If academies petrify a language, it will take refuge among children and mad poets.

I was somewhat astonished in 1920 to learn that Hugo Ball had composed his Lautgedichte (phonetic poems) in 1916. It would seem that both Tzara and Huelsenbeck failed to realise what Ball had done. They paid no attention and completely passed it by. Indeed, Huelsenbeck never even mentioned their existence when I developed a very similar form in May, 1918.

But in 1920, he published one of Ball's phonetic poems in his Dada Almanac. That was the first time I saw Ball's work. Up until then, I had sincerely believed I was the inventor. So let me say here and now that it was Ball.

However, Ball's phonetic system was founded on unknown words, whereas my poems were directly and exclusively based upon letters; they were letterist.

Phonetic poetry was such a necessary purification of poetic poetry, that I simply invented it a second time.

It was only in 1921, when on tour in Prague with my friend Kurt Schwitters, that the latter realised the importance of phonetic poetry, opening the door to an entirely new phonetic-musical domain.

Our Dada Manifesto demanded a new poetry. By 1919, 1 had already gained a clear idea of the principles behind this poetry and the means of achieving it. Poetry was then dominated by expressionist form, introduced by August Stramm. He had achieved a sort of ecstatic stammering effect by eliminating pronouns, conjugation and declension, and by reducing syntax to a bare minimum.

I was also aware of Marinetti's essays on making poetry more dynamic through the use of letters (typefaces) and through bruitist onomatopoeia. Simultaneous poems, as for example the one in Cabaret Voltaire (19 16), promulgated by Tzara and Huelsenbeck following pioneering work by Barzun, in my opinion were too far removed from pure poetry where language is concerned with itself. A poem for me is the rhythm of its sounds. So why have words? Poetry is produced by rhythmic sequences of consonants and diphthongs set against a counterpoint of associated vowels and it should be simultaneously phonetic and visual. Poetry is a fusion of dissonance and onomatopoeia. Poems emerge from the poet's inner vision and ear, materializing as the power of sound, noise and tonal form, anchored in the very act of language itself. Spiritual vision, spatial form and material sound form are not poetry in themselves but they all make up the poem.

It was then that I wrote my first purely abstract poem. I had realised Huelsenbeck was mistaken in his allegiance to static poetry. A poem is an act which associates respiration with audition, linked inseparably to the passage of time. Phonetic poetry divides the time-space continuum into pre-logical number values which guide visual perception through the power of the written notation of letters. Each value in such a poem expresses itself individually and, by higher or lower declamation, of letters, sounds, vowel-consonant agglomerations, each sound unit is given its value. In order to communicate this typographically, I chose letters of different sizes and of different densities, treating them as a form of musical score.

Optophonetic and phonetic poetry represent the first step towards poetry that is perfectly non-objective and abstract.

This is where I differ from Ball. His poems created new words, sounds and above all musically arranged onomatopoeia; mine are based on letters, therefore excluding all possibility for creating language with a meaning or with coordinated movement.

The semantic revolution demonstrates that art can never be placed in the shopping bag of history.

Classification is worthless. Ideas emerge here and there, are pursued and perfected elsewhere; these leaps forward might sometimes outrage yet are never outrageous.

This is language wreaking revenge on poets!

And the birth of pure phonism.

Around the world, the sounds of music are recognised according to certain vibrations and wavelengths. Sounds are coloured by secondary vibrations and by various timbres that can be ringing or muffled, rounded or jarring, husky or shrill. Drums make no "musical" sound, but just beat out a rhythmic noise. They provide a framework for the overall mixture of colours. A purely phonetic poem not only relies on a series of contradictory vowel and consonant sounds, equivalent to a drumbeat, but also possesses phonemes that can be clear, shrill, sonorous or sighing. It may therefore be considered as a hybrid between music as it is commonly understood in European, Occidental terms and in an Oriental, Asian or African sense.

The phonetic poem may be compared with a drum that can play half and quarter tones, as for example in Arabic or Chinese music, where these notes lend their timbres at different pitches to the general melody, changing intonation and thus altering the sense of words pronounced. A similar process occurs in phonetic poetry through architectural arrangement of contradictory groups of vowels and consonants as well as other non-linguistic noises; snoring, humming, croaking and so on.

Thus phonetic poetry employs hybrid sounds of language drawn from the depths of the mega-mneme (Translator's Note. Mega-mneme "great memory" is Hausmann's term for an idea similar to the collective subconscious though here it specifically relates to subconscious awareness of primitive language roots.) whilst simultaneously seeking to open up possibilities for a language of the future. This language of phonetic poems is made visible through typographical layout.

and that's how to write a phonetic poem!

I've always been interested in turning words around and repeating simple sentences. This probably comes from hearing my father sing nonsense songs from his native village of Stcheleeves near Prague, where his family settled in the wake of Napoleon's Russian campaign. Stcheleeves means O'Bourg du Chardonneret' [i.e. Goldfinch Town] and that was something I was unlikely to forget.

When I first devised phonetic poetry, I happened to be living in the town of Steglitz-Stieglitz-Chardonneret, near Berlin.