Dada poetry
Reach out to embrace the random.
We used to do this sometimes at Storyslingers: cut up a bunch of words from random sources and pick them out of the hat to generate a word splurge. Sometimes interesting combinations would leap out, enough to spark a new idea.
Great and original works of art, poetry, literature and music are rarely generated from a place of complete reason and control. They often come from a different plane of existence. Great works can be bewildering, taking us to a place our ordinary lives and ways of thinking can never take us to. Some people reach that place through meditation, some through drugs, some through dreams, and some through sticking a bunch of words in a hat and pulling them out again at random.
Don’t expect this exercise to always generate seeds for literary masterpieces. Usually the most it’ll generate is a few lols and a half hour not looking at your phone. These things are the next best thing to transcendental works of spiritual genius in my opinion.
Dada? Whatwhat?
Dada was an avant-guard art movement of the early 20th Century that theorised that the logic and reason of bourgeois capitalist society was a factor in war and discontent. They rejected logic and embraced chaos instead. Visit your local library to find out more about dadaism and see some of the artworks that it generated. I’d say the most important part of dadaism is at a point of departure from dadaism, of embracing the random and finding something meaningful within it, interpreting it and bringing some semblance of order into it. Dadaism led to some truly great art movements such as surrealism and modernism. Personally I wouldn’t say much of the works generated purely out of a dadaist principle were that interesting, but these works were often stepping stones towards something greater.
The challenge
Your first challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to cut random words out of a local newspaper or junk mail, or whatever, and put the words into a hat. Then pull them out at random and photograph or write down the result. Send us pics of what comes out of it. I’ll post them up here, which leads to the second challenge:
pick out a phrase from one of the dada poems below and use it to form a new poem, story or song.
Dada poems by Becky Bye:
While I was editing this one in photoshop I accidentally pasted whatever was on my pasteboard: half a sentence from my novel. It wasn’t the most recent thing I copied onto my pasteboard - I have no idea why photoshop selected this excerpt out of all the ones in the pasteboard. This was a totally random mistake, so I decided to keep it there to further add to the poem. Pasted words by Jennifer Newbury.
