Lettrists

The Lettrists? "Lettrism is the almost-forgotten visual poetry movement of the twentieth century. Preceding the concrete poetry movement by almost a decade, the world all but ignored the Lettrists during its infatuation with the concretists in the 1960s and ’70s. ... Lettrism was the creation of Isodore Isou, a Romanian who moved to Paris in the mid-1940s before he could even speak French. ... His ideas were simple enough: To atomize language. To reject the idea of language and the word itself as the exalted conveyors of meaning. To reduce art to its most elemental form, the atom of language, the letter. ... Lettrist visual poetry rarely includes readable words, rarely even includes readable letters.

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Lettrism is the bridge between Dadaism and concrete poetry, between the now-quaint avant-garde and the always-sedate avant-garde. ... The Lettrists broke into more factions (the Ultra-Lettrists, the Situationists) and made fewer friends [than the concrete poets & Dadaists]." -- Geof Huth

Huth includes links to Lettrist works so go on over to dbpq (the "Letrrists" link above) to check 'em out.