Tim Cremin

Dada Poem with Jim in It

“I Zimbra” is a song by Talking Heads, the first cut on their third album, Fear of Music, which was released in 1979. The song features several percussion instruments, including the surdo, djembe, and talking drum. The first time I heard it, in the ground-floor apartment on West Doty that Jim and I shared that fall, the lyrics sounded African to my ears—I heard them as a prayer or sacred chant, imagining an intense ritual with drumming and dancing that generates a profound communal trance. Turns out they don’t mean anything—they are pure nonsense adapted from the poem “Gadji beri bimba” by Hugo Ball, a poet of the Dada movement, which took place around the time of the First World War. The Dadaists rejected reason (which had led to the war’s large-scale, mechanized killing) and embraced irrationality. I really got into Talking Heads back then. Jim never did.

real time
the signal looking
a lot like noise

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About the Author

Tim Cremin is a high school math teacher in Massachusetts.  His poetry has appeared in many journals, including Acorn, bottle rockets, Failed Haiku, Frogpond, Mayfly, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, and tinywords.