don't say no-no to dada

By Lavinia Leon

This journey in the company of Dada (as [mis]understood by a Romanian-Canadian who's been fascinated with Dada for three decades - and has the collaborative poems with titles such as "Nuclear Loves" to prove it) is only as long as you want it to be.

If you like questioning meaning, but also the idea that there can be one at all, you might like this chap-zine-workbook.

If you suspect there might be sense even in "nonsense", and that some patterns could be in the eyes of the pattern-seeker, you might enjoy the speculation in which this book originates. Could two poets born one year and barely two hundred miles apart, who walked very different literary-philosophical paths (Lucian Blaga and Tristan Tzara) have anything in common, even if that's the tension of apparent opposites? One sought meaning in ways referred to as "neo-Kantian," and his poetry is imbued with the sense that, in his own words, "eternity was born in the village" - even as he wrote about metaphysics. The other was, among several who frequented the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich around the time of the Great War, responsible for the birth of the Dada movement.

There is no overt philosophy, history, or literary commentary in this book, but there is a lot of ludic intention - play as a means to un-writer's-block creativity. There are two short deconstruction-reconstruction experiments, a couple of comments on translating poetry, and a few cubist artworks, together with a handful of open-ended, Dada-inspired exercises for the reader.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FY5WR8V8
• ISBN13: 9798262748211
• Release Date: October 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 38 Pages
• Weight: 0.19 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.1" x 6.0" x 9.0"