Product Description
This major anthology of writings by legendary poet tristan tzara (1896-1963) reveals the various facets of Tzara's style: from the deliberately disconnected to the sustained and lyric; from the fragmentary to the visionary and the epic; from the tormented or the nostalgic to the severe; from the simple to the complex. The accent falls constantly on two recurring elements: on action or the spectacle of action and on the attempt to find a language which will translate it. Of particular importance is the inclusion of Tzara's epic poem of 1925-30 "Approximate Man." Now widely regarded as the poetic masterpiece of Surrealism.

This new and fully revised title, translated, edited, and updated by Mary Ann Caws for Black Widow Press includes a critical introduction, an account of the more interesting variants of tzara's poems, and an essay new to this edition "Dada's Temper, Our Text," which provides an insightful view into the historical context of "Approximate man." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

No Laughing Matter
having read this collection and lee harwood's 'chanson dada', i am now convinced that- alongside his countryman gherasim luca and aime cesaire- tristan tzara was the very best of the surrealist poets.

true, his verse can be exasperating in its unevenness (this, lamentably, is a distinctively surrealist trait, which never aspired towards poetic perfection to begin with), but the anthology does an extraordinary job of depicting the intrinsic *continuity* of his concerns, concerns which are much closer to us, the crestfallen clochards of postmodernity, than any of his contemporaries. like mallarme, tzara is concerned with vanishings, evanescences and disappearances, the ultimate (hegelian) identity of truth and 'illusory' appearance, irruptions that border upon the imperceptible, momentary flickerings of non-sense that can only be grasped by exacting effort. this is precisely the way in which tzara manages to bridge the intensely personal intimacy of the lyric form (few poems manage to sustain this sort of soul-searching subjectivity without becoming soporific) with its universal address and import.

for me, 'approximate man' is about hope, faith, tenacity. poetry, in tzara's conception, is a painful exercise of fidelity, a tightening of nerves, a seizing of singularities from the voracious maw of lassitude, indifference and disgust. thus, there is a monastic austerity, a remorseless rigor in tzara's work that contrasts starkly with the 'will to inebriation' that typifies surrealist poetics. there is a sense of purpose here that approaches solemnity, and the high seriousness of tzara's poetic production is likely to upset readers accustomed to the kaleidoscopic, freewheeling delirium of automatic writing which, to my knowledge, was not a technique that tzara indulged in. the experience of reading tzara is so 'difficult' because he does not operate on the surface of sense or sonority alone- while affording many pleasures to both the ear and the third eye, tzara tries desperately to galvanize a gallimaufry of images into a coherent conception of reality. anachronistic as it may have been in the high tide of the avant garde, tzara was deeply committed to writing MEANINGFUL poetry, poetry that would do more than point at an absent reality that poetry could merely prefigure (the symbolist heritage that surrealism inherited). in 'approximate man', i think, the moral compass of surrealist practice is placed in full view, while the exigencies and the demands that history places upon poetic expression are probed within the poem itself, giving rise to a triumphant sense of literature's irrepressible power, a power retrieved from the collapse of surrealism's virginal childhood.

why then, are tzara's poems so tortured, so riddled with anguish and regret? if tzara is, like pessoa, like beckett, like mallarme, like artaud, one of the great poets of failure and frustration, it is because he was never satisfied with the surrealist conception of language as a productive cinematic machine, a canvas for unconscious imaginings. adorno's imperious denunciations of surrealism's arrested development are worth repeating: its 'undialectical' and indiscriminate exposition of gratuitous images could only lead to the twin cul-de-sacs of aestheticism and mysticism. can we say, then, that tzara's work elucidates the relationship of surrealism to its historical conditions, the intensely ethical orientation of its human concern? in tzara, the icarian flight of automatism turns back upon itself, gazing back at the scorched earth from which it sprung. while affirming its inexorable autonomy, literature no longer claims exclusive access to the absolute, which it is nonetheless tethered to as though by an umbilical cord. this marks the solidarity between surrealism and the communist struggle, the reconciliation of poetic praxis with emancipatory politics. renouncing its celestial privileges, the clipped wings of poetry are streaked with the blood and tears of suffering humanity. yet it would not be poetry if it made its peace with pathos- poetry is the inexorable demand to have done with penance. hence the generosity and the power of 'approximate man', which, while regarding mortal finitude with tenderness and mercy, affirms the infinite, indomitable right of promethean revolt.

