized performance[s]”⁵ began with the Biopsies (1965-1969).

For Biopsie 7, Bilan ou mâcher ses mots (1967), which evokes human digestion, Heidsieck invited a small group of people to eat on stage and distributed cookies to the audience so that the poem would be embodied in a shared experience. For La scissure de Rolando (Biopsie 9, 1968), a poem that pays tribute to the cells that enable walking, the taped text grew progressively louder as Heidsieck (also reading the text aloud) walked back and forth in front of the audience so that the action became physically visible.

Finally, for Vaduz (Passe-partout 22, 1974), the first poem he recorded in stereo on his newly acquired Revox A700, the continuous unfolding of vertically attached typed pages offered a visual metaphor for the peoples and ethnic groups named in the poem. Action became integral to each subsequent reading he performed, as the “poet tightrope walker,” to use one of his favorite expressions, unfolded the pages of the poem toward the audience. Each performance required him to negotiate the specific conditions of space and duration, since the temporal demands of each venue never perfectly coincided with those of the poem itself.

Risk thus became deeply inscribed in Heidsieck’s stage practice because, as he insisted, the poet must situate himself “outside of all theatricality, outside of all aestheticism.”⁶ In other words, neither voice, nor sound, nor action was conceived with the professionalism of a lyric singer, theater actor, or composer, but rather from within the poetry itself.

Poésie action and electroacoustic music

Heidsieck distinguished the poet from both the actor and the singer. While actors and singers shape their voices to produce effects, poets do not recite but read. Poets even accept that they may read badly, or even embrace their vocal slips, accidents, and mistakes. Heidsieck drew a similar distinction between the concert and performance. Performance requires the convergence of author/creator and performer, demands the performer’s physical commitment, and welcomes the unpredictable. What Heidsieck rejects, in other words, is the notion of interpretation. By using the tape recorder, his poetry comes close to musique concrète and electroacoustic music, genres for which interpretation is not operative since the sampled sounds are fixed on tape.

Pierre Schaeffer described his own early experiments with noise when he worked with Pierre Henry as a “kind of sound poetry,” and Symphonie pour un homme seul (1950) as a “poem made of noises and notes, shards of text, spoken or musical.”⁷ Similar practices of sampling and editing lie at the heart of Heidsieck’s poetics. In his work, recorded noises (metro cars in La Poinçonneuse, Passe-partout 2, arc welding in Kockums AB, Passe-partout 29, a wild crowd in Vaduz, Passe-partout 22, etc.) and music samples (jazz, department store jingles, radio theme music, etc.) do far more than evoke a particular sound environment. As in musique concrète, they participate in the very syntax of the poem. His scores identify their sources explicitly, signaling their documentary function. At the same time, this documentary use of sounds also sets his poetry apart from musique concrète, which transforms recorded material into what Schaeffer called the “sound object,” detached from its referential source.

A further distinction lies in Heidsieck’s non-expert use of sound technologies: poésie action remains a low-tech practice. Sound poets in the 1960s rarely had access to professional studios. Text-Sound Compositions: A Stockholm Festival (1968-1978), produced by Swedish Radio and Fylkingen Records, offered one of the first opportunities to record and mix poetry under professional conditions with the assistance of a technician. Heidsieck recorded several Biopsies there between 1968 and 1977 (La Scissure de Rolando, Terre à terre) as well as two Passe-partout poems (Poème-interview and Sisyphe). Derviche/Le Robert (1978-1985) marked the first time he recorded an entire work in a studio, working with eight tracks. The project took three years and finally allowed him to achieve a level of technical quality previously beyond his reach.

Although they use sound technologies in different ways, sound poetry and electroacoustic music share similar dissemination technologies. Heidsieck’s first record release, Poème-partition B2B3, was published in the journal KWY in 1963, shortly after Dufrêne’s U47 (Panorama des poésies expérimentales, 1962, Philips). Only in 1964, however, did Henri Chopin’s OU-Cinquième saison (1964-1974) provide a periodical dedicated to the dissemination of sound poetry.

