Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings of Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven

by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, Irene Gammel (Editor), Suzanne Zelazo (Editor)

The first major collection of poetry written in English by the flabbergasting and flamboyant Baroness Elsa, “the first American Dada.” As a neurasthenic, kleptomaniac, man-chasing proto-punk poet and artist, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven left in her wake a ripple that is becoming a rip—one hundred years after she exploded onto the New York art scene. As an agent provocateur within New York's modernist revolution, “the first American Dada” 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. Her delirious verse flabbergasted New Yorkers as much as her flamboyant persona. As a poet, she was profane and playfully obscene, imagining a farting God, and transforming her contemporary Marcel Duchamp into M'ars (my arse). With its ragged edges and atonal rhythms, her poetry echoes the noise of the metropolis itself. Her love poetry muses graphically on ejaculation, orgasm, and oral sex. When she tired of existing words, she created new “phalluspistol,” “spinsterlollipop,” “kissambushed.” The Baroness's rebellious, highly sexed howls prefigured the Beats; her intensity and psychological complexity anticipates the poetic utterances of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Published more than a century after her arrival in New York, Body Sweats is the first major collection of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's poems in English. The Baroness's biographer Irene Gammel and coeditor Suzanne Zelazo have assembled 150 poems, most of them never before published. Many of the poems are themselves art objects, decorated in red and green ink, adorned with sketches and diagrams, presented with the same visceral immediacy they had when they were composed.

Genres: Poetry, Art, Nonfiction

434 pages, Hardcover

First published October 7, 2011

About the author

Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (sometimes also called Else von Freytag-von Loringhoven) was a German-born DADA artist and poet who worked for several years in Greenwich Village, New York City, United States.

Reviews

[Alan (the Lone Librarian rides again) Teder · Rating 5 out of 5]

The First American Dada
A review of the MIT Press hardcover (October 7, 2011).

When she is dada she is the only one living anywhere who dresses dada, loves dada, lives dada. - Jane Heap, "Dada", (Spring 1922).

Body Sweats is a difficult book to rate as much of the dada poetry and prose will appear to be nonsense on a surface level. The amount of meticulous research and assembly and extensive introduction and notes here by co-editors Irene Gammel 🍁 and Suzanne Zelazo🍁 is stellar though and puts it into 5-star territory. So a 4.5 star rounded up is a compromise to account for some impenetrability.


Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven in a characteristic costume of "found" objects. Image sourced from Wikipedia by Bain News Service, publisher - Library of CongressCatalog: https://lccn.loc.gov/2014714092Image download: https://cdn.loc.gov/service/pnp/ggbain/33900/33940v.jpgOriginal url: https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2014714092/, Public Domain, Link.

I found this to be a fascinating read, especially due to the number of literary and other artistic figures that EvFL interacted with in Germany, France and the United States. Much of the poetry in this book is shown both in print and in facsimile of the handwritten final variants that EvFL prepared (sometimes translated from her original German) for a proposed collection to be edited by Djuna Barnes which never came to fruition. Barnes did incorporate some of EvFL's character (along with that of Thelma Wood) into the fictional Robin Vote in her later novel Nightwood (1936).

The other main interactions were with Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson who published EvFL in The Little Review (1914-1929) (which ties in with their championing James Joyce and serializing excerpts from Ulysses and then having to fight against its censorship in the courts), artists and filmmakers such as Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray, poets such as William Carlos Williams, writer Ernest Hemingway who published her along with Gertrude Stein in The Transatlantic Review (1924) over the objections of Ford Madox Ford, composer George Antheil, and the various Dadaists of the period.


An unfortunate multiple page graffiti desecration of the single loan copy of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven's poetry anthology in the Toronto Public Library system, although perhaps in keeping with the dadaist mentality. Image from own photo collage.

So overall this was a 4.5 for me, but I am admittedly constantly fascinated by this era of the so-called Lost Generation and EvFL was a completely new discovery for me. The extensive Introduction and Notes by the co-editors made this also somewhat of a biography and critical analysis.

Trivia and Links
I sought out a copy of Body Sweats after seeing Kate Story's bio-documentary play Death in Reverse: Project Baroness a few months ago. I had never heard of Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven previously.

Curtain call for the cast of "Death in Reverse: Project Baroness" by Kate Story at The Theatre on King, Peterborough, Ontario, Canada on May 10, 2025. Image from own photo.

Aside from her Baroness biography Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity-A Cultural Biography (2003), Body Sweats co-editor Irene Gammel has written extensively about Canadian 🍁 author L.M. Montgomery and her literary creations. See e.g. The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery (2005), Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic (2007) and Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (2002).

The other Canadian 🍁 connection is that Elsa's 2nd husband Frederick Philip Grove (born Felix Paul Greve) abandoned her in Kentucky and moved to Manitoba, Canada where he wrote Settlers of the Marsh (1925) ostensibly about farming on the prairies in Canada, but partially based on his life with Elsa back in the U.S.