in this way, tzara saves literature from the dead end of transgression and its dialectical waltz with propriety, literary or social. a poetry that is truly 'trans-bourgeois', without exhausting itself in hyperactive formal experimentation. a poetry that is delivered from the french, all-too-french, kantian-schopenhaurian horizon of the sacred noumena. if tzara can say, with rimbaud, that the 'true life is elsewhere', it is not because poetry is forever ensconced in the slough of despond, expelled from a state of grace that is purely hypothetical. literature inhabits the space between nostalgia and anticipation, gathering the specral traces, the consequences of a truth that has vanished, clearing a space in which new certitudes will announce themselves. poetry is thwarted because it is ensnared in a critical impasse- it cannot speak with absolute certainty of that which has disappeared, nor can it properly prophesy that which will come. while literature cannot itself drain the real of the transient NOW into itself, it need not resign itself to mystical silence. what binds remembrance and expectation together is the unflinching avowal of CONTINGENCY, the fissure in every complacency which uncovers a primordial past while freeing the fugitive future. a poem, as a form of thought, is an aleatory affirmation, a caesura in the seamless cloth of possibility. this is the way in which it touches upon the impossible:
"The product of chance, it will return to chance, but to a humanized chance which would have lived out the space of a memory, a chance which would have taught memory its own adventurous ways of living and the inestimable perspectives it gives to human hope, through all the downfalls and infirmities, of bringing to life the object of dreams, outside every concurrence of circumstance." (198)

and again:
"Life appeared to me in cross section like an agate whose spots are moving in a perpetual flight of worms writhing alongside each other trying to avoid one another and seeking in a constant equilibrium a way out which would conform in contour to the oppositions, the barriers and the interdictions provoked by movement itself. Perhaps there will be a gap in the framework...Perhaps it will be seen that as darkness is only a crystal globe, a tumor, it is enough to break it in order for light to exist and to invade memory and the fear of death. Perhaps it will be a question of love. Then only will the moral laws empty their pockets, for man will be visible and visitable and no one will wish to know more than can be seen, the humanly thinkable will turn aside, on its tracks of the new laws of chance and humor, the hateful proplery thinkable which each day adds another stone to the millstone of our times of windowpanes and of clearings." (199)

we all know that, following their storied breaks with the surrealist movement, the likes of char, aragon, eluard and desnos all returned to the fold of literary orthodoxy, a maneuver that was in part inspired by their involvement in the communist party and the french resistance. we also know that their artistry suffered a good deal in the process, as they subordinated poetic expression to a populist poetics (char being a luminous exception to this).

tzara never capitulated to this compromise, and i can't help but feel that the sheer intransigence of his vision ensures that he remains among the most UNIVERSAL of the surrealist poets, his universality being a good deal closer to the likes of beckett, michaux, vallejo and artaud than his fellow wayfarers. despite the length of 'approximate man', there is a sinewy leanness and a precision in its menacing imagery that one rarely finds in surrealist poetry. the bloated gratuitousness, the overladen imagery, the ludic arbitrariness of surrealism are abandoned in favor of a highly concentrated, compressed style that, while harnessing the spontaneity of chance procedures (many of tzara's most arresting images were aleatory amendments to his original manuscripts, which bore the blemish of tzara's own inclinations towards symbolist sentimentality) achieves an unerring, almost mathematical clarity of vision that approaches that of mallarme. the incantatory refrains that punctuate each section gain momentum until they swell into paroxysms of pain or praise. there is a scarcely-veiled classicism that persists throughout tzara's best work- a hushed reverence for poetic communication and the capacity of his readers to receive its transmissions, however occult they may be on the surface-that never condescends to the hackneyed, naively humanistic 'neo-realism' of aragon, prevert or desnos.

in a way, i can't help but feel that much of tzara's earlier work is an 'approximation' of 'approximate man', which i now regard as one of the great epic poems of modernity, besides rimbaud's 'season in hell' (the black breath of which can be felt emanating from the bowels of 'approximate man') , whitman's 'song of myself', hart crane's 'the bridge' and neruda's 'heights of macchu picchu'. so, it is a bit anticlimactic to plough through the frostbitten fields of 'approximate man', only to be confronted with the taxonomic 'anti-poems' of tzara's dadaist youth, all of which were written to irritate and outrage. at the same time, 'approximate man' exerts a retroactive effect upon the slightly-juvenile execrations of the dadaist years, illuminating the latent moral purpose of these early fusillades.

