Poem: Tristan Tzara

One of the things I would hear people say when I was growing up was, "There's not enough time to breathe." I sometimes feel that way, especially during these crowded and crazy academic quarters. I do breathe, and teach, and read, and any number of other things, but sometimes I do feel like I have only a few seconds' head start.

Today in my Conceptual Art/Writing class, we looked at the works of Marcel Duchamp and Tristan Tzara (at right, LilithGallery).  We'd already talked about Duchamp's infamous "Fountain" of 1917, and related it to the theoretical texts we'd read, while also placing it within a history of art and schools and styles (that included the work of Michelangelo, Rembrandt van Rijn, Hokusai, Monet, Yves Klein, Adam Pendleton, and others), and today we returned to it, and his other works ("Nude Descending a Staircase #2," "The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors Even (The Large Glass)," "Three Stoppages," etc.) before placing him in relation to Dada, which he discusses both in "The Great Trouble with Art in This Century," "The Creative Act" and "'Regions which are not ruled by time and space...'" among other pieces, and Surrealism, which led, I think quite nicely, to Tristan Tzara (1896-1973), who issued a number of Dada manifestos, including the (in)famous one of 1918.

At any rate, Tzara also has a lovely little poem that doubles as a do-it-yourself Dada poem instruction kit, called "To Make a Dadaist Poem." So we read the 2nd Manifesto of 1918, and then the Dada poem, and then we began the process of making a Dada poem.  So here's Tzara's poem. I brought in scissors and copies of the Chicago Tribune and New York Times, which was full of interesting articles today (in just the Arts section alone there were pieces on Howard Dodson's retirement from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; fiction Pulitzer winner Paul Harding's trajectory from multiple rejectee to prize awardee; a piece on Timothy McVeigh's taped prison tapes; making art at the speed of the Net by pairing techies and, well, artists; junior dance companies at the 1,2,3 Festival; and much more), students snipped and will now go create poems.

You can try it too. Here's Tzara's poem. I'll append my Dadaist poem later tonight.

HOW TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM

Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want to make your 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.
And there you are—an infinitely original author of charming sensibility, even though unappreciated by the vulgar herd.

Copyright © Tristan Tzara, 1920. No rights reserved.

Update: here's the Dadaist poem I assembled, to mirror what my students were working on. It was originally an article about the prison tapes of Timothy McVeigh. I did not move a single word around to make it sound more felicitous, and I tried to use as many of the snippets as I could cull from the bag (I had to use tweezers since the New York Times's print is so small--was it always so? I know my eyes are going!) Let's call it "Head / terrorist":

Head
terrorist
which
interview
very
MSNBC
talking
completely
prison
shared
Michel,
Timothy J.
ex
co-author
bombing
instructor
building
interviews
free
McVeigh
American
a
information
Here
journalist
but
tapes
168
matter-of-fact
he
of
bombing
a
anti-government
a
voices
Oklahoma
reassuring
appropriately
letting
Lou
or
inspector
come
prison
Oklahoma
cause
us
people
you're
told
of
calm
who
had
just
taped
of
killed
could
know
reporter
era
to
of
Timothy
a
McVeigh
See
read
city
been
earned
city
before
ingly
the
1995
in
to
and
it
in
driving
Bronze
even
it's
speaking
went
those
with
extremist
these
hours
ing
are
McVeigh
faces
in
harder
gauge
out
Gulf
he
was
Persian
course
vet
having
hard
I.