Category Archives: Dada

tuesday links

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The 2008 Pulitzer Prizes have been announced. The winners include Junot Diaz for  The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Fiction), Tracy Letts for "August: Osage County" (Drama) and a special citation for Bob Dylan.

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We’re officially in the middle of a Picabia moment: with exhibits at the Tate Modern and the Passage de Retz,  and an MIT Press publication, The Artwork Caught by the Tail: Francis Picabia and Dada in Paris, by George Baker, which is the occasion for an article on Bookslut encouraging us to see the Dada artist as a poet as well. Why not.  Read the article and learn why "Dada is an artichoke doorknob."

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More on Virago Press from The Guardian; this time a meditation on Novel on Yellow Paper (which I still recommend you read, it’s so kooky and out there) and on the thirtieth anniversary of the press, which is next month.

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The Sydney Morning Herald looks at how weird and out there travel guides are getting in order to capture a share of the market. But there’s also a strong desire not to say the same things over and over that I think motivates this kind of narrative… and that’s how you end up with women walking from London to Africa.

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My dear Pierre Assouline looks up from his espresso to remark that the commemorations of May 1968 are really starting to bore him, but that in spite of the "avalanche of memoirs, documents, photo collections, novels, and narratives" there are some good books to read on the subject. He recommends  Le jour où mon père s’est tu (Seuil), by Virginie Linhart, the daughter of Robert Linhart (the communist and now sociologist who literally slept through May ’68); Tigre en papier (2002), by Olivier Rolin, and Génération (1987), by Patrick Rotman et Hervé Hamon.

And I counted precisely one semi-colon.

dada poem

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Dada_poem_2
Do you know Tristan Tzara’s instructions for how to make a Dada poem?

"Pour faire un poème dadaïste
Prenez un journal.
Prenez des ciseaux.
Choisissez dans ce journal un article ayant la longueur que vous comptez donner à votre poème.
Découpez l’article.
Découpez ensuite avec soin chacun des mots qui forment cet article et mettez-les dans un sac.
Agitez doucement.
Sortez ensuite chaque coupure l’une après l’autre.
Copiez conscienscieusement
dans l’ordre où elles ont quitté le sac.
Le poème vous ressemblera." ("Manifeste sur l’amour faible et l’amour amer," 1920)

When a professor of mine gave us a list of words the other week (taken from an unspecified poem) and told us to try making a new poem out of them– just for fun– I decided to make a Dada poem with them.  I followed Tzara’s instructions: I cut each word out of the list, placed them all in a bag, shook them around, and they came out in this order:

Who for Tongue For Fate Said From Goes Kissed
Nor Start Well Because I As Is The You To Heart
For Late The Heart What And At Small
Nor Simply Is Speech What Who Forgotten
Between Senses Mean Re-written Nor The Ghost
Not For Listless With The You Nor Heart
The Houseless The Go Away Bedclothes And I
About By What The Given Word Heart
Even The Say Data Though Me Easy

What’s incredible is that even though this "poem" is a compilation of words chosen at random, it appears to have its own grammar– a sort of logic exists between the words.  This is no doubt a result of the words having an original relationship to each other– they were carefully selected by WH Auden.

Interested in reading the original poem?