Dada - Sound Poems

In class, we briefly studied the absurdity of dada works, but I was really interested in dada works of the time and what they told us about the vanguards of the movement and, more generally, the spirit of the time. Dada "happened" to coincide with World War I, and after looking at some of the prominent sound poems at the time, it's become more clear why.

One of Dada poetry was the sound poem. These poems were not composed or ordinary words chained together to form an instantly cohesive idea. Rather, common words are cast aside, and sound poets instead use phonetic sounds to convey the poem's meaning through the syntax of these invented words and their natural flow. These poems were mainly intended to be performed during live readings, not written word. Kurt Schwitters, a leader of the movement, stated about dada poetry, "The reader himself has to work seriously to become a genuine reader. Thus, it is work rather than questions or mindless criticism which will improve the reader's receptive capacities." Below are audio recordings of these sound poems so that you can judge for yourself whether these poems are utter trash or a transcendent, revolutionary form of literature.

Hugo Ball
Karawane

Kurt Schwitters
Ursonate

Raoul Hausmann
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From a certain perspective, these poems are indulgent works by pretentious writers of the time, but if you can accept them for what they are, they can become a somewhat compelling form of literature. These poems really force you to pay attention to the phonetics of poetry, and the performance becomes similar to acting in that it requires precise voice inflections that can determine the tone, and to an extent, the "meaning" of the piece. When you listen to the poems being performed, it is possible to envision, at least partially, what their creators intended to convey.

When you look at sound poems and Dada in the frame of a timeline, there's a viable relationship between Dada and the Great War. This was the most horrifying war that had ever been seen, both in size - Europe was completely divided and America with other countries were also participants - and magnitude - trenches, gassing, PTSD, mass land destruction, total war. Whether the connection is direct or indirect, it is undeniable that the events and aftermath of World War I mirror the development of Dada. Dada is basically the destruction of words and clear thought. Words and sounds are fragmented and replaced together frantically. Poems do not immediately make sense. After this terrible of a war, should anything make sense? After death in the masses, this seems to be a natural way to react. The effects of the war's destruction can be seen in the deconstruction of language that sprung from the dada movement's sound poems.