What are your impressions of Dada work? Of the notion of “anti-art”? Many have situated Dada, especially pre-World War I publications and gatherings, as the beginning of “post-modernism.” Often thought to be primarily a political performing and visual arts movement, Dada practitioners also certainly shaped the trajectory of text arts. We’ll come to examples of later work that have been heavily influenced by the sound poetry of Hugo Ball, for instance, and the performative poetics of Emmy Hennings. A good question to ask, however, is: what’s going on in these works? What has shifted? A bad question, in my estimation (or in any case, a secondary, less interesting question), is: what the hell is “post-modernism”? Feel free to address ALL bad questions.
If writers associated with Dada did much to influence the course of literature, in so doing help shape how many of us think about what creative writing is or can be, certainly Gertrude Stein added as much, if not more, to the conversation. How might the early sound-oriented poetry you hear in Ball relate to the small bit of Stein we’ve read?
If you are interested in working further with Stein, Dada, or both, follow the links below. Tender Buttons, perhaps Stein’s most influential book, is actually public domain and can be dowloaded free thanks to Project Gutenberg.
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/s#a6032 - Stein, Tender Buttons
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dadaism - A Dada primer, wiki
the jackhammer (spectacle) is a manifold composite of mutually irrelevant impressions. The impressions fold in on each other and indicate the infrangibility of their respective interior locale. Plural. But in the process of distinction between the hyporheic symptomotology of sublimity of the surface (the crisis) we see the crisis is of meaning: inherently semelparous. The iteroparity of their respective attributes transgresses the norm of reified dogmatic quackery, resulting in the convoluted re-misstranslations of the hyperspheric topograpy.