Body Sweats review in London Student

 

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874-1927) was a German-born avant-garde, Dadaist artist and poet. Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is the first major English collection of her work, and was edited by the Baroness' biographer Irene Gammel and poet and poetics scholar Suzanne Zelazo.

 

She is one of the almost-forgotten names of modernism, though well-known among the literati of the 1920's. She was part of the New York dada scene with Marcel Duchamp, and was close friends with Djuna Barnes. She appears briefly in Pound's Canto XCV, which laments that she went "mad". The blurb describes her aptly as "a neurasthenic, kleptomaniac, man-chasing proto-punk poet and artist". It goes on: She "not only dressed and behaved with purposeful outrageousness, but she set an example that went well beyond the eccentric divas of the twenty-first century, including her conceptual descendant, Lady Gaga." This collection fulfils the Baroness' desire to see her poetry published in a book, a project she began but did not achieve during her lifetime. Djuna Barnes, a close friend and editor, never got around to publishing her work posthumously.The book has a detailed scholarly introduction which contextualizes the poems and gives some background. Poems are organized by theme. The Baroness' poetry typically speeds vertically down the page, with a lot of line dashes to add emphasis and speed:

 

      I
      Taint
      Thy
      Teeth
      Into
      Slashing
      Me —

 

And the slower, beautiful: