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.