Pierre Albert-Birot

Born in Angoulême, Albert-Birot moved to Paris in 1894. There he attended art school and befriended Gustave Moreau. He worked for five decades as a restorer for antique dealer Madame Lelong. He began writing after he met the musician Germaine de SurVille in 1913. Long before the First World War, he participated, as a painter, sculptor, poet, theater presenter, playwright and creator of groups and magazines, in the great adventure of modern art. His friend Apollinaire dubbed him "the Pyrogene," so fiery was he as an innovator and exciter. From January 1916 to December 1919, Albert-Birote edited the avant-garde art magazine SIC, an acronym for Sons Idées Couleurs (Sounds Ideas Colors), which featured writings by Futurists, Surrealists, and Dadaists. SIC became the turntable of all avant-garde initiatives, from cubism or futurism and to surrealism, a movement that he will help to birth, but to which he will not adhere, this "blaster" having the religion of independence and objectivity.[1] If he wrote a number of poem books (Thirty-one Pocket Poems; 1917; Daily Poems, 1919; La Triloferie, 1920; Poems to the Other Me, 1927; Amenpeine, La Cle des Champs, La Panthere noire, 1938; Natural Amusements, 1945; 110 drops of poetry, 1952, etc.) this work of an explosive lyricism, funny and eminently "modern" is inseparable from the theatrical work that Alber-Birot composed, from 1917 to 1922, in a burlesque tone which announces Ionesco: Larountala, Matoum and Trevibar, The man cut into pieces, the Bondieu, the folding women, etc, and it is dominated by two great epics in prose: Grabinoulor (1933) and the Memoirs of Adam (1943). His first volume of poems was Trente et un Poèmes de Poche (1917). His novel Grabinoulor appeared in 1919. Grabinoulor, which was partially brought to light in 1964, is certainly his masterpiece and one of the most important works of "modern" poetry. Bernard Jourdan has finely established that the name of the hero of this poem-river, from which all punctuation is banned, is the almost successful anagram of "We Albert-Birot"; contemporary type, this Grabinoulor knows a host of adventures, some daily, others wonderful, which resemble him to the heroes of Rabelais and Lewis Caroll, but also, and above all, to the supermen of modern mythology, from Fantomas to Tarzan, from Arsene Lupine to science fiction superman, capable of traveling through the centuries as well as through the stars. We also owe to Pierre Albert-Birot, a singular man, poet on the fringes who exerted a great fascination for the new generations, fanciful novels like Remy Floche, employee (1934), learned translations of Homere, Eschyle and Virgile, transcriptions in modern French medieval poets and interesting studies on prosodic forms.

Albert-Birot directed the first performance of Les mamelles de Tirésias (Tiresias's Breasts, 1917) by Guillaume Apollinaire, a friend who had also been a contributor to SIC. He went on to compose numerous plays of his own, including Barbe-Bleue (Bluebeard); Les Femmes pliantes (The Flexible Woman); and L'homme coupé en morceaux (The Dismembered Man).[2]

In 1929 he founded his own theater, Le Plateau, in which he produced his own series of short performance pieces entitled Pièces-Études.[2]

• Pierre Albert-Birot: A Poetics in Movement, A Poetics of Movement (1997) by Debra Kelly.

• Covers and excerpts from all fifty-four issues of SIC, scanned and archived by the University of Iowa library

Jean Rousselot. Dictionnaire de la poesie francaise contemporaine 1968, Auge, Guillon, Hollier -Larousse, Mooreau et Cie.-Librairie Larousse, Paris