Kurt Schwitters

“Oh you, beloved of my 27 senses, I love to you! 
You, yours; you to you, I to you, you to me, - - - - we?
That does not, incidentally, belong here!

Who are you, uncounted woman-creature, you are, are you?
People say you are.
Let them say it; they do not know how the church tower stands.

You wear your hat on your feet and wander on your hands,
on your hands you wander.

Halloo, your red clothes, sliced into white folds,
Red I love, Anna Blume, red I love to you.
You, yours; you to you, I to you, you to me, - - - - we?
That, incidentally, belongs in the cold glow!
Anna Blume, red Anna Blume, how do people say it?”

This is a translation of the opening of Kurt Schwitters’ poem An Anna Blume – to Anna Flower. Today it is set reading in schools and is perhaps the most important Dadaist love poem of all. You will already have heard that it is not a conventional love poem. In places, it is more sound play and wordplay than poetry concerned with meaning. The artist unsettles the listener with grammatical errors and unexpected asides that step outside the space of the love dialogue. Sense is followed by nonsense; the familiar is linked, through new combinations, with the absurd. In 1920, Schwitters commented:

“I set sense against nonsense. I prefer nonsense, but that is a purely personal matter. I feel sorry for nonsense, that it has so rarely been given artistic form so far – which is why I love nonsense.”

Schwitters first published the poem in 1919 in a volume of poetry in the avant-garde series Die Silbergäule, the silver mare, where he described it as Merz Poem No. 1. The following year, he had the poem displayed as a poster on advertising columns in Hanover. The poster resembles an announcement for a political rally. In fact, however, it is a literary and poetic creation – one that is Dadaist and grotesque, at that. The strategy worked, and Schwitters attracted considerable attention for both himself and Anna Blume.