near the close of this book, we are treated to the incandescent prose poems of tzara's late years. the seductively didactic 'seeds and bran' rivals peret in sheer imaginative power, siphoning the polemical thrust of the dadaist manifestos and tzara's nietzschean sense of the tragic through the protean plasticity of the surrealist imagination. i will be reading this collection for decades to come.
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Product Description
A new translation of Tristan Tzara's Dada anti-masterpiece, Le coeur à gaz, with an introduction, commentary, and notes on staging by the translator, Eric v.d. Luft. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Selected vs. Collected, or Complete
I was certainly pleased to get 'any' quantity of works by Tristan Tzara translated into English, but I wonder if it was the decision of Lee Harwood, or of Black Widow Press to limit this volume to "Selected Poems" rather than offering one or more volumes of "Collected Poems," or "Complete Poems" instead.
Are the poems (especially the fragments from longer poems)in this edition ALL that Lee Harwood has translated over the years, or did he translate more than is offered here? I suspect that this has something to do with the publisher's estimation on the best size, price and marketability of this body of works, but I would have them know that I would gladly have paid a much higher price for a more extensive collection of Tristan Tzara's writings. ... Read more

Product Description
Chanson Dada contains all the poems of legendary Dada Poet Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) translated by English poet Lee Harwood. Begun in 1963 with Tzara's enthusiastic approval, the translations are selected from the full range of Tzara's published works, from those informed with the rebellious impulse towards absolute artistic freedom and the 'destruction' of formal language, to those concerned with the human act of struggle, and with moral affirmation.Also included is an introduction by Lee Harwood, a bibliography of Tzara's work, and Harwood's illuminating essay, "dada/My Heart Belongs to Dada." ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Still the best English language poetry overview of Tzara
Chanson Dada still contains some of the best English language translations of Tzara. Poet Lee Harwood (a poet of some 20 plus poetry titles himself) has captured part of the essence of Tzara. I only wish the volume was bilingual and more comprehensive. Tzara is still woefully under translated when one considers the amount of writing he did. Harwood's essay "Dada my heart belongs to dada" is a wonderful, evocative mini-survey of Dada. ... Read more

Product Description
4 X 1 is as puzzling as it is compelling. Notededitor and translator Pierre Joris brings together four seeminglydisparate authors, Rainer Maria Rilke, Tristan Tzara, Jean-PierreDuprey and Habib Tengour, forming a book of poems, prose-poems,semi-autobiographical prose, and poetic narratives. It is not ananthology, it is not a collected translations, it has roots in noparticular literary movement or idea. The only obvious binding factoris presented in the title: that these four works share a singletranslator.

The out-of-the-ordinary seems to be the overridingtheme. Even readers familiar with the two well-known authors, Rilkeand Tzara, will not find what they expect. Rilke, perhaps Europe’smost famous modernist poet, noted for his Elegies and his posthumouslypublished Letters to a Young Poet, is here represented by along prose work, "Testament." Tzara, one of the core founders ofDadaism, who wrote the first Dada texts along with the famed SevenDada Manifestos, is shown through the lens of his completeethnopoetic work, poems that resonate with the sounds of Africa,Australia and the Pacific.

Duprey and Tengour are virtualunknowns to readers in English. Duprey, a late French Surrealist,gained repute early in his short life for his dark, foreboding imageryand recognition by such luminaries as André Breton, who wrote, "Youcertainly are a great poet, doubled by someone who intrigues me. Yourlight is extraordinary." Duprey’s prose-poems in 4 X 1 aredreamscapes of intricate language, filled with fantastic creatures ofshadowy nightmares. Tengour, the only of the four still alive, hasemerged over the years as one of Algeria’s most forceful and visionaryfrancophone poetic voices of the post-colonial era. The selection hereis a re-imagination "through contemporary Maghrebian characters intheir Occidental exile in Paris the story of that most famous Arabtriumvirate of Omar Khayyam, Hassan as-Sabbah and Nizamal-Mulk."

However, as the book proceeds from Tzara to Rilketo Duprey to Tengour, the works cast a strange light on the authors'respective literary movements. These works, which have never beforebeen translated into English, subtly alter our understanding ofDadaism, Modernism, Surrealism and Postmodernism. And even morestrangely, when the book is taken as a whole, common themes emerge anddemand to be recognized.

