Dealing With Dadaism

When I retired four years ago after thirty-five years of teaching English, I thought I would never have to deal with dadaism again. After all, I was not a fan of the movement and taught it in my Masterpieces of Literature class as a small segment of twentieth-century literature. I was wrong to think my dada days were over.

Andrei Codreseu has recently written The Posthuman Dada Guide in order to explore his own feelings regarding the philosophy and history of dadaism. The book is an alphabetical listing of terms and people associated with dadaism. My book club has chosen this book for its next discussion. While it is quite informative, and even interesting in some places, I still am not convinced that the movement should have ever been legitimate. Putting words in a paper bag and shaking them out to form a poem still seems like an inexplicable exercise to me.

The movement began in the World War I period in our history of the world in a small cafe in Zurich. By definition, dadaism challenges anyone to find meaning in it; it seems to me that it was just an escape from the reality of war. After all, the artists were sequestered in a neutral country while their fellow countrymen were shooting or gassing the enemy while living in trenches for months. Dadaism opposes communication of any kind.

As an occasional writer of poems both for pleasure, and occasional publication, I have always believed in the value of communicating with the reader. Marianne Moore communicated this idea best in her famous poem, "Poetry." She says about poetic lines, "When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible, / the same thing may be said for all of us, that we/ do not admire what / we cannot understand."

Hopefully, the dada movement, and its many offshoots like absurdism, relativism, existentialism, and so on have seen their best day in literature.