Avant-gard poetry in the twentieth century made experimental breakthroughs in imagery, grammar, diction, voice and modes of language, mainly within the framework of modernism. The beginning of poetic modernism pioneered a marginal experiment in poetry, namely the visual experiment in avant-gard poetry.

With the poets Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara, as well as the artists Picabia and Duchamp, Dadaism began a cross-border experiment in avant-garde poetry in Zurich, Switzerland. The two initiators of Dadaism, Hugo Ball and Tristan Tzara, were both poets, but the acts they initiated actually went beyond poetry to involve performance, collage, installation, photography and other major modern forms throughout 20th century art. Hugo Ball’s first experiments with poetry in Zurich were sound-centred costume performances in which he invented a so-called ‘sound poetry’, consisting of a random patchwork of raw words, which he performed live in his tavern. In his own version of the Dada Manifesto, Ball declared, “All words are invented by others. I need something of my own, my own rhythm, vowels and consonants, to make the rhythm harmonious, my own.”

Another leader of Zurich Dada, the Romanian poet Tristan Tzara, has created a kind of ‘collage poetry’. Instead of writing the lines of his poems by hand, he cut out a line or large word from a newspaper and then collaged them randomly on a piece of white paper. Tzara describes his way of doing this, “Pick up a newspaper, take a pair of scissors, pick an article, cut it out, then cut out each word, put them in a bag, shake it …… and touch them out one by one, rejoin them together and spell out a poem that I don’t know what it is. ” This approach influenced post-war pop art, episodic art collage and randomism, and had an impact far beyond poetry. Breton, an early member of Dada and a leader of Surrealism, also experimented with the ‘collage poetry’ of newspaper clippings in the 1920s. Tzara’s Dadaist manifesto was in poetic form, but it was a novel experiment in typography, with different key words and sentences piled together in a variety of fonts and sizes.

The main form of poetry is text, but poetry as a printed text involves typography, fonts, colour and graphic relationships such as illustrations. Modernism lies to a large extent in an experimentation with elements and media, which give rise to collage peotry.