Poetry Can Be Any Damn Thing It Wants

Introduction to a collection of eight manifestos commemorating the centennial of Italian futurists.

by Mary Ann Caws

In 1909, pamphlets were dropped over the town of Milan containing Marinetti’s Futurist Manifesto, the centennial of which we are celebrating. Everything about this piece was exciting, its pace, its over-the-top scenery:

We had stayed up all night, my friends and I, under hanging mosque lamps with domes of filigreed brass, domes starred like our spirits. . . .

An immense pride was buoying us up, because we felt ourselves alone at that hour, alone, awake, and on our feet, like proud beacons or forward sentries against an army of hostile stars.

Nothing is slow in this manifesto of speedy Futurism: “‘Let’s go!’ I said. ‘Friends, away! Let’s go!’” I love that kind of exalted certainty about a showy (manifest) endeavor. Of course, we have the right to ironize about the over-the-topness — who among us would so exaggerate the style and so magnify the substance as to make a larger-than-life-size poster, pointing at itself as a deictic genre? Look! Here! Now!

Tristan Tzara, Papa-Dada himself, lays down the rules in 1918, and not just for Dada: “To proclaim a manifesto you have to want: A.B.C., thunder against 1, 2, 3.”

Tongue-in-cheek or not: how nice not to know. There’s something about parody that’s immensely engaging. Look at a few passages from the grandly parodic manifestos written for this issue of Poetry: they are fun, funny, and somehow right on target. And, on top of that, reminiscent of other manifestos and events. Take this passage by Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr (for Hate Socialist Collective):

When we say the manifesto we mean poetry and Poetry and poets and our own pathetic selves.

And so like you, oh Poetry, we propose to reanimate the manifesto. We will first require the following things: a century of revolutions. Delight and terror. Shit on the curatorial. Shit on bankers and trusts. Shit on ourselves.

This call out for shit sends me right back to the beginning of Jarry’s Ubu Roi: “merdre” was itself revolutionary. And think how the Dada excremental emphasis decorated Mr. Antipyrine’s Manifesto of 1918: “We want to shit in different colors to ornament the zoo of art of all the consulate flags.” Imagine the time when André Breton visited Picasso’s studio, saw a small picture that fascinated him, with a spot of something indefinable in its center. What is that, he asked the painter, who replied that it was the excrement of children having eaten cherries and their pits . . . and Breton went home to dream about a mountain of gleaming brown stuff, with flies upon it. Glorious, he said. And at the Brooklyn Museum, Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary with dung, a traditional form of homage—so offensive to then-Mayor Giuliani. How super to offend someone with an homage, especially an institutional someone.

Manifestos are not only bearers of opposition to other movements and bygone days. They bear within themselves an oppositional turn, characteristic of the genre. Michael Hofmann maintains: “Poetry is delayed, instant; unending, brief; electric, tiny. Each poem is an insurrection against the world before it existed—or a desertion from it.” All the contraries meet here, just as they did in Dada, where the yes and the no met on street corners, and in surrealism, where life and death, waking and sleeping, merged in the doors swinging back and forth . . .

Manifestos can do any damned thing they want: they can run on and on, stop short, be fragmented or in order, or in an order which they themselves mock. Joshua Mehigan enumerates the now-ness:

We are here now.
Our aesthetics is empirically grounded.

And continues with an against-ness to past-ness:

History will forget you and salute us.
Here you are, and here is oblivion.
This is the final manifesto, and the only one.

Whatever a manifesto claims, it has most surely to have the consciousness of being the only one, right now, forget the past—like Marinetti’s turning his back on Venice in “Past-Loving Venice.”

But the back-turning in no way rules out the comic use of reference, often depending quite simply on the reader. Try this one, which stands—or seems to, to this reader—in immediate salute to Frank O’Hara. It is D.A. Powell’s “Annie Get Your Gun,” which begins with the small fish we have seen swimming elsewhere:

The thing about sardines when you buy them in a can: they are fairly uniform in size and in flavor; their individual identities have disappeared into the general fishiness of the soybean oil . . . and one forgets a sardine quickly after one has partaken of it. . . .

