Return to the Poem-amatic: Tristan Tzara's Dadaist Poetry Engine

JF Ptak Science Books  LLC  Post 530

Each thing we see hides something else we want to see.
--Rene Magritte

I am very fond of images like this--images that show us  everything and nothing. The engraving was meant to show some of the ephemeral antique bric-a-brac collected by whatever collector was currently residing at Chantilly.  Remove that explanation, and the meaning of the engraving goes spinning into whatever space you open for it.  It is a wonderful thing to open these dis-associated image combinatorics to free interpretation, each viewer finding their own meaning in a mysteriously composed components. 

This of course was an unintentional artifact of the artist and engraver.  Images like this--confusing, anti-intuitive, misleading--weren't constructed to be so (at least not in a major and determined way) until the arrival of the Dadaists in the 20th century.   This was a short-lived, proto-archaic (?) group with a confusing history, a tumultuous existence, and a short and sure ending.  They were disengaging from the avant garde to form a group that went somewhat beyond*

(Even the naming of the group is a story of unusual ripeness and spoilage, no one being able to tell the truth of how it came into being.  Suffice to say that "dada" either was or wasn't found by an accidental grazing through Larousse by Tristan Tzara in February 1916.  At least Hans Arp tells this as the true story, saying too that he was there, along with his 12 children and a brioche in his left nostril. Anyway the naming doesn't seem to matter terribly much to a group like this that disposed of and twisted names proper and otherwise.)

An example of a Dadaist work is at right, by Hannah Höch, Cut with the Dada Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany, 1919)

The Dadaists, born in the Cafe Voltaire, were interested first in the written arts, and didn't move to painting and the plastics for a couple of years.  The first among these creative equals was probably Tristan Tzara  (born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro, 1896–1963) who was first a writer and poet before an artist.  True to the Dadaist great non-existent history, Tzara set forth a method of constructing poetry.  It was basically an engine for a simultaneous poem, as in the "bruitist" Futurists tradition, which built upon the work of Hugo Ball, who in turn was the inventor of the sound poem (Lautgedicht). And so tongue deep in cheek, Tzara set forth these principles:

To make a Dadaist poem:

• Take a newspaper.
• Take a pair of scissors.
• Choose an article as long as you are planning to make your poem.
• Cut out the article.
• Then cut out each of the words that make up this article and put them in a bag.
• Shake it gently.
• Then take out the scraps one after the other in the order in which they left the bag.
• Copy conscientiously.
• The poem will be like you.
• And here you are a writer, infinitely original and endowed with a sensibility that is charming though beyond the understanding of the vulgar.

(Some few weeks ago I made a post about an automatic poem-making device--the poem-amatic fist micrroscope--a fun little bit about making poems of ordinary printed pages by recording what you saw of them in the visual field seen through the barrel of a semi-closed fist. 
Then there is the entry “Poetry from Found-Wordist and Book Pathologist Mr. Ignatio Norme, Found-Wordist and Page Number Collector (Boston, Mass.; 1923-1988))” in my growing and imaginary museum catalog called Weltin and Wantin.  Mr. Norme constructed poems in much this same way, except that he stripped his poems out of the lines of his books. His effort is here, called Primo VI, the Analysis of Man//Fantasies brillantes (by  “the man who found obscure phi-related connectivity between random word placement, page number and the poetic ideal”).

Now.
I tried this out, but not with newspaper--rather I did it with Tzara's instruction itself, and let me tell you, it doesn't work.  There's just too much left to chance, and, frankly, too many prepositions, too much grunting work.

On the other hand, if you lay out the pieces before you and determine to allow yourself 15 minutes to select a poem from the scattered bits on the table, then the method does stand some sort of chance.
Here's what I came up with, and it is almost something or other; at least I think that  is probably not nothing.  In the very least, though, it is a very interesting exercise, trying to get your mind to find a poem in strips of paper.  In that way Mr. Tzara was perfectly correct. 

(Below is a fragment of Mr. Norme's work.)

_______

*  Dada is the groundwork to abstract art and sound poetry, a starting point for performance art, a prelude to postmodernism, an influence on pop art, a celebration of antiart to be later embraced for anarcho-political uses in the 1960s and the movement that lay the foundation for Surrealism.
—Marc Lowenthal, translator's introduction to Francis Picabia's I Am a Beautiful Monster: Poetry, Prose, And Provocation

Comments

[Jeff]

It never occurred to me before that the Dadaists were the inventors of refrigerator poetry. We had a lovely old refrigerator in the lobby of the library for years full of magnetic words for people to play with. We had to keep an eye on it and dismantle the lewd poems, but it was fun to have. I kind of miss it.

[John Ptak]

Jeff: that's true, you're right; and the Mamaists invented the *not* reading of the refrigerator poetry. Actually, I'd do all of my writing on a refrigerator if I could only get the thing through cable.