[Theresa Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This gorgeous coffee table book is well, just plain gorgeous. It is a heavy, coffee table book filled with photos, stories and the poetry of the troubled and brilliant bisexual poet, writer and artist, Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven, the German woman who came to the US and became an integral part of the ex-patriot movement in NY, though she mostly lived in NY, she often traveled to Paris and was a big part of the lives of many of the artists and writers of that generation. She was a tragic figure, really, and more than likely sexually abused by her alcoholic, degenerate father. She died under mysterious circumstances, with foul play being likely involved in her death. It is a wonderful book, showing just how brilliant her flair for language really was, and how creative she was with fashion and in how she wrote in red and green ink. She was a true original and it will always strike me as so sad that she died so young, at only 52 if I recall, in what was probably an intentional homicide. She was ahead of her time, and she deserved so much better than she got. Highly Recommended!

[Richard S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredible book exploring the utmost extremes of poetic creativity. Freytag-Loringhoven has been kind of maligned by calling her a "dadaist" and while there are elements of dada the poetry is surprisingly powerful, rich, moving, and above all - real. Even this book (the title) grossly mischaracterizes her as some kind of "sex-poet" (is MIT Press trying to sell books?). I kept thinking "Djuna Barnes" as I was reading and sure enough they were friends in Paris and EFL used her typewriter. This is the kind of artist whose death by suicide is so tragic, whose potential seemed endless. Way ahead of her time if she wrote this poetry today she'd be heralded as one of America's greatest poets. She wrote "sound poetry" where the words are nothing but sounds. She writes these long poems where every line is a single word - the effect is extraordinarily complex - and also more "normal" poems. Her interest and frequent focus on sex and bodily functions is fascinating but certainly not dominant. and the book’s early focus on this (part i: "Coitus is Paramount") again really is misleading. It's like saying Henry Miller is all about his prostitute visits. Is there a double standard here?

Sample poem (a relatively "normal" one but captures some of it):

"Perspective"

In Latin France, Massive Roman shell
Crystallized incandescent luminar
Onto sunproximity.
Post potency bridal's rape-finale -- --
Transparency condensing clay preparatory
In new continent stands Heir
Receptacle elect.

Betwixt her nimbused form America's
Womb cluttered -- -- shaping hulk --
Relations of mutual esteem
Forecast event.
_______________

The book also reproduces some of her "art" poetry where the poem includes artwork -

Anyway, wild, provocative, fascinating, norm-disruptive, genre-bending and deeply stirring -

Strongly recommended to all creatives (not just poets) for inspiration as this is pure art. Very difficult for traditional poetry lovers or readers in general. I think this poet is hurt by her extraordinary name and reputation, which gives her a sense of "flippancy" which detracts from her serious writing.

[Rebecca DeLucia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"IRRESPONSIBLE — RESPONSIVE
PRESSURE
OF NO
MEANING."

EvFL brings the gladdening commotion of german word compoundability to dadaist heights auf englisch + beyond.

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 3 out of 5]

As with much Dada poetry, something feels lost in the reading. Something more performative is needed. Very happy the visual poems are reproduced in color as Elsa wrote/illustrated them. They retain their power this way. After living the last 20 years (mostly) without poetry, this and the Picabia book make for quite a difficult entry, but that's Dada for you. One hundred years of the anti-tradition. This makes a great companion to Irene Gammel's (excellent) "Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada, and Everyday Modernity—A Cultural Biography" which I finished a year or two ago.

[Mills College Library]

831.912 F895 2011

[Elisabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, booty from introduction by Gammel and Zelazo:

“The Baronness is the first American Dada.”—Jane Heap, 1920

“Delirious in its ragged edges and atonal rhythms, the poetry echoes the noise of the metropolis itself. Profanity sounds loudly throughout her poems…

“Our consciousness is captured not only by the baffling simultaneity of heterogeneous materials but by the ongoing transformation of the self. […] Fusing, braiding, mixing, and crossing are at the heart of the Baroness’s poetry […]surreal hybridity

“In her introduction to the Bad Girls exhibit of radical feminist artists at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 1994, Marcia Tucker identifies the subversive power of the female joke, which ‘challenges traditional role models, defies stereotypes, is seductive, inclusive and, most important, is based on the idea that any and all systems of exploitation, not just those that exploit women, can and must be changed for the better.’ Through her humor, the Baroness could own her cultural criticism. She is, after all, often laughing at herself. Naumann confirms that for New York Dada, ‘humor is the most salient, consistent, and powerful operating factor behind the creation of all great Dada artifacts.’”—IG+SZ

“Long ago when I was young I asked Marcel Duchamp, ‘Would you call the Baroness a Futurist or Dadaist?’ He replied, ‘She is not a Futurist. She is the future.’”—Kenneth Rexroth

“By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism; in short we are cyborg.”—Donna Haraway

