Parallel to his visual work, Öyvind Fahlström devoted great part of his creative energy to writing. Firstly influenced by Antonin Artaud and the Surrealists, his poetry suddenly broke free, in the early 1950s, to embrace the trends of experimentalism that aimed to fuse music to writing.

Under the influence of Pierre Schaeffer’s theory of musique concrete, Fahlström wrote what was to be known as the first manifesto for concrete poetry. That document alone has earned Fahlström a prominent place in the history of the avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century.

A.S. Bessa