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Chapter 6 - Avant-gardisms

Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, H. D.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 June 2012

Peter Howarth
Affiliation:
Queen Mary University of London
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Summary

The culture of the avant-gardes

If the names of the modernist avant-gardes are exotic – Futurists, Vorticists, Dadaists, Surrealists, Simultaneists, Constructivists – then their ways of making poetry happen were even more so. The Futurists put on music-hall shows in which poems without syntax were screamed at the audience through a megaphone, with the audience encouraged to fight back. At the original Dadaist Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, Hugo Ball, dressed in a cylinder of shiny blue cardboard, had to be carried off stage after becoming intoxicated by bellowing his poetry made of abstract sounds, the audience joining in. His wife Emmy Hennings would mix poetry with demonic puppet shows, while Ball's own sound-poems were often accompanied by Sophie Taüber's abstract, masked, robotic dances. Later Dadaists made Apollinaire's ‘simultaneist’ verse into a performance by reading overlapping lines of texts in different voices at the same time. Another avant-garde technique was to combine poetry with objects. Blaise Cendrars layered a semi-delirious travelogue of his semi-imaginary journey from Moscow to Manchuria against Sonia Delaunay's abstract curves and swoops to create a poem which is a two-metre-long fold-out-book and painting as well, the Prose du Transsibérien (1913). The Constructivist Kurt Schwitters would paste words and sentences together into drawings, and then drive nails into them to make objects which were simultaneously pictures, sculptures and poems. Later he would develop the sound-cluster ‘fmsbw’ by Raoul Hausmann into the forty-minue Ursonate, scoring phonemes like musical notes in themes, variations and repeats. The avant-gardes also experimented with random or automatic processes of composition: the Dadaist Tzara made a poem-recipe from cutting up newspaper fragments, shaking them in a bag, and reading out the results. The Surrealists played ‘exquisite corpse’, where poems are composed one word at a time by different people unawares. Compared to these relentlessly anti-personal, multimedia performances, slim modernist pamphlets in free verse look rather tame.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2011

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References

Lyon, JanetManifestoes: Provocations of the ModernIthaca, NYCornell University Press 1999
Morris, AdalaideHow To Live / What To Do: H. D.'s Cultural PoeticsUrbanaUniversity of Illinois Press 2003
Puchner, MartinPoetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestoes and the Avant-GardesPrinceton University Press 2006
The Salt Companion to Mina LoyPotter, RachelCambridgeSalt 2008
Sheppard, RichardModernism – Dada – PostmodernismEvanston, ILNorthwestern University Press 2000

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  • Avant-gardisms
  • Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139023863.006
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  • Avant-gardisms
  • Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139023863.006
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Avant-gardisms
  • Peter Howarth, Queen Mary University of London
  • Book: The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry
  • Online publication: 05 June 2012
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139023863.006
Available formats
×