Write a manifesto. Don’t you see that it’s too small to keep? Throw it back.

How can we not think of Frank O’Hara’s poem for Michael Goldberg, about sardines and oranges?

My poem
is finished and I haven’t mentioned
orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

Which leads us right over to O’Hara’s delicious “Personism,” mocking the grand style and the great moment: “It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959” (See, another lunch poem). Informality wins the day and the brass ring. Here’s to the manifesto: beginning with the manus, or Latin for hand — so, handcrafted — and then a fest (from festus) for its tight-fisted grip on whatever occasion it might be. Like this one.

The Final Manifesto

First in a series of eight manifestos.

by Joshua Mehigan

We see you.
We know who you are.
Your ideas are worthless.
Your aesthetic is stupid.
Your “technique” is a welter of narcissism, superstition, and habit.
All your little tiny ideas, all your whoring attempts at creation, and you yourself are nothing, nobody wants you, we despise you, it’s in our nature.
You should be kept as a pet.
You are a Philistine, the Paul Bunyan of decadence, an acromegalic fraud.
You are a minnow, a speck, a stain.
The genre humain is sick, and you are to blame.
You are a necrophiliac.
You are a museum of irrelevance.
It will take years to make Art vital and important again.
You are from this moment forbidden.
As the Italians say, Parla quando piscia la gallina.
We are here now.
Our aesthetics is empirically grounded.
Our taste will be raised to principle.
You and your band of jays will be flushed out.
Yes, Art is resurrected today: Victory is ours!
History will forget you and salute us.
Here you are, and here is oblivion.
This is the final manifesto, and the only one.

Manifesto of the Flying Mallet

Second in a series of eight manifestos.

by Michael Hofmann

Poetry is—as the poet said, though his subject was butterflies—an army of stragglers. Contemporaries, aeons, and cultures apart slog wordlessly through the mud together, not at all pally, not at all like Virgil and Dante. There’s no uniform, no team shirt, no battle or plan of battle, no weapons, no organization, no hierarchy, no ranks or badges except for homemade ones that don’t count, enemies and detractors everywhere. Its colors you should think twice before rallying around (I don’t know what they are, perhaps sable on sable), and its only cavalry is the reader, and there’s only one of him or her, sitting at home minding his or her own business, without a horse to hand, or a thought of you. There are plenty of fellow travelers, whom you can tell from their air of confidence and impunity, and because they tend to get there faster. (Even though of course there is no “there.”)—How can I call anyone to the barricades?

What really matters in relation to poetry has probably never been said—Ezra Pound’s “logopoeia” (doing things with words) the nearest thing. All there is is confusion, pretense, contradiction, and instinct. Most of what proposes itself—or is hailed or dismissed—as poetry at any given time probably isn’t. Poetry is soluble intelligence, but it reserves to itself the right on occasion to be stupid. (And sometimes it is nothing but feeling or eyesight or glossolalia or journalism.) Poetry is subtle, but sometimes “as subtle as a flying mallet,” as the man says. Poetry isn’t about rules or about infractions, but there is something by definition rebellious in its use of speech for its own purposes. Poetry may be effective or ineffectual, but it is never overly designing. Poetry is delayed, instant; unending, brief; electric, tiny. Each poem is an insurrection against the world before it existed—or a desertion from it.

There are no plurals, only chance or temporary agglomerations. The only plural forms are what Wallace Stevens—plural himself, as you might think—referred to as “functionaries” or “hacks,” and Lou Reed as “jim-jims.” As the world shrinks and grows, there is only one thing: be singular. Ezra Pound said: be against all mortmain. Gottfried Benn said: disappoint the season-ticket holder. Say not the straggle nought availeth.

Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links

Third in a series of eight manifestos.

by Charles Bernstein

I love originality so much I keep copying it.

Immature poets borrow. Mature poets invest.

POETRY WANTS TO BE FREE. (Or, if not, available for long-term loan.)

I’m the derivative product of an originality that spawns me as it spurns me.

The work of art “itself” does not exist, only incommensurable social contexts through which it emerges and into which it vanishes.