Each work is full of estrangement,dehiscence, mental and physical expulsion; each breaks with psychicand national boundaries, exploding and spilling into the others. Rilkebecomes Dadaist, Tzara almost Postmodern, and Duprey’s surrealismslides into Tengour’s Arabian consciousness. Through mutual exile anddisplacement, the book takes us on a geographic and spiritualexcursion through the extraordinary. As Joris remarks in hisintroduction, fitting the four authors together "was like tracing aweirdly exemplary, if abbreviated, poetic map of the 20th century. . . a psycho-topography that leads from matters involving late 19th century colonialism all the way through the long and torturous 20th century to leave us exactly there where we have to imagine a new cultural constellation."

4 X 1 invites the reader to discover a different sort of book, a collection of different writings in known and unknown spaces, that cannot help but move the reader toward an image of the twentieth century organized without boundaries.
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Customer Reviews (5)

Surrealistic joy-ride
Pierre Joris in his book, 4X1: Works by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey, and Habib Tengour has compiled four seemingly unconnected authors into a surrealistic joy-ride of sorts. Though the motley assembly of these authors can seem haphazard there is a real destination to this book: some sort of connection between the four authors. Joris fleshes out this connection with his translations and succinct notes following each chapter. The connection via strangeness, in 4x1, pushes toward a better understanding of these poets; an understanding that would be hard to obtain examining each author individually.

Four poets, one translator




In 4 x 1, Pierre Joris translates lesser known works by Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke,Jean-Pierre Duprey, and Habib Tengour, four twentieth century poets out of Europe and North Africa. Together, this collection leads us on an intimate, evocative journey through four major poetic and literary trends (Dadaism, Modernism, Surrealism, and Postmodernism) of the previous hundred years. One book, four poets.Four poets, one translator. Joris is an expert guide. Here are four passages, not at all representative of major themes or styles, but simply four among many passages that lured me through the text, like stars in a distant night sky.

From Tzara's Dadaist ethnopoetic output, his Poemes Negres, this excerpt of a Maori song from New Zealand:"sing a song/shove/ an oar in the water/ deeply/ a long stroke/ ai ai/ a pull on the oar/ an old man stands out by the pull on his oar/ further/ bend/ cape/ out to sea/ out to sea"

From Rilke's 1921 Testament (unpublished until 1976):"And suddenly I wished, wished, o wished with all the ardor my heart had ever been capable of, wished to be, not one of the two apples - in the painting -, not of these painted apples on the painted window sill - even that seemed too much of a fate . . . No: to become the soft, the small, unseeming shadow of one of these apples - that was the wish into which the whole of my being gathered itself."

From Jean Pierre Duprey's 1959 The End and the Manner:"The Moon of Salt:1.During the night, during that night white as teeth, there was no more shadow upon which to hang one's skin, no more lateness into which to drain time, and the heart had used up its beats.. . .We were saying: / "She is long, long like nobody . .. / -- It's the road changed by the winds./ --A floating eyelid? /-- A beautiful time, indeed, this time of sliding sceneries in one's life!"

From Habib Tengour's 1983 The Old Man of the Mountain: "The café of youth, which opened at the Call, was furnished with a long rickety bench set against the wall.In his tiny shop, between the mosque and the café, the Tunisian was enthroned in front of his dough in the ochre of a petrol lamp. A light fog chased the nocturnal blue thus re-establishing the appearance of the empty square.
Omar bought fritters and paid for two rounds of tea.They were alone.
. . . Then they separated."

Joris's introduction, in which at one point he riffs on the styles of each poet, and his notes on the texts are all excellent.

