Walter Conrad Arensberg
Born 1878 in Pittsburgh. Died 1954. Remembered mostly for the art collections he founded, his home in N.Y.C. was a center during World War I for poets & artists like Duchamp, Picabia, Man Ray, Marsden Hartley, Mina Loy. After 1916 his own poetry turned to radical explorations of language & structure, appearing in magazines like Rogue, his own Blind Man, Kreymborg’s Others (which he helped to found), Man Ray’s TNT, & Picabia’s 391. He moved, from the early l920s on, to studies of Bacon/Shakespeare, Dante, etc., in search of hidden messages, but his poetry remained a presence in Rexroth’s mid-20s "cubism," e.g., & bears an acknowledged resemblance to recent poets like Clark Coolidge & Ron Silliman, who continue to probe the possibility of "abstract" &/or non-syntactical composition. While there’s never been a book of Arensberg’s "cubist" & Dada poems, some of the earlier work (influenced by French symbolism, etc.) appeared in Poems (1914) & Idols (1916).

 DADA IS AMERICAN

Cubism was born in Spain; France just picked the patent up, didn’t even clear it with the state. Too bad, Cubism’s a little like French matches, never did catch fire; surface of that box was short on phosphorous. And just when Monsieur Rosenberg’s all set to fabricate an enormous box, it turns out that the matches are all soggy, floating around in the mouldy liquid.

Cubism was Spanish, it became Alsacian, now it’s dancing on red carpets in a few commercial Paris galleries.

No chance for it to cry: Viva DADA; it’s a consumptive on a chaise-longue; youth has flown out of its mean old eyes; just makes you think of that old lady, Roch Grey; hates her children, speaks of nurses with the utmost scorn.

I’ve had the urge to say a little about Cubism, being one of those who was expecting something from that geometric word; now I’m forced to admit my disillusionment and at the same time my joy in contemplating DADA, the world-wide representative of everything that’s young, alive & playful; Dada whose religion doesn’t come out of a cathedral like appendicitis.

DADA is American, DADA is Russian, DADA is Spanish, DADA is Swiss, DADA is German, DADA is French, Belgian, Norwegian, Swedish, Monacan. Anyone who lives without rules, who doesn’t love museums except for their floors, is DADA.... A true work of Dada shouldn’t live more than six hours.

I, Walter Conrad Arensberg, American poet, declare that I am against Dada, seeing no way but that to be up dada, up dada, up dada, up dada.

Bravo, bravo, bravo. Viva Dada.