Tzara's Manifestos and Ball and Schwitter's Poetry

In Tzara's Seven Dada Manifestos, he repeatedly discusses the idea that art is done for the artist himself, and no one else. It cannot be "translated," that is, the point of art is not for the general public, or even for other artists, to "understand" it. As he puts it, "an intelligible work is the product of a journalist." This idea is exemplified quite well by Hugo Ball's "abstract phonetic" poem, O Gadji Beri Bimba. O Gadji Beri Bimba is written in what we might colloquially identify as "pure gibberish," that is, it is not written in an identifiable, preexisting (or currently existing) language or dialect. Rather, Ball uses a multiplicity of languages to draw inspiration from when writing this poem, and implements various aspects of each language's phonology and morphology. Thus, the end product is a piece whose artistic merit lies in the way in which this seemingly random, nonsensical amalgam of sounds come together on the auditory level, and not necessarily on the level of the "meaning" of the diction or the syntax. This is not to suggest that the poem has "no meaning," however, and this brings us to the overall political and artistic statement made by the poem. While the individual words used in the poem may have no identifiable "meaning" in the traditional sense, the poet's "message" is evident. This poem, as Ball writes in his diary, serves to "abandon a language ravaged and laid barren by journalism," an idea which aligns itself quite well with Tzara's sentiments as written in his Dada Manifesto. Ball does not, however, simply "abandon" traditional language, he takes it a step further by creating his own "language," using the "cut-and-paste" techniques that are a trademark of Dada. Ball's refusal to employ traditional language reflects Tzara's disdain for art that is intended to merely portray reality in a palatable, easy-to-understand way. Tzara's ideas in his Dada Manifestos are also evident in Kurt Schwitter's poem, Anna Blume. While Anna Blume is written in an actual language, it tests the constraints of that language and undermines grammatic and linguistic convention in doing so. Instead of a total, Hugo Ball-style rejection of the "language ravaged and laid barren by journalism," Schwitter seeks to reject the journalism-ravaged state of language by first using that same language, and then subverting the reader's expectations of how that language should typically be employed. For example, Schwitter's repetition of the line "I/love your! - you ye you your, I your, you my./ - We?" mimics the format of verb conjugations (I love, you love, we love, etc.) and plays with the difference between the possessive pronoun "your" and the non possessive pronoun "you." He rejects common syntax by not including grammatically necessary parts of the sentence: "I love your" includes a subject ("I"), and a verb ("love"), but no direct object--"I love your" is not a grammatically complete sentence. Additionally, Schwitters undermines the conventions of poetry--his line breaks, use of punctuation, itemized lists, and parenthetical asides, just to name a few examples, are unusual and unexpected in the genre of poetry. So, while Schwitter may not reject the language of journalists in the same way Ball does, he refutes this journalism-language by using it in his poem. Tzara, I think, would approve.