ABSTRACT
Alfred Jarry became acquainted with a new generation of avant-garde writers and artists, on whom he would have a considerable influence. The Almanacs were inspired by aspects of the artistic counterculture found in the cabarets of Montmartre and by popular tradition, cultures that operated on the margins of contemporary art and literature. The collage aesthetic in the Almanacs, and the re-evaluation of existing modes of representation, prefigures the experiments of the early avant-garde movements of the twentieth century, such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso's 'papiers colles' and the work of writers surrounding these painters, such as Guillaume Apollinaire. Jarry's poetics announced a paradigmatic change in the arts, which involved a new dialectic between avant-garde and mass-culture. Apollinaire would, find poetry in the morning's newspaper, as he wrote in his poem Zone, allowing his poetry to reflect the dynamics of modern life, through form as well as content.