In the 1970s, musical events such as the Bourges International Festival of Experimental Music (Synthèse) began featuring sound poets. In 1975, Heidsieck won the festival’s third electroacoustic competition with Vaduz. As the decade came to a close in 1979, Polyphonix, founded by Jean-Jacques Lebel, opened its stage to multidisciplinary performances in which sound poets played a significant role.

Ultimately, although Heidsieck moved beyond strictly literary practices and ventured into the technological terrain opened by electroacoustic music, he continued to situate his practice within poetry. He considered the decisive turning point to be Antonin Artaud’s cry in Pour en finir avec le jugement de Dieu (1948), which he saw as a tipping point toward a poetry beyond the page. For Heidsieck, the category “sound poetry” was more important than the media determination. In this, he stood opposed to Henri Chopin, who believed that sound poetry was electroacoustic poetry.

Gestural painting and vocal gesture

As Heidsieck developed his poésie action between 1955 and 1965, he called on different models: staged poetry, happenings and performances, electroacoustic music, and the visual arts. Several of his Poèmes-partitions are devoted to paintings: D2 (1958) and D3Z (1961) to paintings by Jean Degottex; D (1958) to paintings by Jean Dupuy; T (1950-1960) to paintings by Antoni Tàpies; J (1961) to paintings by Françoise Janicot; and Coléoptères and Co (1965) was dedicated to Paul-Armand Gette. These poems reject both illustration and ekphrasis. Heidsieck did not attempt to thematize or describe. As he explained with regard to Degottex’s paintings, his goal was to transpose in his “score poems” the “gestures of the ultra-rapid signals” of the painter, so that the “reading out loud” of the poem reproduced “the rhythm and calculated speed of execution that helped create the canvasses.”⁸ By contrast, in the Poème-partition T, Heidsieck’s goal was to showcase the slowness generated by Tàpies’s “matter painting.” To do so, he decomposed verbal material itself — through spelling, truncation, scattering and spreading of syllables, phonetic writing, and onomatopoeia — thus producing relative abstraction.

The encounter of Poèmes-partitions with these currents in Art Informel marked an important step in the construction of Heidsieck’s poetics. Before, his work had largely relied on mimetic rhythmic explorations. In Poème-partition A (1958), for example, he transcribed in sounds and words the heartbeats documented in a medical training record devoted to cardiac pathologies.

The transposition of pictural gestures into poetry unshackled him from this mimetic framework. Vocal rhythm became a gesture structurally equivalent to the event-like nature of the graphic mark. This convergence of orality and pictural gesture laid the foundations for poésie action by beginning to work, in Heidsieck’s words “for a poem, then, upright standing feet planted on the page.”⁹ He wrote this line in the manifesto published by the Galerie Internationale d’Art Contemporain for the 1961 opening of Degottex’s Sept Métasignes show, during which D3Z was performed.

Heidsieck lost interest in this form of vocal gesture fairly rapidly, however. Poème-partition D4P (1962), dedicated to Dufrêne and comparing his “crirythmes” to the gestural painting of Georges Mathieu, was his final attempt in that direction. This abandonment was partly due to technological factors.

Speaking about the third movement of Poème-partition J (1961), composed of seven laughs, each one with a title indicating its nature (“fear,” “triumph,” “irony,” “suffering,” “joy,” “laughing at laughing”), he notes: “A live recording of children shouting can actually be substituted for the seventh: stridency and freshness.”¹⁰ Sound collage now offered a more direct solution. The poet could leave behind the problem of mimetic gesture and instead work with gesture’s self-referential force — laughing at laughing — much as gestural painting had done, and, at another level, just as Dufrêne had done as well. Heidsieck accomplished this by assembling sound fragments pulled from everyday life.

Coléoptères and Co (1965) is emblematic of this newfound freedom. Heidsieck no longer seeks to transpose the gesture of the painter, in this case Gette, but instead superimposes a recording of buzzing insects followed by traffic jams on a text made up of a montage of scientific statements about the life cycle of beetles. This collision of heterogenous sound sources renders abstraction and imitation obsolete: by forcing the raw material of everyday life into the poem, Heidsieck substantially transforms the poetics.

