Our Dada Manifesto demanded a new poetry. Poetry was then dominated by expressionist form, introduced by August Stramm. He had achieved a sort of ecstatic stammering effect by eliminating pronouns, conjugation and declension, and by reducing syntax to a bare minimum. A poem for me is the rhythm of its sounds. Poetry is produced by rhythmic sequences of consonants and diphthongs set against a counterpoint of associated vowels and it should be simultaneously phonetic and visual.
Poetry is a fusion of dissonance and onomatopoeia.
Poems emerge from the poet's inner vision and ear, materializing as the power of sound, noise and tonal form, anchored in the very act of language itself. Spiritual vision, spatial form and material sound form are not poetry in themselves but they all make up the poem. It was then that I wrote my first purely abstract poem. I had realised Huelsenbeck was mistaken in his allegiance to static poetry. A poem is an act which associates respiration with audition, linked inseparably to the passage of time.