[MUSIC] The dramatic reversal of fortune that accompanied Whitman's evolving influence also played out in the influence the emerging experimental tradition would have in the United States. TS Eliot's The Waste Land, and by the 1930s and 40s, the solidifying politics of Ezra Pound's Cantos, gave experimental modernism, not only a culturally elitist cast but also strong links to conservative or fascist politics. Progressive poets from William Carlos Williams to Edwin Rolfe, among them, many working in New York in venues like New Masses, struggled with that apparent legacy, railed against it at times. And then began to re-articulate experimental techniques to very different social agendas. The effort to link experimentalism with leftist political projects would also sustain itself throughout the century. Amongst its towering achievements were Melvin Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia from 1953. Which replaces Elliot's Euro-centric range of reference with an extraordinary rich set of quotations, allusions, and explicit references that create a composite history, at once European, African, and American. The literary inspirations for the widening field of experimental poetry were matched by developments in the visual arts. As I noted before, the Armory's show was the signal influence and it helped create the Dada movement in New York, which was equally influential at the time. Francis Picopia was in the Armory Show, and given more space still in Gallery 291. Officially inaugurated in Zurich in 1916, the movement established itself in the United States in such 1915 to 1919 New York Magazines as 291, 391, The Blind Man, Wrong Wrong, and New York Dada. Walter Conrad Arensberg was both a Dada patron and a poet. His Axiom, a poem, appeared in The Blind Man in 1917 and you'll need to see it to follow it. From a determinable horizon absent spectacularly from a midnight. Which is yet to make public a midnight in the first place incomparably copied. The other, in observance of the necessary end guarantees the simultaneous insularity of a structure self-contained a little longer than the general direction of goods opposed tangentially. Axiom is a rather early example of a poem that uses linguistic associations to take itself across multiple domains, from cultural understanding to nature, to economics. In this case, in service of an anti-capitalist subtext. The New York Dadaists were largely all anti-war, anti-colonialist, and anti-bourgeois. But none of them had quite so anarchist and unconventional a literary style or personal presence as Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven. She arrived in New York from Berlin in 1910, remained here until 23, establishing herself as a figure in the New York avant-garde and writing poetry furiously. She published scattered poems in The Little Review, Liberation, Broom, and Transition. The first two edited in New York, and the third arriving in Manhattan near the end of its run. She was working on a book of her poems at the time of her death. It was never completed. A full evaluation of Freytag-Loringhoven would have to wait until the remarkable collection of her work, Body Sweats, was published in 2011. Her poems include portmanteau words rich with instructive meaning. Phalluspistol Kissambushed, icefanged, wombcrucible, bloodsuckled, spirittesticle. Surrealists set pieces, wheels are growing on rosebushes. Compressed sacrilege, and God spoke kindly to mine heart. He said, thou art allowed to fart. And ribald sexual celebration, no spinsterlollypop for me, yes, we have no bananas, I got lusting palate, I always eat them. These are mixed with associational reverie, sound experiments, and what you might call rants that could be celebratory or denunciatory. As this representative passage from Mineself, Minesoul, and Mine Cast-Iron Lover. >> Mineself, Minesoul, and Mine Cast-Iron Lover by Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven. Costly he looketh a toad. Creature that is, demands bloodright and balance. Has it, finds it, squats on it. Costly he looketh in grandeur. Magnitude, eyes stony, darkcentered, gazing undisturbed at good and evil for him. Thinking ceaselessly, unwinkingly, dreams, toaddreams! Squatting in shadow darkness upon center of crimson throne. >> One of her more infamous pieces was the long 1921 Thee I call Hamlet of Wedding-Ring. Criticism of William Carlos Williams's Kora in Hell and Why. But Williams himself would have a failed relationship with her, end up being somewhat inspired by her. And Descent of Winter, his 1928 long experimental poem, creates a mixed a Dadaist poem and prose sequence. Someone should summarize these things in the interest of local government or how a spotted dog goes up a gutter, and in chalk crudely upon the railroad ridge support a woman rampant brandishing two rolling pins. Dada would continue to have an impact on American poets in New York and elsewhere but not primarily by people affiliating with it directly. Much the same story can be told about surrealism in American poetry, a movement in which poetry and the visual arts were also intertwined. Indeed, Dada and surrealism themselves were interrelated, sharing interest in left politics, and practices like automatic writing. Surrealism, however, added an explicit commitment to unconscious motivation and to dreams as a resource. It also developed its American strains slightly later. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, and achieving a high point with Charles Henri Ford's New York magazine View, 1940 to 47. Some would argue that Dada was in effect transformed into surrealism, but it's worth distinguishing the two sets of literary commitments. Surrealism began to become widely visible in the United States in the 1930s, at the very moment when so many writers were becoming affiliated with or at least aligned with the communist party. The question of whether surrealism could actually be a vehicle for radical political advocacy, despite the party's general preference for realism, would then be widely debated in New York and other East Coast magazines. Dada, on the other hand, was credited with a committed political edge throughout its history.
