DADA | poetry - Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven : A Dozen Cocktails Please (1927)

 

A Dozen Cocktails Please

Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven

No spinsterlollypop for me—yes—we have  No bananas I got lusting palate—I  Always eat them— — — — — — —      They have dandy celluloid tubes—all sizes— Tinted diabolically as a baboon’s hind-complexion.  A man’s a—  Piffle!  Will-o’-th’-wisp! What’s the dread  Matter with the up-to-date-American-  Home-comforts? Bum insufficient for the  Should-be wellgroomed upsy!  That’s the leading question.  There’s the vibrator— — —  Coy flappertoy! I am adult citizen with  Vote—I demand my unstinted share  In roofeden—witchsabbath of our baby-  Lonian obelisk.   What’s radio for—if you please?  “Eve’s dart pricks snookums upon  Wirefence. ”  An apple a day— — —    It’ll come— — — —  Ha! When? I’m no tongueswallowing yogi.  Progress is ravishlng— It doesn’t me— Nudge it— Kick it— Prod it— Push it— Broadcast— — — — That’s the lightning idea!  S.O.S. national shortage of—   What ?  How are we going to put it befitting  Lifted upsys?  Psh! Any sissy poet has sufficient freezing  Chemicals in his Freudian icechest to snuff all  Cockiness. We’ll hire one.  Hell! Not that! That’s the trouble— —   Cock crow silly!  Oh fine!  They’re in France—the air on the line— The Poles— — — — — — Have them send waves—like candy— Valentines— — — — “Say it with— — —  Bolts !  Oh thunder!  Serpentine aircurrents— — — Hhhhhphssssssss! The very word penetrates  I feel whoozy!  I like that. I don’t hanker after Billyboys—but I am entitled  To be deeply shocked.  So are we—but you fill the hiatus.  Dear—I ain’t queer—I need it straight— — A dozen cocktails—please— — — — about this poem “A Dozen Cocktails Please” was first published in 1927 in the magazine  The Little Review, edited by Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap.  About the poem, biographers Irene Gammel and Susan Zelazo  write in their introduction to the book Body Sweats:  The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven  (MIT Press, 2011), “Boldly erotic, the Baroness’s poems offer  poignant commentary on the cultural consumption and valuation  f the female body and what insights that might lend to an  understanding of the economy of art. Thus, it is in poems like  ‘A Dozen Cocktails—Please,’ that she, as a woman, rivals and  arguably outperforms the shocking bodily exuberance of male  Dadaists such as poet-boxer Arthur Cravan.”  They continue, “To demonstrate her appetites is to make herself  present, to take up space in a sociocultural landscape that privileged  male subjectivity and objectified women. By inhabiting her own  exhibitionism, the Baroness reclaims the female body in language,  but also transforms that body through a new language of desire.” Elsa Hildegard Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven was born Elsa Plötz  on July 12, 1874, in Swinemünde (now Świnoujście, Poland), in what  was then the German province of Pomerania. Otherwise known as  “The Baroness,” she was a German artist, poet, and performer  associated with the Dada movement. Active among the literary,  artistic, and intellectual circles of early twentieth-century New York,  she died on December 14, 1927, in Paris.