The Rothenberg Dada Strain

Jerome Rothenberg posted the following announcement on the Buffalo Poetics list — & I think it is worthwhile repeating here on Nomadics:

As a kind of followup to the Dada show in New York, I’ve just posted the following on my ubu.com ethnopoetics web site: Ethel Waters’ 1922 recording of That Da Da Strain. The tune was a standard for early jazz groups, but over the years it lost its words & became purely instrumental. For myself the title was incredibly seductive, and sometime around 1960 I proposed to do an anthology of European Dada writings & to use That Dada Strain as a title. Nothing came of that until the Dada section in Poems for the Millennium, but I did use it in the 1980s for a book of my own work and for a German radio hörspiel (soundplay) and a staged version by a Living Theater offshoot in the late 1980s. The URL for the Waters version is http://www.ubu.com/ethno/soundings/waters.html, or go directly to http://www.ubu.com/ethno/ for the full lineup. Now that I’ve finally tracked it down, words & all, I take it to be a significant if coincidental part of the history of Dada.

Also a second new audio addition to the site consists of two versions of a “toast,” The Signifying Monkey, from African-American oral tradition. The URL for this one is http://www.ubu.com/ethno/soundings/monkey.html.