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At Harvard in 1955, the philosopher J. L. Austin introduced the notion of the performative utterance to linguistic studies; in the same year, François Dufrêne performed Crirythmes at François Maspero's L"Escalier Gallery in Paris. Although initially a Lettrist, Dufrêne broke from the movement by abandoning the "letter" and by putting the voice and body of the poet at the very centre of his work.¹ His aim was to establish a radically inventive form of poetry that would no longer be merely subservient to discursive or representational language, a gestural and infinitely creative art liberated from all naturalistic pressures to represent reality. Initially, poetry welcomed its encounter with performance, from which it quickly learnt how to manipulate disparate materials stolen from everywhere and anywhere. However, as I show in this essay, a few decades or so later, as a result of its fruitful detour through performance, poetry in France was to reinvest yet again in the text. This allowed it to multiply its compositional strategies, styles of delivery and forms of presentation.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230305663_12

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