Friday, September 16, 2005

To Make a Dadaist Poem















If the members of the Zurich Dada group aimed at negation/destruction in the social and cultural sphere, they gave it symbolic form in their graphic and literary work through techniques of structural and semantic breakdown. One of their main techniques was systematically to exploit random pictorial and literary effects. Its most usual form was a collage-based arrangement of materials, material that were often taken from sources not conventionally associated with the fine arts.

In Tzara’s “To make a Dadaist Poem”, he offered the following instruction:

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from the paper an article of the length you want to make a poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left the bag.
The poem will resemble you

(Tzara, Seven Manifestos and Lampisteries, p. 39)

I will definitely give it a try

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Drinking in poetry from a paper bag seems like the best way to get drunk on life. I, too, must try this! This sounds like a fun homework assigment. Are you considering doing it? This is Max by the way, I am at a different computer and I forgot my blogger pass!

Andrea said...

Hi Max! GREAT to "see" you!

Yes I will try to write a poem following the instructions. It seems fun, who know which is the result.
But as they say, the fun should be in the process!! :-)

Hi John, I will visit your Blog, thanks

Unknown said...

Hmm I am SO doing this later!

cargwaps said...

haha! have you done this yet? what happened? i think i might have a go at this too. ^__^ but the outcome will most definitely resemble me: awkward, hard to understand and very messy!

cargwaps said...

p.s.

i hope it's okay with you that i put a link back to your blog on my own blog.

Andrea said...

Hey Kb!! I loved your picture!!!

Of course you can carwaps and by the way yes, I will make a dadaist poem tomorrow, it will be fun. I will look for yours and KBs later too!!!

:-)