The author dies. The author’s work is born.

Poetry is a secret society hiding in plain sight, open to ear and mind’s eye.

The shock of the new for some, the invigorating tonic of the contemporary for others.

A work of art is the overlay of a set of incommensurable possibilities, linked together around an original vanishing point.

CONCEPTUAL POETRY IS POETRY PREGNANT WITH THOUGHT.

(The absence of conception had itself to be conceived.)

THE POET IS A LIAR.

THE POET IS A LYRE.

THE POET’S TIRED.

(Poetry abhors a narrative.)

“I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like.”—J.M.W. Turner (1842)

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E P=O=E=T=R=Y: a loose affliation of unlike individuals.

Which reminds me of the story of the man who reports a wife-beating to a neighbor. “Then stop beating her,” the neighbor replies. “But it’s not my wife!” replies the good Samaritan, becoming agitated. “That’s even worse!” says his neighbor.

No parodist goes unpunished because in these times the parodist is pilloried for the views he or she parodies. In a world of moral discourse absent ethical engagement, only the self-righteous go unrebuked.

I was born yesterday . . . and’ll die tomorrow.

This is so & so is this
But neither is important.
That is theirs
& near’s not here
But neither is important.
Never twill, never twine
Nor peep nor bleat nor pipe.
Neither’s important.

CARPE DIEM: CARP AND DIE.

I am not the man I was much less the one I will be nor imagine myself as, just the person I almost am.

A bird calls but I hear only its song.

My skin is burning but inside I am as cold as the North Pole.
My shivering is metaphysical, a kind of involuntary davening.

Religion is giving religion a bad name.

Nor am I an atheist. I believe in the fallible gods of thought and in my resistance to these gods. I have faith in my aversion of faith.

Take care not to define yourself against others’ belief systems. Their God does not define the domain of my profane, their Devil does not wash away my sins.

The water colors in watercolors.

I’m an observant Jew. I look closely at the things around me, as if they were foreign.

Sandy as a sugar donut, salty as a red rose . . .

You’re either awake or asleep or will be.

I am not a secular man, but in moments of crisis I turn to agnosticism for the comfort it gives in freeing me from superstition. Once, when gravely ill and sure I would die at any minute, I embraced agnosticism, and, with Nietzsche in hand, swore I would remain an agnostic even if I recovered. But once I did recover, I lapsed again into religious belief, feeling the danger was over and it was safe to return to my old ways. Still, the fear of dying under the veil of dogma still grips my soul late in the night and I yearn for the courage to embrace reality without prophylactics.

My mind is a labyrinth with well-lit exit signs; as much as I try, I can’t ignore them. When I take leave of my mind I put myself in the care of my brain. In this way, I become again the animal to which my mind is blind.

There’s no depth to the depth.

In the world of the imagination, impossible just means the next opportunity to get real.

The ceremony of sorrow is performed with a measured, defiant acknowledgement that makes words charms, talismans of the fallen world. Poetry is a holding space, a folded grace, in which objects held most dear disappear, returning as radiant moments of memory’s forgiving home. [for Akilah Oliver]

Turner’s sheerness.

Existence needs essence the way a walking tour needs local color.

But a hole in an argument is not the same as a point of light.

Rather than an expression of love, justice is a protection against our inability to love.

We are most familiar with our estrangement; it is our home ground.

The absence of an accent is also an accent.

Yet the Dark, untouched by light, injures it all the same.

The Eighties, Glory Of

Fourth in a series of eight manifestos.

