Twenty-five years after his death, a monk who was a leading figure in the avant-garde art and poetry scene of the 1960s is being celebrated at a London gallery / By Laura Gascoigne

For those who don’t remember the 1960s, the recent exhibition, “You Say You Want a Revolution?”, at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum contained some vivid reminders. Among them was Peter Whitehead’s film of the 1965 International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall, showing a familiar audience of duffle-coated poets and Biba-dressed girls. But in the front row sits a more incongruous figure wearing clerical black teamed with dark glasses.

This “beatnik from the middle ages”, as he has been described, was Dom Sylvester Houédard, a Benedictine monk on leave from Prinknash Abbey in Gloucestershire to attend a key event in the avant-garde poetry scene which he had done so much to promote in Britain. Whitehead’s film was, appropriately, titled Wholly Communion. In 1971, the V&A gave dsh, as he was known, the honour of a retrospective. 

It celebrated a poet and artist who, since the late 1950s, had been a pivotal figure in the British counter-culture: co-founder of concrete poetry collective Gloup and Woup, collaborator with David Medalla’s experimental performance group, the Exploding Galaxy, and inventor of his own art form, the “typestract”: a form of abstract work on paper ingeniously created through deft manipulation of the letter and symbol keys on a portable typewriter.