Wednesday, April 15 — Dada Poetics and the Indecipherable

(l) Hugo Ball performs "Karawane" at the Cabaret Voltaire in "a cubist costume"
(r) Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven strikes a provocative pose.

As the end of the semester nears, we're coming full-circle, returning to the Dadaist poetics of Tristan Tzara and his peers, however whereas before we simply considered his instructions for creating Dada poetry as a precursor of Burroughs and Gysin's cut-up techniques, today we'll actually take a look at the work he created through those methods.

A potent international multimedia movement with roots in Zurich's Cabaret Voltaire, Dadaism emerged in reaction to the horrors of the First World War. While its aesthetic far too often gets reduced to formulas like "the world didn't make sense so their art didn't make sense," there are far more complex ideological underpinnings that took issue with nationalism and colonialism, bourgeois politics and aesthetics, and the destructive potential of modern industrialism.  That having been said, Dadist ideology was largely centered on shock value and the opportunity for critical rethinking that came with it.  One key way they achieved this was through the use of unconventional materials (cf. Marcel Duchamp's readymades) and multiple media; another frequently used method exploited the malleability of language, and this was perhaps inspired by many of the artists being conversant in multiple languages.

We'll start with selections from Jerry Rothenberg and Pierre Joris' Poems for the Millennium, including a brief critical intro and work by Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Marcel Duchamp, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Kurt Schwitters: [PDF].  Through the materials below, we'll look in greater depth at interpretations of selections from "The Complete Sound-Poems of Hugo Ball" 

"Karawane," perhaps Ball's best-known poem.

First, here's the one and only Marie Osmond(!) discussing Ball on the old Ripley's Believe It or Not television show and reciting "Karawane":

And here's Canadian conceptual poet Christian Bök performing the piece [MP3] along with "Seahorses and Flying Fish" (Seepferdchen und flugfische) [MP3] and "Totenklage"[MP3]. Dutch composer and sound poet Jaap Blonk offers a take on "Seahorses and Flying Fish" here: [MP3] (we'll be encountering more from Bök and Blonk in our next two classes, by the way). Next, here are two takes on "Karawane" by Jerry Rothenberg, one with musical accompaniment by Bertram Turetzky [MP3] and a solo vocal performance here [MP3].

While working on Talking Heads' third album, Fear of Music (1979), David Byrne found himself unable to come up with words for an evocative polyrhythmic track the band pulled together at the end of the sessions. Producer Brian Eno suggested he try singing lines from Ball's poem "Gadji beri bimba" over the track as a way around his writer's block, but rather than simply use them as placeholder lyrics, the band wound up keeping Ball's gibberish, and the finished song, "I Zimbra," was not only given prominent place as the album's opening track, but served as a blueprint for the musical experimentation they'd do on future records like Remain in Light (1980) and Speaking in Tongues (1983). Here's a particularly incendiary version of "I Zimbra" (paired with Byrne's solo track, "Big Business") from the concert film Stop Making Sense ("I Zimbra" begins at 4:52):

For comparison's sake, here are the lyrics to "I Zimbra":

I Zimbra

Gadji beri bimba clandridi
Lauli lonni cadori gadjam
A bim beri glassala glandride
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Bim blassa galassasa zimbrabim
Blassa glallassasa zimbrabim

A bim beri glassala grandrid
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

Gadji beri bimba glandridi
Lauli lonni cadora gadjam
A bim beri glassasa glandrid
E glassala tuffm I zimbra

As an interesting intertextual complement to these contemporaneous Dada poems and later interpretations, I'd also like you to take a look at a few selections from Rothenberg's 1983 collection, That Dada Strain [PDF].  Audio for certain poems is posted below:

• on That Dada Strain [MP3]
• That Dada Strain [MP3]; with musical accompaniment [MP3]
• A Glass Tube Ecstacy (for Hugo Ball): [MP3]; with musical accompaniment [MP3]

Mamie Smith's "That Dada Strain" (1922), which gives Rothenberg's sequence its title, can he heard below:

Finally, let's consider two more contemporaneous experiments in asemic writing. First, our old friend Charles Bernstein's provocative poem, "Lift-Off" [link, click "next page" for the end of the poem] from 1979's Poetic Justice, which transcribes the contents of the correction (think Wite-Out) ribbon on the poet's typewriter. You can hear Kenny Goldsmith's performance of the poem at a celebration of Bernstein's new and selected poems, All the Whiskey in Heaven, here: [MP3]. Also, here's David Melnick's PCOET [link], a book of 83 deeply fragmented micropoems (feel free to browse as much or as little as you'd like).