Poetics of the everyday: “Any scrapings can be good to say.”¹¹

The beginnings of this poetry of the everyday were already at work in Poèmes-partitions. In Poème-partition K, subtitled Le Quotidien (1962), an onomatopoeic imitation of heartbeats is overshadowed by the cutting and splicing of recordings of actual heartbeats with city noises and spoken text. The accompanying notes to Poèmes-partitions: H1 and H2, as well as to Le Quatrième plan (1963) make the poet’s intention clearer: if poetry is to rejoin society and become familiar within it once again, it must leave the page and become a “biopsy.”

The tape recorder made possible an almost clinical approach to the everyday. The machine examines, probes, and dissects reality; through cutting and editing, it produces “photographs” of the interaction between the individual and the collective consciousness. By capturing reality in this way, interrogating everyday gestures and speech, the poem seeks either to render reality sublime or, in Heidsieck’s words, to “exorcise the banal.”¹²

The two series that followed, Biopsies (1965-1969) and Passe-partout (1969-2004), exploited this poetry of the everyday. They establish a three-way relationship among samples of everyday sounds and noises, fragments of social speech sampled or re-spoken by the poet, and documentary excerpts drawn from gray literature, also read by Heidsieck. The poems in these series sometimes resemble found poetry, but are more broadly connected to the aesthetics of ready-made and cut-up poetry.

Some of these works are based on documentary material. This is the case in Biopsie 8, Qui je suis en une minute (“Who I Am in One Minute,” 1967), which superimposes a reading of Heidsieck’s personal documents (his identification card, voter registration card, driver’s license, social security card, etc.) over a hubbub that rises steadily to a crescendo. The poem adopts a critical stance aimed at both lyric poetry and the society of spectacle. Its title promises intimate self-revelation, yet what the listener hears are only banal administrative formulas, underlining the fact that the individual is a part of society, an ordinary body among the crowd. At the same time, the poet appears to answer a fictional command that dictates both the subject (“who am I?”) and a length (“in one minute”). Personal confession thus becomes a timed social exercise, shifting us from the private sphere to the public, as the ever-louder murmur confirms. The poem ends with Heidsieck stating, “C’était Qui-je suis. 1 minute, Biopsie 8” (“That was Who I am, 1 minute, Biopsy 8”). But the poem is not actually finished: a burst of lively applause follows, and by incorporating the poem’s reception into the poem itself, Heidsieck turns self-disclosure into a fleeting public acclaim, his fifteen minutes of fame, offering a view at once amused and critical of the transformation of the self into spectacle.

Other poems appropriate economic, administration, social, or political discourses, juxtaposing and confronting them through a critical interplay of documentary noise and discursive polyphony. The effect varies depending on whether Heidsieck reads these materials himself or places his voice against these sound documents. For example, in Biopsie 3, Mais oui mais oui (1966) all three overlapping voices belong to the poet, each on a different discourse: a questionnaire about work practices, a list of items for evaluation, and the refrain chanted in the folk game “(s)he loves me; (s)he loves me not.” Their collision satirizes managerial procedure by intercutting it with a sentimental game of chance. By contrast, Le Carrefour de la chaussée d’Antin (Passe-partout 10 à 22, 1972), described as “the sound topography of a Paris hotspot,”¹³ combines Heidsieck’s voice, recordings captured in situ, and excerpts from writings on consumer society read by some twenty friends.

The exceptional length of Carrefour de la chaussée d’Antin (1 hour 50 minutes) illustrates the fact that the Passe-partout poems are for the most part much longer than the Biopsies. The Passe-partout also frequently make use of voices other than Heidsieck’s, as in La Poinçonneuse (Passe-partout 2, 1970), Ruth Francken a téléphoné (Passe-partout 8, 1971) and Tu viens chéri(e) (Passe-partout 23, 1975). At this stage, Heidsieck edited and mixed from the mass of recordings he had collected, friends’ voices and various other sounds, as in La Semaine (Passe-partout 5, 1971), which consists entirely of collaged radio announcements of the hour.

