January 30, 2003

  • I shall do nothing to counter the near irrepressible wave of mounting hysterical realism other than embrace it.


       —nfp


    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.


       —Tristan Tzara, from 'Dada Manifesto on Free Love and Bitter Love', (c1920)


    . . . let us not lose sight of the fact that the idea of surrealism aims quite simply at the total recovery of our psychic force by a means which is nothing other than the dizzying descent into ourselves, the systematic illumination of hidden places and the progressive darkening of other places, the perpetual excursion into the midst of forbidden territory . . .


       —André Breton, from The Second Manifesto of Surrealism, 1930


       . . . It is only by making evident the intimate relation linking the two terms real and imaginary that I hope to break down the distinction, which seems to me less and less well founded, between the subjective and the objective. . . . I intend to justify and advocate more and more choice of a lyric behaviour such as it is indispensable to everyone, even if for only an hour of love, such as surrealism has tried to systematize it, with all possible predictive force.


    . . . What is strangest is inseparable from love, presiding over its revelation in individual as well as in collective terms. Man's and woman's sexual organs are attracted to each other like a magnet only through the introduction between them of a web of uncertainties ceaselessly renewed, a real unloosing of hummingbirds which would have gone to hell to have their feathers smoothed. . . We will never have done with sensation.


       —André Breton, from Mad Love (L'Amour fou), 1937

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