by Ange Mlinko

These days, everybody everywhere (under fifty—“younger poets”) seems to allude knowingly to Frank O’Hara’s “Personism” and deploy with gusto the chatty irony, the pop sagesse, he pioneered. Inventing a new tone is no small thing, though grander projects beset us these days: book-length “projects,” lipograms, and variations on macaronics and “hybridity.” It’s like we’re stuck in the eighties. Which is about right, I mean rite: the pendulum swings back and forth, and our momentum always seems to be driven by reaction to reaction, rather than to life. I’m paraphrasing. Frank O’Hara said, “It’s a pretty depressing day, you must admit, when you feel you relate more importantly to poetry than to life.” It would be interesting at this point, while everyone is in love with “Personism” and its author, to look (briefly) at two rather more boring manifestos he wrote.* One is “Statement for The New American Poetry” (1960) where he begins: “I am mainly preoccupied with the world as I experience it.” And the other is “Statement for Paterson Society” which ends “this will explain why I can’t really say anything definite for the Paterson Society for the time being.” In the first manifesto, he tries to explain, seriously, what he does when he writes poetry, and comes off with at least one sentence as good as any in “Personism”: “My formal ‘stance’ is found at the crossroads where what I know and can’t get meets what is left of that I know and can bear without hatred.” In the Paterson Society statement, he repudiates that first manifesto, writing:

It seems to me now . . . more mistaken, pompous, and quite untrue, as compared to [“Personism”]. But it is also, like [“Personism”], a diary of a particular day and the depressed mood of that day . . . and as such may perhaps have more general application to my poetry since I have been more often depressed than happy, as far as I can tally it up.

It’s “a hopeless conundrum,” he admits. He is happy and amusing; he is unhappy and serious; he tries a lot of different things; he is preoccupied with the world, with experience, with flux. No wonder then that he writes so much about weather, and not just any weather: wind and sea surfaces are his metier. Now he is clear and “accessible”; now he is fuzzy and (misused word) surreal. Instead of surreal, I think of this explanation he offered: “It may be that poetry makes life’s nebulous events tangible to me and restores their detail; or conversely, that poetry brings forth the intangible quality of incidents which are all too concrete and circumstantial. Or each on specific occasions, or both all the time.” If I’m cheating by building my own manifesto out of the bones of another’s, I apologize: my motto might be: Lord (Apollo), grant me courage to be new, serenity when I can’t be, and the wisdom to know when I can’t be. In other words, I too want poetry to be a response to the weather: the world’s, and the author’s own. I can’t really say anything more definite for the time being . . . except that I will not be writing any “book-length projects.”

Annie Get Your Gun

Fifth in a series of eight manifestos.

by D.A. Powell

The thing about sardines when you buy them in a can: they are fairly uniform in size and in flavor; their individual identities have disappeared into the general fishiness of the soybean oil; their little bones have melted; their flesh has become a mass grave; they are fairly cheap and fairly consumable; and one forgets a sardine quickly after one has partaken of it.

But damn: don’t some people just love sardines? They’re convenient; they take no preparation time whatsoever; and, though a steady diet of them would probably be unhealthy in the long run, they are—in the short term—a pretty safe snack. They’re snacky. They aren’t lox, but they aren’t cat food. They are the middle of an ocean swimming with possibilities.

Sardines school. Yet, despite their defensive strategy of hiding behind one another, millions of them get eaten. All that schooling does them nary a whit of good. And yet, they still join, instinctually, each one believing that it’s some other poor pilchard who’ll be devoured.

I don’t know that artists and poets join schools for quite the same reason that sardines do. Sometimes there’s a true innovator in the bunch, sometimes they really do share some common misunderstandings about aesthetics, sometimes it just so happens that a bunch of really interesting people all shop at the same hat shop and they start to hang out and resemble one another and make little sandwiches. It can seem quite seductive to be associated with a school. Or to have a school from which one insistently distances oneself. Or even to found a school. But most of what makes a school truly interesting is what others say about it; not what it says about itself.

Is it the nature of beings to coalesce? I think sometimes that artists, like other lower forms of intelligence, want to “belong.” Or rather, that they want to not belong in some similar ways. They want to belong to the outside, and yet to be recognized by the inside. It’s a conundrum. Because, really, in order to belong to a school or a movement or a gang or a pod, you have to—whether you’re willing to think about it this way or not—move towards a “center.”

