FABULOUS TIMES, PLACES AND PEOPLE: PARIS IN THE 20s and 30s.

POETRY

Photo: Ideogramme, in the shape of a horse by surrealist poet Apollinaire.

Everyone loves a good poet, though they're not always so keen on themselves. Cubism and collage had made the wordsmiths look at their medium with fresh eyes - new ideas were championed by the arch-Modernist Apollinaire. These included arranging words into images on the page, experimental punctuation and all sorts of other confusing things. He also invented the word 'Surrealism' in an attempt to describe the musical happening "Parade" in 1922.

In the modernist world of Parisian poetry Cubism and Dada had a resounding effect. Not only did the subject-matter go through a radical change, but even the shape of the poetry altered. These changes are most noticeable in the work of Guillaume Apollinaire, a close friend of the Dada artists, who championed their work as an art critic and helped build many a reputation. In his Calligrammes Apollinaire experimented with arranging fragments of speech spatially, in the shape of the subject of the poem. Hence a poem about a horse would be ... horse-shaped. Apollinaire also experimented with poetry based on the layout and subject matter of the press, proudly claiming: "I believe that I have found a source of inspiration in prospectuses … catalogues, posters, advertisements of all sorts. Believe me, they contain the poetry of our epoch". The complete removal of punctuation was another of Apollinaire's innovations, leading the Cubist painter Georges Braque to describe his work as closer to "Cubist typography" than "Cubist poetry".

Apollinaire claimed to have no need of punctuation, saying "the rhythm itself and the division into lines provide the real punctuation, and no other is needed". Dada's call for the freedom to experiment lead to much nonsense poetry. This freedom allowed taking a newspaper article, cutting it up, putting the pieces in a bag and shaking it. The order in which the words or groups of words came out determined the order of the words in the poem. While in Paris Ezra Pound followed the Dada movement closely, drawn by its subversive tendencies. He even attempted his own Dada poems, one of which was published in The Little Review under a pseudonym and is as far from traditional poetry as it is possible to get. Its opening lines are: "Godsway bugwash... Bill's way backwash ..." ... and it includes such nonsense as: "... Brot wit thranen, con plaisir ou con patate pomodoro …." Hemingway, on the other hand, thought Dada was ridiculous, and was in Paris writing economical prose stripped of superfluous words and florid language. He worked on this new, sparse style with the help of Pound, who he claimed taught him "to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations".
 Hemingway was in Paris as a reporter, while Pound was contributing regularly to The Little Review and writing "Parisian Letters" to The Dial. Several issues of The Little Review were devoted to the work of the modernist artists Pound was rubbing shoulders with. He also published a piece for the New York Evening Post which focused on Picabia and the Parisian scene.  With the demise of Dada the poets and writers Louis Aragon, Andre Breton and Philippe Soupault became principal members of the Surrealist group, going on to write novels which had Paris as a focus. Later, in 1929, Walter Benjamin wrote of the Surrealists "At the centre of this world of things stands the most dreamed-of of their objects, the city of Paris itself".

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