The Posthuman Dada Guide by Codrescu Andrei

Author:Codrescu, Andrei [Codrescu, Andrei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4008-2984-2
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2009-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Tristan Tzara cut up various texts onstage during Dada events in Paris, pulling words out of a hat and solemnly reading them, first to the outrage of the audience, then to their amusement, as the value of shock diminished. The first performance of a cut-up text came before a French audience so traditional that they thought it was impolite to as much as sit down during the reading of a poem. (Each poem being, apparently, a sort of national anthem. Ah, the religion of art!) Poets never read their own work, either. Actors performed the poems, a custom that lasted well into the Sixties in Romania, where actors from the National Theater read on television poems by “poets from literary journals.”

In 1964, an old eminence from the National Theater in Bucharest recited one of my earliest poems on television, prefacing it with “This is a poem by a sixteen-year-old poet from Sibiu,” and then proceeding to massacre it in a way that, even at that tender age, almost made me abandon poetry forever. The consequences of that misreading of my juvenilia before the nation were numerous. In the first place, I found it hard to believe that the plainly stated intentions of the poem (with a tad of symbolism here and there) could be interpreted as anything more than what they declared, which was something to the effect that my young soul experienced the reverberations of the church bells in my medieval hometown as messages from another world. The old actor was moved to a different interpretation. His stentorian declamation condemned the sounds of the bells as carriers of nefarious messages from the defeated past. My mother was, at the time, being courted by an army captain I loathed. When I came back from school, I knew that he’d been in the apartment because the stink of his boots made me want to throw up. It turned out that this captain, who’d read some of my poems, let it be known around the garrison that he wrote poetry, and he had passed around some of my poems as his own, including the one just read on TV. When the old actor told the national audience that the author was a “sixteen-year-old,” a scandal broke out. The captain was demoted and my mother broke up with him. Who says that poetry makes nothing happen? Happily, the solemn recitation of poetry by actors before bored populations has ceased long ago. We have come so far from the days of solemnity attendant on the presence of a poem that we now receive daily the automatic blessing of a dada poem via our e-mail. Poetry readings are everywhere and the poets themselves are the terrible actors of yore. Dada poetry is ubiquitous: the pulses of internet spam are surging around the dams and walls erected by spam-assassin software, networks, and government, and producing eerie poetry. At first, I thought that avantgardists had targeted me personally for their guerrilla poetry, but realized quickly that there

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