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A Poem by Harold Norse
ready-made

I transport from the canvas unsteady dissonance in the blue!
I heard in a dream about Marcel Duchamp.
Was he speaking from the other side of the Great Glass heavenly Dada
windows?
Marcel agreed to bring “a little intelligence into painting…this
turpentine intoxication,” he scoffed.

On Sundays friends gathered in the garden at Puteaux
Leger, Picabia, Metzinger, Appollinaire, Reverdy,
“with almost juvenile good humor. One almost forgets that
at that time nobody was anybody,” recollected Duchamp.

“Fascinating frivolity and beautiful illusions!”
chortled Ribemont-Dessaignes. They behaved like schoolboys on
holiday,
playing pranks, games, enjoying slapstick. Fame and public image had
not yet arrived. Marcel could not stand them when they did.


Like Picabia he demanded unlimited freedom
hated groups and schools, repetition of style.
“Art is useless, impossible to justify!” declared Picabia.

A wild ungovernable infant
riding its hobbyhorse
around the world, trampling
the pompous beneath its hooves
DADA was just arriving.

Marcel drew logical conclusions:
he painted a moustache on the Mona Lisa,
an act as pointless as suicide

to which he was utterly indifferent.
His heart belonged to Dada.
He painted all values into a corner:
the urinal is the good, the beautiful, the true.

Marcel was in love with bad taste:
he invented a way of being absent
that Rimbaud never suspected.
“Duchamp is destined to reconcile art and the people,”
said the unknown Apollinaire.
But were the people ready for ready-mades?



Marcel arrived in New York with a glass ball full of Paris air.
It was a gift for a friend. His “explosions in a shingle factory,”
as one critic dubbed Nude Descending A Staircase in 1913,
shocked everyone. Marcel was famous. With ironic humor
he detached himself on his condescending staircase
where with lofty vanity he observed,
“Without vanity we should all kill ourselves.”
He had no other deadly sin.

In 1915 he exhibited a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool.
a bottle rack and a urinal titled Fountain.
The ready-mades became works of art, he said, as soon as he declared
them so: looking at an object made it art.
He signed the urinal R. Mutt (the name of a firm of sanitary engineers).
The urinal achieved immortality.

Meanwhile Gertrude Stein
as busy in her own studio
inventing Hemingway
and Virgil Thomson;
when she created Ezra Pound
she frowned, screamed
and threw the rough draft away.


“Remarks,” said Miss Stein, “are not literature.”

Stein and Duchamp took the 20th Century for a ride
on the merry-go-round of painted horses and calliope tunes
of childhood where they play in our memory still

The song of Rrose Selavy.
The love song of R. Mutt.
The pigeons on the grass song.
Song of unsteady dissonance.

Chanson of the urinal.
The pissoir melody.
Marcel Duchamp in drag
as Rrose Selavy
camps through the studios
of friends and foes.

Marcel and Man Ray play a game of chess lasting forty years.


Harold Norse. (1916 – 2009)