English Translations of Amaxing Writing
A remarkable group of translated writings comprises 4x1, meaning four poets, one translator.Poet and educator Pierre Joris translates works by old and new writers: Tristan Tzara, Rainer Maria Rilke, Jean-Pierre Duprey, and Habib Tengour.The opening question is why this quartet of writers?Joris answers with the following reasons: he has chosen writers he considers his favorites, the works share a surrealist leaning, and, although he doesn't state it explicitly, the works must have been great fun to translate.They provide a recipe for success.
Opening the book are the Poèmes Nègres by Dada poet Tristan Tzara. These are the total output of Tzara's ethnopoetic works.They are sharp, surprising poems based upon tribal and oral tales from non-European cultures that Tzara assembled and composed from a variety of scholarly sources.The poems are astonishingly strange in that they are built upon a repetition and musicality quite different than what common today. The suite shares a pedestal in this regard perhaps only with the poems in Stephen Watson's Song of the Broke String (1991) in which he draws upon traditional /Xam stories. I would acquire 4x1 for the Poèmes Nègres alone.
Other excepted works include Rilke's diaristic The Testament and Duprey's The End and The Manner in which we find the brilliant lament, "I, for one, should never have gotten my feet caught in this galaxy!" The book wraps up with the first few chapters of Tengour's The Old Man of the Mountain. The story develops slowly as attentive description knocks against capricious musings.Representation becomes ethereal much like the scent of wood smoke tracing through a campground -- it's definitely there but impossible to physically grab.
When once I delved into Rilke, I spent a good deal of time flipping pages to compare the German with differing English translations. Through this process I could better understand the translators and their choices.For this reason I wish the book had also included original language texts. But we are forced to trust the decisions of Joris, who states at one point that he, "stayed on the whole as close to the main versions as possible, even if at times this means a certain loss in elegance or clarity."I appreciate this far more than translators who lose the original in wild poetic conceits.I'm about to head into unbridled praise but first must warn casual readers, a couple of sentences in the introduction are burdensome literary jargon.Don't be scared off, they are a tiny anomaly.4x1 is the rarest of treats, available, quite luckily, for instructors, students, and everyone whose world demands great poetry and contemporary fiction.Rhymingly put, four times one is four times the fun. -- Christopher Willard is also a reviewer for BookPleasures.

A Cross-Cultural Education
"4 X 1" gathers together four previously published translations by the distinguished poet Pierre Joris. It will prove a happy surprise for anyone attuned to 20th century poetics, art, and sociology. (Odd that we can now begin to think of the 20th century as a bygone era. Of Joris's subjects, Rilke and Tzara began it; Duprey was mid-century; Tengour, born in 1947, is still very much active.)

For those with an interest in Rilke, this book is self-recommending, containing as it does the first-ever English translation of his "Testament," which had remained unpublished until 1976. Beyond that, the little known corners of Dadaism, Surrealism, and Arab poetry that Joris explores are fascinating, and he helpfully ties all this together in his postludes, which are erudite and to the point. Graced with evocative artwork by Nicole Peyrafitte, "4 X 1" is handsomely presented by Inconundrum Press.

Tristan Tzara, best known as a Surrealist poet, devoted a deal of effort to creating "ethnopoetry," translations into French (and sometimes German) of what he termed Negro poetry. In reality, his source material (supplied by the researches of archeologists and ethnographers) was far-flung, coming from various parts of Africa, Mozambique, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands. Tzara's pithy introduction to this work concludes with a perfect summation of its effect: "Poetry lives first of all for the functions of dance, religion, music and work." Every now and then a stunning line of English poetry emerges from Joris's thrice removed translations.

According to Joris's lively notes, Tzara's ethnopoems sometimes received Dadaist presentations at Zurich's Cafe Voltaire, with Hugo Ball accompanying them on drums(!). We who have experienced an intervening century of Jazz, world music and dance, and hip-hop must surely smile at this picture.

All who care for Rilke will need to read "Testament," a collection of prose fragments, journal entries, letters, and poetry which chronicles the crucial years of upheaval and rootlessness arising from the chaos of WW 1. Through the use of third person narrative, a calm objectivity pervades some of the longer prose sections. A hidden river here (revealed by Joris in his notes) is Rilke's love affair with Baladine Klossowska, self-abnegating on her part as she provided him a desperately needed refuge and space to write. Thanks to her he was able to finish the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus.

Jean-Pierre Duprey is certainly not a household name to those unfamiliar with the second tier cadre of Surrealists, but he bears investigation. His poetry and prose poems translated here are hallucinatory and febrile; snapshots of a mad world that reminded me a bit of both Maldoror and Michaux. Duprey - writer, artist, and sculptor - was, according to Joris's welcome biographical note, a tormented man who saw bitter truths. Brutalized by what we tend to call "the system," he eventually hanged himself.

The fourth member of Joris's quartet is Habib Tengour, a Maghrebian born in Algeria in 1947. Did you know what a Maghrebian is (and that Derrida was one, too), or that there is such a thing as "Maghrebian Surrealism"? Pierre Joris will open a new vista for you here, timely and apposite for our exploding world.

