Its not dadaisms fault that it became internalized as a true art by the academia. Whether art is found, created, destroyed, parodied, or any other thing, it is still art if it is labeled as such. The approaches to producing this type of art are no where near bankrupt. Anagrams are the hardest thing I have ever had to work with, and anyone who says that its not art in the classical sense is sorely mistaken. The creativity that goes into the process of creating Oulipo and Dadaist style compositions should never be understated. I will admit The Fountain is a bit wacky, and perhaps too absurd for my tastes, but its contributions to normalizing the avant garde and creating a sense that art can be whatever one chooses it to be has had a major impact on modern art. I believe that whenever something as abstract as these movements become a part of the dominant culture, it can make room for the new avant garde movements and works to have a chance in the spotlight.

I'm going to use the poem "And The Moon And The Stars And The World" by Charles Bukowski in an attempt to create something new via anagram.


Knights town galla,
Thaws hat, rough footed sol
Poet King e.i.n.- indows W.
Over enthusiastic whig dew
Hi! Forty ton fig gif.
Hard timbered eden-Dushanbe

wow...that was actually particularly difficult.

If proceeduralism is the scaffolding that a creates the dimensions of a poem, it can be assumed that an engagement with the absurd is more likely, but not entirely necessary. There is always a pressure to write within the constraints that are being employed by the author, and it can become necessary to embrace the absurd in an attempt to maintain cohesion within the scaffolding. Not all lines or stanzas can make perfect sense all the time, or fit perfectly within the poem. Sometimes it can be particualry hard to find a word that ryhmes with another, or to write a line with a perfect syllable count. Even Shakepeare's poems have discrepincies in scansion. Understanding that the absurd must be utilized on occasion for the purposes of proceeduralism can not only add memerable aspects to the poem, as the absurd can be delightfully entertaining to the audience, but can save the writer some frustration in choosing the perfect line. Poetry is wonderful in that it does not have to make sense 100% of the time. If it did, it would be even more difficult to write than it already is. As an effect of proceeduralism, the meaning of poems can be made to be interpreted by the audiences differently, as any one reader of the poem will be affected differently by the authors use of the absurd. The effects of contraints could also be contstrued in the manner that which meaning is hidden in the poem; not all poems are straight forward in their meaning and must be deciphered by the audience. Such is the work of Yeats, as his spurning gyres and allusions to who knows what weave about within his works, it can become confused, jumbled, and frustrating to the reader. Enigmatic passages seem to me to be a function of constrained writing. Even in my own poetry, I must resort to the absurd via metaphor or other devices to make something work. Unfortunately, it can make whatever poem this is applied to hard to figure out, as well as decrease readability in the audience.

The beat generation seems to have borrowed heavily from the unconventional forms that have appeared through Dada. Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Kerouac's stream of consciousness stylings achieve some of the functions of Dada in that they are departures from what is accepted by the academia, and that they can be provoking to their audiences. Both the beat and Dada movements share the war induced angst and turned it outward in an attempt to change the social norms of several societies, so that they may provoke an emotional response against the power of institutionalized control of capitalist war mongering. Despite their avant garde beginnings, the changes to the norms they sought to break have become internalized and accepted as legitimate, resulting in the assimilation of their former counter culture into the dominant culture. With time, what they considered anti art has become the foundations of celebrated contemporary art; thereby, reducing what they've done to what they hated.

Good morning everyone. My same is Dalton Aday, and I enjoy writing. The concept of form versus constraints is an interesting one. I have always admired the challenge of being creative within a given set of guidelines, but the allure of poetry without constraints has recently started stirring my attention. I would rather read constrained poetry with set rhyme patterns and syllable counts per line; however, i feel now that greater control of the disbursement of emotion can be garnered through the specific placement of words and phrases within a line or stanza without regard to any set of constraints other than those associated to the piece by the writer with the explicit intention of conveying explicit meaning. Constrained poems like ghazals and sonnets forced me to use allegories, hard to interpret stock images, and metaphors only understood by me to maintain whatever control I could over of the poems constraints. Through the ignoring of placement of images and ideas to maintain specific structure, I have found that my own poems have more meaning, and are much more emotionally charged. Except this one, its just weird:

Plectrum drives down
the road to the machine head is bumpy red metal
while down below the plectrum plucks away
the lights turn green to red and slide around
backing up traffic by keeping perfect tune with
the feet banging horribly on
the plastic faces and walls of noise
they stop and the plucking starts as
a tacet for fear ends and
the silence is broken by up and down
beatings of silver lines
in lines, in line with
the cowboys beating whore hearts of
checkered dresses starring down
the road but not up the mountain
Its nicked and shit crowds under the silver but
the deadening filth takes tone just how you like it and
the plucking never stops ringing until it pisses off your friends while
they show you the dark thing and seven minor bees rip through
stinging the shit out of everything until
the plucking stops and
the eruption begins on the road
melting faces of on lookers and
the smell of sticky piss haunts the beetles in ways
we'll never understand