Maybe it’s peculiar to our time, in which actual schools (academies) proliferate and spawn, that we’re seeing so much centrism. What we need is more eccentrism. Who isn’t tired of the contemporary qua contemporary? Who isn’t bored by innovation for innovation’s sake? It has, sadly, become the mode du jour. Not even a school. A monocultural fish farm. An orchestra in which everyone is trying to solo at the same time. A tin of silvery bodies falling into place. I imagine that each of those fish must have thought it was going in a new direction. But all the other fishes got there at exactly the same time, and thus the great net encompassed them all.

Look, I like sardines. I probably like them better than most. But the time will come when all we have of the mighty oceans is canned fish. That’s the doomsayer in me. Shouldn’t there at least be a chance that I am wrong? Shouldn’t there be a greater variety of life, a greater variety of art, a greater variety of poetry than what gathers in the schools trying oh so hard to appear larger and more menacing than it is? Write a manifesto. Don’t you see that it’s too small to keep? Throw it back.

The New Perform-A-Form: A Page Vs. Stage Alliance

Sixth in a series of eight manifestos.

by Thomas Sayers Ellis

The performance body, via breathing and gesture, dramatizes form. It makes it theater. It makes it action. It makes it living, alive, as in “get live,” as in “all the way live,” as in lyric. The idea body, via text and thought, flattens form. It makes it fixed. It makes it language. It makes it literature, an imagined living, as in artifice. The work of the performance body is not without craft, control, or form. It is not lowly. The work of the idea body is not without attitude, improvisation, or flow. It is not closed. A perform–a–form occurs when the idea body and the performance body, frustrated by their own segregated aesthetic boundaries, seek to crossroads with one another. This coupling, though detrimental to aspects of their individual traditions, will repair and continue the living word.

ONE
The old style of representing “likeness” is over and perform–a–formers, though appreciative of metaphor and simile, etc., no longer need either to express nuance in poetry. The matrimony of page and stage insists on eliminating the false functions between the line and the limb. All rhyme schemes reborn as gesture, all gestures as sculptural integrity.

TWO
A perform–a–form line breaks many times, verbally, before it breaks the last time visually. If written, it is written more like blood than bone. If spoken, it is spoken more like stutter than song. Perform-a-forms do not lie (on the page or on the stage), frozen in little boxes or voices, unable to interact with the reader or listener, as if on a table in a morgue.

THREE
Perform–a–formers seek a path around both academic and slam poetry; to eliminate the misconceptions between them; and to balance the professional opportunities (in publishing and employment) opened to each. The utterance, paged or memorized, is only a schema in need of diverse modes of respiration.

FOUR
Against the narrowness of linearity, a perform–a–former will subject its own composer-sition to the rigor of audience participation. You can’t workshop a perform–a–form, but you can participate in its creation and correction. Able to surrender to the collective sensibility of community, not the critic’s scalpel, the last great perform–a–former was Sekou Sundiata.

FIVE
A well-crafted perform–a–form will continue to pour after it is written or performed. This pouring, akin to echoing, should reclaim the original attributes of poetry from nature and cinema. Despite history, the perform–a–former seeks carnivorous wholeness, a gluttonous diet of the anatomy of the art–i–verse.

And while it is rare to attend a poetry festival or a conference and see poets (established and emerging, white and black, gay and straight, academic and non-academic) being treated as equals, consequently it is even rarer to discover literary editors and publishers open to “all” levels of class intelligence. The first task of activism of any perform–a–former is the removal of all one-dimensional judges of craft.

Presto Manifesto!

Seventh in a series of eight manifestos.

by A.E. Stallings

The freedom to not-rhyme must include the freedom to rhyme. Then verse will be “free.”

All rhymed poetry must be rhyme-driven. This is no longer to be considered pejorative.

Rhyme is at the wheel. No, rhyme is the engine.

Rhyme is an engine of syntax: like meter, it understands the importance of prepositions.

English is not rhyme poor. It is only uninflected. On the contrary, English has a richness in rhymes across different parts of speech; whereas in many other languages, rhyme is often merely a coincident jingle of accidence.

There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes. Rhymes are not predictable unless lines are. Death and breath, womb and tomb, love and of, moon, June, spoon, all still have great poems ahead of them.

Rhymes may be so far apart, you cannot hear them, but they can hear each other, as if whispering on a toy telephone made of two paper cups and a length of string.

