Bernard Heidsieck was born in Paris on 30 November 1928 and died there on 22 November 2014. He graduated from the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris in 1952 and spent his professional life working at the Banque française du commerce extérieur (1953-1988). He is a pioneering figure in sound poetry, alongside François Dufrêne, Brion Gysin, and Henri Chopin.

In 1955, the publication of a collection of his poems titled Sitôt dit (Seghers) opened his eyes to the fact that the poetry world had become a dead end, both institutionally and in the media; he realized that poems existed in a closed-off space, printed as objects of sterile fetishization. He attended Pierre Boulez’s Domaine Musical, where he enthusiastically discovered Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge (15 December 1956), an experience that left him fully convinced that the poetry world had fallen behind. His first series of poems, “Poèmes-partitions” (“poems-scores”, 25 pieces, 1955-1965), took the radical step of assigning to the typeset page a functional role as a kind of notated score, considering that the poem had not been fully realized until it had been read to an audience by its author. The composition and the transmission of this poetry were thus significantly affected by several technical phases. In 1959, Heidsieck acquired a monophonic tape recorder, which allowed him to record his “Poèmes-partitions,” which had until then only been read to small audiences. In 1961, with Poème-partition J, sur les peintures de Françoise Janicot, his wife, he began working directly with tape. The tape recorder, which until then had been a tool for recording and broadcasting, became a creative tool for sound writing - for an art in which sounds were fixed materially, in this case, on magnetic tape, similar to musique concrète. In 1962, he discovered the Fluxus performances of the Domaine Poétique (Jean-Clarence Lambert). The following year, he read Poème-partition B2 B3 ou Exorcisme there, superimposing his live speaking voice and his recorded voice, which would become a recurrent modality in future readings and performances. In this way, he forged the concept of “poésie action“ or “action poetry,” a way of thinking of poetry as a staged, physical form of communication in a given space and time.

The “Poèmes-partitions” were significantly influenced by electroacoustic music and by abstract and new realist painting. Heidsieck’s subsequent sets of poems, “Biopsies” (13 pieces, 1965-1969) and “Passe-partout” (29 pieces, 1969-1980) were conceived as samples taken from society, constituting, in their militantly banal ethos, a set of found poems and documents that functioned as critiques of consumerist society. The poet acquired a Revox A 700 around this time, expanding the scope of his experimentation, in particular stereophonically: Vaduz (1974) and Canal Street (1976). Passe-partout n° 25, Sisyphe (April 1977) was recorded on four tracks at the Fylkingen Studio in Stockholm; this use of new technologies implied expanding into new performance spaces as well as new forms of transmission.

Before the 1980s, electroacoustic festivals were one such space: the Text-Sound Compositions Festival (1968-1977, Fylkingen, Stockholm), the Festival international de musique expérimentale de Bourges, where Heidsieck won the 3^rd electracoustic music composition competition for Vaduz in 1975, as well as the Concerts manifestes (November 1979, Porte de la Suisse, Paris), which brought the international arts community together for events devoted to musical writing and electroacoustic poetry. In January 1976, Heidsieck organised a Panorama de la poésie sonore internationale (Atelier/exposition Annick Le Moine, Paris) that included the broadcast of magnetic tapes and poetry-action events. Its catalogue, Poésie action Poésie sonore, covers the years 1955-1975. Later, many other forms and spaces proliferated, including mobile and multi-disciplinary festivals such as Polyphonix (founded by Jean-Jacques Lebel in 1979), and occasional events such as the Rencontres internationales de poésie sonore, which Heidsieck organised with Michèle Métail in Le Havre, Rennes, and in Paris at the Centre Pompidou (January-February 1980), as well as regular ones, such as La Revue parlée, founded and run by Blaise Gautier between 1977 and 1992 at the Centre Pompidou.

Heidsieck’s last two series of works, Derviche/Le Robert (26 pieces, 1978-1985), and Respirations et brèves rencontres (60 pieces, 1988-1995) were more specifically focused on “what speaking means.” The first, an 8-track studio recording put together over the course of three years, was an alphabet book created from the first ten words of each of the letters in the Grand Robert dictionary whose meaning the poet did not know. The second series was made up of dialogues with celebrated poets whose breath was the only indication that they were present and responding to his words.

Heidsieck also created a series of visual works starting in the 1970s, “écritures/collages“ (writings/collages) made up of pieces of his everyday life (photographs of objects, printed letters, magnetic tape, integrated circuits, writing, etc.).

On 17 December 1991, he was awarded the Grand prix international de poésie and served as president of the poetry commission of France’s Centre National du Livre in 1992. In 2017, the Centre Pompidou created the Bernard Heidsieck Literary Prize, which is awarded to forms of literary creation other than books.