One result of this work with tape was that many poems he composed at this time were made for listening, rather than for public reading. In this respect, they bear comparison with Ferdinand Kriwet’s contemporaneous Hörtextes, which likewise pursued a critical exploration of mass media. Yet, as Heidsieck explained, “I had left the page, considered as a ghetto, but I was moving into [the ghetto] of the record. For a complete exit, I had to be able to read my texts in public.”¹⁴

He achieved precisely this return to performance with works such as Vaduz (Passe-partout 22, 1974), Canal Street (Passe-partout 24, 1976), and Démocratie (Passe-partout 27, 1977-1978). While the recorded tape played a list of the presidents of the Constitutional Council of France’s Third, Fourth, and Fifth Republics, Heidsieck pronounced their names with different tonal nuances as he walked toward the stage from the back of the audience, tossing small pieces of paper on which their names were inscribed as he went.

Ultimately, the tensions that arose from Heidsieck’s reworking of recorded sounds expose anecdotes and conventional representations that had hitherto gone unnoticed. By deconstructing social discourses, the poems rearticulated them, operating a kind of “socio-analysis” of the everyday through the very act of “recommunicating.”¹⁵ Their ambition is therefore profoundly political.

Language practices occupy a central place in this undertaking. Within Passe-partout, Heidsieck distinguished three distinct series of practices that explore language in context. Some works stage situations of communication in order to interrogate their conditions and conventions (Canal Street, 1976). Others use breath to summon the ghosts of dead writers (Respirations et brèves rencontres, 60 pièces, 1988-1995). Still others give new life to unfamiliar dictionary words, setting them circulating within language once again (Derviche/Le Robert, 26 pièces, 1978-1985).

The writing collages

It is commonly believed that Heidsieck’s poésie action was exclusive, that it relegated the book form to the past, the better to relate closely to music and its technologies. However, such a view overlooks his many publications in both books and journals — complex editorial objects that combine text with records, performance photography by Françoise Janicot, and the visual work of artists such as Gette and Gianni Bertini, with whom Heidsieck collaborated regularly in the 1960s and 1970s. It also neglects his own visual work, which began in 1965, by which time he had already identified the intermedia practice of his poésie action. His visual work precedes or prolongs the sound work of his poems.

His series of “writing collages” (“écritures collages”), as he called them, began with Cent Foules d’octobre (100 plates, 54 x 40 cm, 1970) and Machines à mots (40 plates, 64 x 50 cm, 1971), and closed with Abécédaires (2004-2013). His practice intensified after his 541st and last public reading, held in 2007 at the Hôtel Beury Center for Art and Literature in Charleville-Mézières. These projects connect to his poems in several ways. First, they obey the same serial logic. Like the poetic cycles, they rely on repeated composition procedures: sampling, displacement, editing, collage. They shift Heidsieck’s gestures into the visual realm, just as he had earlier transposed the visual works of Degottex and Tàpies into poetry. Here again, he rejects illustration in favor of structure and pragmatism.

Second, his materials (typed or handwritten text, photographs, letters cut out of periodicals, magnetic tape, splicing tape, radio tubes and circuits, objects) foreground the technology of his poetry, emphasizing a poetry of the everyday and his poems’ own modes of action. The fifty writing collages for Canal Street (1974), source of the thirty-five Canal Street poems in Passe-partout  24, offer a clear example. Magnetic and colored splicing tape visibly represent his process of cutting, splicing, and sharing his work; the tapes link integrated circuits with typewritten and handwritten text blocks located in the lower part of each collage. The texts themselves seem to be extending poésie action, which superimposes live voice over recorded tape; now recorded tape is imposed over writing.

Certain collages include everyday objects, such as packaging for a dropper (Canal Street 16) or a knife and fork (Canal Street 17). Canal Street and the writing collages give voice to the trivial, and, in this sense, can be linked to the practices of the New Realists, which were on display at the Paris Avant-Garde Art Festival Heidsieck attended in 1960. In displaying electronic waste, found objects, or stereotyped sayings composed of cutout letters, his collages engage in the same “recycling of the urban, industrial, and advertising real” as the New Realists’ works. Through their very arrangement, they likewise summon “all of sociological reality, the common good of human activity, the great republic of our social exchanges, of our commerce in society,” to use the words of Pierre Restany in the first manifesto of the New Realists, dated 16 April 1960.