Poems that secrete, fume, flounce, cuss, defy, subvert, electrify, seduce, short-circuit, crackle, queef. Poems of the “Electric heart - / Panicky soul - / Carrionfeeding spiritcannibal - / Gory roisterer - / Redsmoky wastrel - / Reeking eternity bacchant” (170). But not just poems—performance, persona, intervention, a general lived exuberant contrariness meeting the sacred with the profane and anxiety with sensuous lustre and humor. Why has it taken so long—close to a century since their creation—for the collected and uncensored works of The Baroness Else Von Freytag-Loringhoven to appear? This lag in fruition is enough commentary on the instituion of poetry in the U.S. to underwrite evidence of its drawn-out hospice. The Baroness rises from its little corpse, Amazonian zombie with headdress, shooting electric rays of lust from her eyeballs and flames from her ass.

Some poems that drill in slender spirals (drill-bit form) through the strata of heteronormativity—thin, spondee-driven, at times bark-like, things that arrive at something aggressive, swooshy, and simultaneously insouciant., glinting. For example, “To Whom it May Concern”:

Glean
Whip of
Hair –
Queu swish of
Racing Mare –
Love’s spontaneous
Gesture.
Tilt
Spine
Back
Deep –
Hurt –
That –
Loves –
In:
Hate cool
Subtle mistrust
Vast pleasure
Of
Equal measure.

A kind of sonnet that cums in the middle. A physiological map of the god-self being eclipsed by animal-self and the near ineffability of orgasm, only to return to the human at a bare emotional state of “subtle mistrust”—the symbiosis of a coitus subverting the dominant-submissive binary in favor of equal pleasure.

“In 1910, on arrival from Berlin, [the Baroness] was promptly arrested for promenading on Pittsburgh’s Fifth Avenue dressed in a man’s suit and smoking a cigarette.”—IG=SZ

In “A Dozen Cocktails—Please” and at a point of total exasperation with her place and time (“What is the dread / Matter with the up-to-date-American- / Home-comforts?”) and a focus on lonely personal comforts (“There’s the vibrator----- -- / Coy flappertoy! I am adult citizen with / Vote—I demand my unstinted share / In roofeden—witchsabbath of our Baby- / Lonian obelisk.”) the Baroness offers an imperative for her poetics:
Say it with-- -- --
Bolts!
Oh thunder!
Serpentine aircurrents -- -- --
Hhhhhphssssssss! The very word penetrates!
In “Coming to Writing” (with sexual connotations in the translated title the Baroness would approve), Hélène Cixous:
In the beginning , I adored. What I adored was human. Not persons; not totalities, not defined and named beings. But signs. Flashes of being that glanced off me, kindling me. Lightning-like bursts that came to me: Look! (Cixous 1)
These signs, in the Baroness’s hands, are dismembered, licked, reattached—some stick together (“saucerorbs,” “ghosttree,” “quiltbeggarskirt”), some are re-severed with Dickenson axe effect, such as the opening of “Ancestry”: “Dad was corkscrew--/ Bottle fair ma-- -- -- -- -- --“ (51). That “ma” might be a mother or it might be the remnants of something else: maiden, matriarch, march-hare, mammal. These M-dashes signal disruptions in frequencies, changes in signals, but they also effect a kind of violence and failure of the word, seeming like a corporeal, pre-language takeover in the poem. Back to “A Dozen Cocktails”: “…I am entitled / To be deeply shocked.” Lifting signs from advertising-rhetoric, radio-talk, street conversation, and re-creating the mundane in a highly charged, hysterical (all connotations granted free entry) ars poetica, the Baroness creates a poetic space that is flashing, restless, and of the female body.

What is the generative mind-state at work here? She lets us know in “Lofty Logic”:
Thou art not acquainted
With thineself before thou not
Experienced feeling of tender
Affection towards thine excrements.
Hast reached that station in
Existence – art elevated
Lonely king – spirit – sun.
That logic. (169)
This hilarious riff on Shakespeare’s “To thine ownself be true” merges antiquated address with the scattalogical, the sacred with the profane, in a logic in which the profane is sacred. Perhaps this ecstatic merger of the holy and the hole-y is the biggest thing for me. She can be my mama. Here are my chromosomes: “Analytical Chemistry of Progeny”: “I am—gleaming fruit at the tree top / Fulfilment—brilliant design / Of a thousand-year-old marriage manure / Genius—idiocy—filth—purity” (40).

[Nadia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book of poetry I have ever read. Dada artist Baroness Elsa the original Lady Gaga from 100 years ago. And should be more famous than Marcel Duchamp: http://www.scottishreviewofbooks.org/...

[Matthew · Rating 2 out of 5]

Subjoyride is great. I didn't get much from the rest.

[Amar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some faves: Appalling heart, Cathedral, Kindly, [They won’t let go fart]

Lol so good haha ooohahoohehehoho!hoho!Hip