Jens Klimek

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Hugo Ball was one of the founders of the Zurich Dada movement and wrote this poem for a performance at Zurich’s Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. A nonsense poem, its words have no actual meaning, merely constituting an absurd sequence of sounds. On 23 June 1916 Ball noted in his diary: Tinvented a new type of poetry, 'poetry without words' or sound-poems, in which the distribution of vowels is decided and allotted solely based on the values of the initial row.’ The performance of his poem, to an astonished audience, took place in a quasi-sacred atmosphere, with Ball delivering his verses in a deliberately over-serious and solemn manner. The intention of this setting is not to mimic the nonsensical nature of the poem, but to provide a contextual frame against which the absurdity of the text becomes more and more evident.