Zaum for Strangers: Paris 1921

<p>The fourth volume of the bie bao series presents Ilya Zdanevich’s talk <em>The New Schools in Russian Poetry</em>, given in 1921 in Paris. In this talk, Zdanevich introduced zaum to the French audience. He declared that practical and poetic languages are two poles of existence, the two ways of life. Additionally, this fourth volume also presents Sergei Sigov’s essay ‘Ilya Zdanevich’s Onolatric Mystery’ from 1991, where one can read about donkey-themed ethnographic inflections of Zdanevich’s zaum plays. Himself a visual poet and the theoretician of transfuturism, Sigov discussed Zdanevich’s zaum as a strange amalgam of archaic with contemporary forms.</p> <p>Zdanevich writes about poetic words circling around the globe until they reach their destination, open to contaminating influences as they cross strange and exotic languages. Sigovs’s life-long collaborator Rea Nikonova’s visual experiments are the best examples of this poetic communication. This global itinerary is further expanded with two visual responses sent by Qing Zhou, a publisher and an artist from Beijing.</p>