Finally, this sociological approach to art neither excludes nor humors visual explorations pursued purely for their own sake. Heidsieck’s three Spermatozoïdes series (2008-2009), comprising fifty-nine plates, show the life of spermatozoa, represented by electrolytic capacitors with red heads, creating an amusing fable of collective electro-biology. The first two of his Les Abécédaires series, made in 2004, refer back to Derviche/Le Robert, while the last two, made in 2013, refer to Respirations et brèves rencontres. In these later works, Heidsieck uses cuttings from newspapers to explore the visual dimension of language — its letters, words, and their graphic presence.

Bernard Heidsieck’s polymorphic creations thus opened the way, starting in the 1990s, to new creative practices that tightly linked textual production with sound and image technologies, thereby creating a new economy of poetic work. Within these practices, the stage became a site of writing where the text exists as a material object to be handled, manipulated, and acted upon, as in the work of Charles Pennequin; comes up against the recorded voice, as with Anne-James Chaton; dialogues with surrounding sonic environment, as in Sandra Moussempès; or merges with forms of visual writing, as in the work of Jérôme Game. This inter-media poetry testifies to the vitality of hybrid practices that redraw the boundaries between art, music, and literature.

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^{1. Original French: “La Poésie, oui, toute frêle, à la lisière de l’asphyxie, à deux doigts de l’agonie, toute à son autodélectation, ne sentait pas même l’engourdissement la saisir, au plus profond de cette page, là où l’avaient menée sa phobie du lecteur, sa soif, aussi, parfois, d’absolu.” Bernard HEIDSIECK, “Notes sur les poèmes-partitions H1 et H2 ou le Quatrième plan,” in Bernard Heidsieck, les tapuscrits: Poèmes-Partitions, Biopsies, Passe-Partout, Dijon, Les presses du réel / Nice, Villa Arson, 2013, p. 483. ↩}

^{2. Bernard HEIDSIECK, “Nous étions bien peu en…”, Notes convergentes, Romainville, Al Dante, 2001, p. 187. ↩}

^{3. This statement and the one that precedes it appear in Poésie action: variations sur Bernard Heidsieck, a film by Anne-Laure Chamboissier and Philippe Franck in collaboration with Gilles Coudert, Paris, après éditions, 2014. ↩}

^{4. “Interview de Bernard Heidsieck avec Marie Lapallus, Le Coin du miroir, Dijon, août 1978,” Doc(k)s, series 3, No. 4/5, spring-summer 1993, p. 49. ↩}

^{5. Ibid., p. 51. ↩}

^{6. HEIDSIECK, “Poésie sonore et musique,” Notes convergentes, op. cit., p. 172. ↩}

^{7. Pierre SCHAEFFER, La Musique concrète, Paris, PUF, 1967, coll. “Que sais-je ?,” p. 18, 21. ↩}

^{8. Jean DEGOTTEX, exhibit catalogue, Quimper Museum of Fine Arts, 4 July – 30 September 2008, p. 9. ↩}

^{9. Ibid., p. 8. ↩}

^{10. HEIDSIECK, Poèmes-partitions précédé de Sitôt dit, [Limoges], Al Dante, 2009, p. 333. Emphasis is the author’s. ↩}

^{11. Id., “Notes convergentes (poésie-action et magnétophone),” Notes convergentes, op. cit., p. 59. ↩}

^{12. Id., “Notes sur les poèmes-partitions H1 et H2 ou le Quatrième plan,” op. cit., p. 483-488. ↩}

^{13. Le Carrefour de la chaussée d’Antin, Romainville, Al Dante, 2001, p. 7. ↩}

^{14. “Entretien avec Bernard Heidsieck,” interview of Heidsieck by Jacques Donguy in Poésure et peintrie : d’un art, l’autre, Marseille, Direction des musées / Paris, Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993, p. 413. ↩}

^{15. Heidsieck often used the concept of “recommunication” (see for example Canal Street, Romainville, Al Dante, 2001, p. 13). He described his poetry as a kind of “socio-analysis” in Doc(k)s, op. cit., p. 55. ↩}

^{16. 60/90. Trente ans de Nouveau Réalisme, Paris, La Différence, 1990, p. 76. ↩}