Concrete Poetics and Non-Art in John Cage and Dom Sylvester Houédard

Abstract

This essay considers the work of John Cage and Dom Sylvester Houédard (dsh) as both concrete poetry and non- or anti-art, paying special attention to their statements of poetics from the early Fifties through to the early Seventies. Although their contribution to the various manifestations of mid-century concrete poetics is well recognised, this recognition has served to obscure their concurrent commitment to anti-art and ‘Neo-Dada’. The inclusion of concrete poetry among the movements of poetic modernism is much debated, and I argue that the accompanying anti-art gestures of these two writers further troubles that designation; for them, concrete poetry as non-art intimated a rejection of their modernist inheritance.