u ner hears

Dialect is once again more prominently present in the literary works of Swiss authors thanks to Spoken Word. The stage poets also draw on a rich past of oral literature: from the Dadaists to Concrete Poetry, and up to the "modern dialect" movement that turned traditional dialect literature on its head in the 1960s and 70s. Among the key representatives were Kurt Marti and Ernst Burren, as well as the Bernese author Ernst Eggimann. In 1968, he published his first poetry collection "Henusode" (Arche), in which Eggimann used spoken language as a starting point for literary experiments: "When I began writing the sound poems 'Henusode,' I felt I was discovering an area within the German language that had remained largely original. Dialect is language in the true sense, derived from speaking.".