Rhymes do not need to be hidden or disguised: they are nothing to be ashamed of.

Rhymes are not good Victorian children, to be seen but not heard. Rhyme may be feminine or masculine, but not neuter.

Some rhymes are diatonic; some are modal.

Off rhymes founded on consonants are more literary than off rhymes founded on vowels (assonance). Vowels are shifty. Assonance is in the mouth, not the ear. It is performative.

Consonance brings forth what is different, so we listen for what is the same (harmonic). Assonance brings forth likeness; we listen for dissonance. The vowel is the third of the chord.

Translators who translate poems that rhyme into poems that don’t rhyme solely because they claim keeping the rhyme is impossible without doing violence to the poem have done violence to the poem. They are also lazy.

Rhyme is an irrational, sensual link between two words. It is chemical. It is alchemical.

April, silver, orange, month.

Rhyme frees the poet from what he wants to say.

Rhyme can also free a poem from fixed line length. A rhyme lets us hear the end of the line, so lines may be of any metrical length, or even syllabic, and still be heard.

Rhyme schemes.

Rhyme annoys people, but only people who write poetry that doesn’t rhyme, and critics.

See also: chime, climb, clime, crime, dime, grime, I’m, lime, mime, paradigm, pantomime, prime, rime, slime, sublime, thyme, Time.

Leave the Manifesto Alone: A Manifesto

Eighth in a series of eight manifestos.

by Hate Socialist Collective

The manifesto is dead. Manifestos are a flashing up of the spirit in a moment of desperate jubilation when the victory of the bourgeoisie is not yet a settled thing. Manifestos are the way the bourgeoisie fights the bourgeoisie in spastic fits, armed with bludgeon, scalpel, and luck. We will not celebrate the end of that era with you. It was not a poetic era, it was a political era. It is this history you wish to seal over with pseudo-celebrations.

Is not Poetry already a manifesto? The well-considered and the well-mannered, the lovely and the liberal, craft and progress: are these not already the manifesto of the bourgeoisie, smeared across every page, every minute of every day? It’s an aesthetic thing, Poetry answers as we fall asleep, choosing its poems as if you could choose who was worthy to shit on your grave. And in our dreams we see Poetry dance on the manifesto’s grave, in the vocabulary of open-mindedness and eclecticism, that bourgeois humanism which is nothing other than the pure hatred of revolution.

The manifesto is obligated to be political at every instant.

To use the forms and worldviews on offer only for bitter mockery.

To be not an alternative to destruction but a complement.

To speak of capitalism and the bourgeoisie, the former as the enemy, the latter defined as the social class which does not want to be named.

To stop wringing its hands over poetry’s lost popularity, that autocritique more stirring than any Maoist’s.

The manifesto is obligated to say There are other countries where poetry still matters! Where the war against the marketplace of capital, against the confirmation of the bourgeoisie as the end of history, endures.

When we say the manifesto we mean poetry and Poetry and poets and our own pathetic selves.

And so like you, oh Poetry, we propose to reanimate the manifesto. We will first require the following things: a century of revolutions. Delight and terror. Shit on the curatorial. Shit on bankers and trusts. Shit on ourselves. We believe in art for art’s sake the same as we believe in destruction as our Beatrice; Mallarmé said them both. Poetry must be as violent and loving as the disease called history with which we infect each other, red and black condoms with the reservoirs cut off. Those who make a manifesto by halves dig their own graves.

Joshua Clover & Juliana Spahr on behalf of Hate Socialist Collective

Bryson Literary Society

who we are

2.27.2009

An excerpt from Catia Chien:

2.26.2009

madame bovary by gustave flaubert

2.24.2009

1 play. 24 hours.

8 Manifestos

Poetry Can Be Any Damn Thing It Wants

The Final Manifesto

Manifesto of the Flying Mallet

Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links

The Eighties, Glory Of

Annie Get Your Gun

The New Perform-A-Form: A Page Vs. Stage Alliance

Presto Manifesto!

Leave the Manifesto Alone: A Manifesto

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