2016 marks a century of Dada. Conceived the same year as the Battle of the Somme, Dada was a short-lived, brilliant reaction against the political and cultural oppression of the early 1900s. Dada revolutionised the way art was made and thought about, pioneering many new techniques – sound poetry, photomontage, readymades, and more. On this new online course, we will try to re-capture some of the energy of the original Dada explosion, creating anarchic, surprising and daring poetry using Dadaist techniques. It is easy to see how this particular moment in our history has many parallels with today’s global political landscape, with current wars and conflicts, fiercely heightened global inequality, unprecedented developments in science and physics, and the need for a rigorous new poetic intervention to shake up the complacency and political apathy we can see around us. We’ll re-examine the philosophies of Tolstoy, Nietzsche, Cioran and Adorno to create our own aphorisms, manifestos, vignettes, and we will use free-association, erasure, ‘anti-meditation’, and automatic writing to create our own forms of revolutionary anti-poetry.