Dom Sylvester Houédard
For the 5 Vowels (E), 1976

Alongside Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt, another key reference over the last 5 years for both my hand-typed work and coded text work (⧉ Cube³s) is Dom Sylvester Houédard, the elusive, and seemingly contradictory, Benedictine monk, intellectual and theologian who had strong ties with the countercultural poetry movement of the late 60’s.

‘dsh’ (as he signed his works, which I always read as ‘dash’) used letters, punctuation and diacritic marks on his Olivetti Lettera 22 to create floating architectonic forms, sometimes combined with esoteric snippets of text. His friend, the poet Edwin Morgan coined the term ‘typestracts’ for these works combining the words ‘typewriter’ and ‘abstract’