Amplification and chiselling

This stripping down of artistic forms came about as part of a natural process, and this became the basis of Isou’s all-encompassing theory of amplitude and chiselling. This theory stated that there are two phases to any development, be it artistic, political, economic or whatever. The first phase is called the Amplified phase, and is the period in which the form is born, acquires its vital characteristics and has its basic parameters set. In the case of poetry, for instance, Isou believes the Amplified phase began with Homer. Homer established what poetry is ; those who followed wrote poems according to the Homeric form. But eventually, it becomes impossible to innovate any further. Everything that can be done within the form has been done – any more additions to the canon from this point on are extraneous, “dead commodities”.

At this point the second stage, called the Chiselling phase, begins, whereupon artists must deconstruct the form. Rather than the poem being used to express subjects outside of it, the poem itself becomes its own subject. During the Chiselling phase, language is whittled down to the letter – the indivisible phoneme. The letter is all that is left after the poetic work is thoroughly deconstructed. Once this deconstructive Chiselling phase has been completed, a new Amplified phase may commence, and poetry can be reborn as the purified letter becomes imbued with new (and perhaps negative) meanings.


Lettrist poetry therefore has no meaning in any classical sense. According to the diagram above, which shows the entire Chiselling phase and how it acts upon poetry, writers from the past 100 or so years (all, save Tzara and Isou himself, French) have reduced poetry to the plastic image, then the sonic image, then the word, and finally the letter. Isou has set language free to “digest” new images and meanings, as in the hypergraphic or “superwriting” of Lettrism.