Jean Arp, Dadaland (1948) :
I would meet with Tzara and Serner at the Odéon and in Zurich's Café de la Terrasse to work on a cycle of poems: The Hyperbola of the Crocodile-Hairdresser and the Cane. This kind of verse was subsequently dubbed "Automatic Poetry" by the surrealists. Automatic poetry emerges directly from the poet's guts or any other organ that has stored up reserves. Neither the Postilion of Longjumeau, nor the Alex- andrine, nor grammar, nor aesthetics, nor Buddha, nor the Sixth Commandment could interfere. The poet crows, curses, sighs, stutters, yodels at will. His poems are like nature: they stink, laugh, and rhyme like nature. Trivia, or at least what people call trivia, are as precious to him as sublime rhetoric, for in nature a broken twig is as beautiful and as important as a star, and it is men who arrogate for themselves the right to judge what is beautiful or ugly.
