The Dada market

Willard Bohn's collection of Dada poetry is the most comprehensive ever compiled. Forty-two poets writing in seven different languages (French, German, English, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, and Dutch) are presented, where appropriate, in a bilingual format with the original text and its English translation on facing pages. The collection, which opens with a critical and historical introduction, spans the years 1914-1923 and includes such poets as Walter Conrad Arensberg, Andre Breton, Malcolm Cowley, Max Ernst, Mina Loy, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Kurt Schwitters, and Tristan Tzara. Twelve works by ten Dada visual artists (six of whom are also represented by their poetry) illustrate the book. Dada's overriding concern was liberty - social, moral, artistic, and intellectual. While rebelling against bourgeois values and all forms of authority, the Dadaists venerated scandalous behavior, spontaneity, and a general joie de vivre. Their adherents questioned the basic postulates of rationalism and humanism as few had done before. In poetry, the Dadaists' distrust of logic, which they saw as a correlative of traditional authority, led to fanatically antilogical compositions and an aesthetic strategy based on subversion, distortion, and disruption. Bohn points out that the Dada poets were among the first to discover that words could be used to convey essentially extralinguistic information. In trying to strip artistic expression down to its bare essentials, these writers often created works that were experiments in sound or typography. Bohn argues that the best Dada poems demonstrate a critique of language and an attempt to deconstruct the cultural sign system, attributes readily apparent in the examples included in this collection.