Sometime in the mid-'10s (2015?), reading this collection of Duchamp's hard-to-classify texts was for me a revelation on par with my then recent discovery of Gertrude Stein (also roughly in that period) and of conceptual poetry - late discoveries, as I spent most of my high school and college years "worshipping" instead the likes of Tristan Tzara, whom I revered for his colorful quasi-noise poetry of his Dada period...

As I was becoming increasingly neurotic in the mid-'10s, even before gaining awareness of my autism, my tastes have changed. I like to read this volume as a collection of poetry (except, for instance, those articles on fellow artists), poetry in the expanded field, if you will. Unlike Tzara, Duchamp was never interested in anything resembling traditional poetry. But texts such as the one on "the" or the four cards with supposed extracts from a bigger text that does not actually exist - these can be read as conceptual poetry today (alongside stuff from Fluxus and Oulipo).

The notes around the "Bride", which include opaque technical instructions full of dry humor (and stuff that I am not sure to what degree passes acceptable nowadays according to feminists, with or without trusting the likes of Deleuze) but also other miscellaneous stuff, remain still so puzzling to me - at the time, I was still not completely aware of Ulises Carrión, despite having some notion of what an artist's book is, so I found here an amazing example of how a traditional book needs not to be always the way to publish, and that writing can not only jump between functional genres, but also refuse to settle on particular ones.

6 years later, I still return occasionally to this - its novelty is still fairly enduring, despite my tastes perhaps slowly making way for a slant return of more lyrical or traditionally literary approaches. ( )