Hugo Ball was one of the founders of the Zurich Dada movement and wrote this poem for a performance at Zurichs Cabaret Voltaire in 1916. A nonsense poem, its words have no actual meaning, merely constituting an absurd sequence of sounds. On 23 June 1916 Ball noted in his diary Tinvented a new type of poetry, poetry without words or sound-poems, in which the distribution of vowels is decided and allotted solely based on the values of the initial row. The performance of his poem, to an astonished audience, took place in a quasi-sacred atmosphere, with Ball delivering his verses in a deliberately over-serious and solemn manner.