In the US, the less adventurous (meaning most) among us have had limited exposure to Arab and other Middle Eastern poetry and prose. Thankfully, that is starting to change as voices from Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, and Iran are increasingly heard. It is perhaps salutary to encounter a writer from a different post-colonial area whose work, though it undoubtedly has a political foundation, focuses in these selections on the felt life, visceral and sensual experiences and dreams. Reading Tengour, and relating him to Western writers, I was reminded of the verbal roller coaster rides of Burroughs, set in the bazaar or taking "...a brown taxi to Qom...the bus to Baghdad." And those who relish Paul Bowles might here savor the other side of the mirror.

Altogether, I found Pierre Joris's collection to be a stimulating course in cross-cultural poetics, handily bound between covers. For me, it has led to an ever-widening circle of discoveries.

Anders Hansen

4x1
I thought this book extraordinary! It takes you to another relm -- above the mundane and floats you gently. I can't wait to read it again and again. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

the dadaist truth
i believe it is a marvelous book,written by the first dadaist-one of the most revolutionary movements in the twentieth century literature,tzara was the first to write it down,sharp and lucid,as though knives were questioning your essence of being -by cutting you up,leaving you with deep scars and petty beliefs,you are what you are,plus what dada says you are.a great book,one to keep in literature's hall of fame,kept in a golden cage,or a golden urinator... ... Read more

Product Description
Tristan Tzara était un écrivain, poète et essayiste de langue roumaine et française et l'un des fondateurs du mouvement Dada.À Zurich et à Paris, Il a écrit ses premiers textes: La Première aventure céleste de Mr Antipyrine (1916), Vingt-cinq poèmes (1918), et Sept manifestes Dada (1924).Des poètes contemporains voient en Tzara le chef de file de l'art nouveau.Vingt-cinq poèmes de Tristan Tzara a été imprimé par le typographe radical suisse J. Heuberger pour la Collection Dada.Il comprend dix gravures sur bois par Hans Arp.Le texte et les illustrations de cette édition ont été mis aussi étroitement que possible à l'œuvre originale. ... Read more

Product Description
While Tristan Tzara (1896-1963) is immediately recognisable as a figure within Dada and Surrealism, he has been almost entirely forgotten as a writer of verse. Seeking to reposition Tzara as a major European poet in his own right, Forcer's study represents the first book-length investigation of Tzara's life in poetry, which continued for nearly forty years after the Sept manifestes Dada. Tzara emerges as a powerful but hitherto neglected force within a French poetic tradition at present dominated by writers such as Apollinaire, Breton and Aragon. ... Read more

Product Description
Cette tude porte sur le thtre de Tristan Tzara, instigateur du mouvement Dada. L'originalit de ce travail consiste dans l'approche ethno-anthropologique de la dramaturgie avant-gardiste dans ses qualits orale, graphique et crite. L'auteur remet en question le nihilisme des spectacles dadastes en les considrant comme moyens de communication indits. C'est prcisment cette nouvelle forme communicationnelle que le public des annes 20 rejette comme non-significative. L'analyse de la rception des pices de Tzara permet de voir un nouveau type de spectateur, dot d'une perception scnique originale qui annonce l'art pluraliste du 20e sicle. Synopsis in English: This study focuses on the theatre of Tristan Tzara, instigator of the Dada movement. The originality of this work consists in the ethno-anthropological approach of the avant-garde dramatic art in its oral, graphic, and written qualities. ... Read more

Product Description
It would be impossible to overstate the importance of that moment when, in the artistic upheaval of the interwar years, the young Kurt Schwitters created his own art form, "Mertz," out of wood, labels, bus tickets, and various other detritus. Kurt Schwitters: 'I is Style' reproduces over twenty texts-poems, anecdotes, essays, and statements of purpose-by Schwitters and his contemporaries Tristan Tzara, Hans Arp, and Hans Richter. In addition, four major essays look closely at various aspects of Schwitters' work: distinguished art scholar Rudi Fuchs writes on Schwitters' art in the context of Expressionism; German Schwitters authority Siegfried Gohr examines Schwitters' ideas on the creative process and looks at his singular place in art history; Gunda Luyken's subject is Schwitters and America-his enthusiasm for the country and his contacts with American artists and writers; and Dorothea Dietrich explores his use of collage. ... Read more