Dadaism
Quick answer: Dadaism was the anti-art revolt of 1916: chance, nonsense and cut-up poems against a world at war. Learn its history, key figures and living lessons.
Dadaism was the deliberately absurd anti-art movement born in Zurich in 1916, which answered the organised slaughter of the First World War with nonsense, chance and provocation. If rational civilisation had produced the trenches, the Dadaists reasoned, then reason itself deserved mockery. Even the name is a shrug: 'dada' is French baby-talk for a hobby horse, reportedly found by stabbing a dictionary at random.
For poets, Dada matters far beyond its short life. Chance-based composition, sound poetry, collage and the cut-up all begin here, and every writer who has shuffled lines on a table or trusted an accident over a plan is working in its shadow. It is the permission slip for productive nonsense.
Cabaret Voltaire and After
The movement started in a small Zurich nightclub, the Cabaret Voltaire, opened by Hugo Ball in February 1916. Ball performed sound poems, verse made of invented syllables, while dressed in a cardboard costume; Tristan Tzara wrote manifestos that contradicted themselves on purpose; Jean Arp made collages by dropping torn paper and gluing it where it fell.
After the war Dada spread to Berlin, where it turned sharply political, to New York, where Marcel Duchamp exhibited a urinal as sculpture, and to Paris, where by 1924 most of the group had followed André Breton into Surrealism. Dada burned for roughly eight years and influenced the next hundred.
The Cut-Up and Other Dada Methods
Tzara published a recipe: cut a newspaper article into single words, shake them in a bag, and copy them out in the order they emerge; the poem, he promised, will resemble you. The serious idea inside the joke is that chance bypasses habit, and habit is the enemy of fresh language.
Suppose the bag hands you 'harvest', 'signature', 'quietly' and 'engine'. A line like 'Quietly the engine signs its harvest' exists nowhere in your usual mind, which is exactly the point. Chance proposes; the poet still disposes.
What a Working Poet Can Steal
Use Dada as a generator when your drafts feel predictable. Cut up your own failed poem and reassemble it; write one line by dictionary stab; read a stanza backwards and keep the best accident. None of this replaces judgement. The Dadaists were superb selectors pretending to be pure gamblers, and the craft lies in recognising which accident is actually a gift.
What poets can take from this
- Cut up a failed draft of your own and reassemble it in a new order before abandoning it.
- Try one chance procedure per month to break habits: dictionary stabs, shuffled lines, random page prompts.
- Treat accidents as auditions; keep only the ones that produce real feeling or image.
- Read a Hugo Ball sound poem aloud to feel how much rhythm survives without meaning.
- Let a poem be funny; Dada proves that comedy and seriousness can share a stanza.
Try it yourself
Cut twenty words out of today's news, draw them blind, and write them down in order. Then write a second poem of the same length that 'translates' the nonsense into a memory of your own, keeping three of the drawn words.
Questions
Was Dada against all art?
It claimed to be, loudly, while producing art the whole time. The real target was solemn, official culture and the rationalism that had led to war. Dada's paradox, anti-art made carefully, is part of its meaning.
What is the difference between Dada and Surrealism?
Dada is the destructive parent, Surrealism the constructive child. Dada used chance and nonsense to attack meaning; Surrealism reused the same tools to hunt a deeper meaning in the unconscious. Many members, including Tzara eventually, moved from one to the other.
Who invented the cut-up technique?
Tristan Tzara published the newspaper-and-scissors recipe in 1920. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin revived and systematised the cut-up in the 1950s, and songwriters from Bowie onward borrowed it from them.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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