The first of our creative sessions around 11-11-11 happened last week at New Art Exchange, when we led a workshop bringing together collage and cut-up poetry.
We took this idea from some of the things that went on in the art world around the time of WW1. Because of the carnage people were seeing, and the sense (even amongst those left at home) that the world had tuned upside down, the old styles of art couldn’t any longer reflect how people felt. Movements like surrealism, expressionism, and Dada responded to this widespread sense that the world had changed beyond recognition, and that everything that used to make sense, no longer did.
So in our workshop, we used collage - an idea that came from the Surrealists, who liked to cut out and juxtapose unexpected images from many sources, to produce a dream-like effect; and the cut-up poem, an idea created by poet Tristan Tzara, leading light of the anti-establishment Dada movement, just after WW1. At a Dadaist rally, Tzara made poems by picking words at random out of a hat; and he often used word-collages comprising text from newspapers, leaflets, and other random sources. The idea is that, hiding within any text you like (whether it’s a leaflet from the bus company or a letter from the DSS) there lies a poem, just as a statue is hidden within a block of marble. All you have to do to reveal the poem is to chop away at the text and rearrange things. Each person will do this differently, and will come up with a different poem - as Tzara said, “your poem will resemble you.”
We made cut-ups with old children's books, newspapers, novels, and actual poems written during WW1, and got some vivid pieces that gave us a feel for how some European writers responded to the traumas of WW1. But the workshop also made us think about what other responses writers made to the War, in countries outside Britain. Many of us learnt a lot in school about the British "war poets" - but what else was there? Read the next blog post to find out.
