ABSTRACT

We do not want more poems about everyday life; there are enough and more than enough poems that do that; but never today enough Dada poems.

(Forrest-Thomson 1978)

TALKING NONSENSE Accusations of nonsense put literary people on the defensive. 'This is not nonsense talk', writes Marjorie Perloff (1987: 231), defensively, of a passage from a poem she admires by the postmodernist 'language' poet Charles Bernstein. She is right to get defensive, for the passage in question (from a poem called 'Dysraphism') certainly looks like nonsense, and a sustainable charge of nonsense is normally fatal to a poem's claims on our serious readerly attention. A stronger defence, however, would have involved turning the accusation into a description, that is, admitting the charge of nonsense while denying that the label 'nonsense' must inevitably be pejorative. 'Nonsense' can just as weIl identify a valuable, and valued, quality. It has functioned that way historically, and not only in marginalized poetry ('children's classics': Dodgson, Lear) , but, more pertinently, in Russian futurist zaum and Dada poetry. Many postmodernist poems might appropriately be described as 'neo-Dada' or 'nonsense' , and part of the process by which we might come to understand why such poems could be worth writing and reading involves coming to understand the possible uses and value of nonsense. 1 In recognition of this, the present essay uses the term 'nonsense' neither pejoratively nor dismissively, but as a neutral descriptive category.