David Mascellani
12-04-2004, 10:34 AM
From an Imagist manifesto:
1.To use the language of common speech, but to employ
the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely
decorative word.
2.We believe that the individuality of a poet may often
be better expressed in free verse than in conventional
forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.
3.Absolute freedom in the choice of subject.
4.To present an image. We are not a school of painters,
but we believe that poetry should render particulars
exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however
magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that
we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk
the real difficulties of his art.
5.To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never
blurred nor indefinite.
6.Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of
the very essence of poetry.
the Imagist manifesto
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/imagism-def.html
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy
and rashness. The essential elements of our poetry will
be courage, audacity and revolt. Literature has up to
now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber.
We want to exalt movements of aggression,
feverish sleeplessness,
the double march, the perilous leap,
the slap and the blow with the fist. We declare that
the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new
beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with
its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with
explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to
run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the
Victory of Samothrace. We want to sing the man at
the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth,
itself hurled along its orbit. The poet must spend himself
with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase
the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece
that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be
a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force
them to bow before man.
We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries!
What is the use of looking behind at the moment when
we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible?
Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in
the absolute, since we have already created eternal,
omnipresent speed. We want to glorify war - the only
cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive
gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill,
and contempt for woman. We want to demolish museums
and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist
and utilitarian cowardice. We will sing of the great crowds agitated
by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored
and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals:
the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops
beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous
railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories
suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke;
bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the
diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers
sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing
on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes
for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose
propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the
applause of enthusiastic crowds.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html
Part 8 of Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love
VIII
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want
to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up
this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left
the bag.
Them poem will resemble you.
And there you are - an infinitely original author of
charming sensibility, even though unappreciated
by the vulgar herd.*
http://www.ralphmag.org/AR/dada.html
Manifesto: The Revolution of the Word
Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems
and plays still under the hegemony of the banal
word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive
naturalism, and desirous of crystallizing a viewpoint...
we hereby declare that:
1. The revolution in the English language is an
accomplished fact.
2. The imagination in search of a fabulous world
is autonomous and unconfined.
(Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity....Blake)
3. Pure poetry is a lyrical absolute that seeks an
a priori reality within ourselves alone.
(Bring out number, weight and measure in a
year of dearth....Blake)
4. Narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection
of a metamorphosis of reality.
(Enough! Or Too Much!....Blake)
5. The expression of these concepts can be achieved
only through the rhythmic 'hallucination of the word.'
(Rimbaud)
6. The literary creator has the right to disintegrate
the primal matter of words imposed on him by
textbooks and dictionaries.
7. He has the right to use words of his own fashioning
and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactical
laws.
(The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction....Blake)
8. The 'litany of words' is admitted as an independent
unit.
9. We are not concerned with the propogation of
sociological ideas, except to emancipate the
creative elements from the present ideology.
10. Time is a tyranny to be abolished.
11. The writer expresses. He does not communicate.
12. The plain reader be damned.
(Damn braces! Bless relaxes...Blake)
(Signed) Kay Boyle, Whit Burnett, Hart Crane,
Caresse Crosby, Harry Crosby, Martha Foley, Stuart
Gilber, A.L. Gillespie, Leigh Hoffman, Eugene Jolas,
Elliot Paul, Douglas Rigby, Theo Rutra,
Robert Sage, Harold J. Salemson, Laurence Vail.
Manifesto: The Revolution of the Word
by Eugene Jolas
http://www.sixgallerypress.com/jolas.html
With regard to a false interpretation of our enterprise,
stupidly circulated among the public, We declare as follows
to the entire braying literary, dramatic, philosophical,
exegetical and even theological body of contemporary
criticism:
We have nothing to do with literature; But we are quite
capable, when necessary, of making use of it like anyone
else, Surrealism is not a new means or expression, or an
easier one, nor even a metaphysic of poetry.
It is a means of total liberation of the mind and of all
that resembles it. We are determined to make a Revolution.
We have joined the word surrealism to the word revolution
solely to show the disinterested, detached, and even
entirely desperate character of this revolution.
We make no claim to change the mores of mankind,
but we intend to show the fragility of thought, and on
what shifting foundations, what caverns we have built
our trembling houses.
We hurl this formal warning to Society; Beware of your
deviations and faux-pas, we shall not miss a single one.
At each turn of its thought, Society will find us waiting.
We are specialists in Revolt. There is no means of action
which we are not capable, when necessary, of employing.
We say in particular to the Western world: surrealism exists.
And what is this new ism that is fastened to us? Surrealism
is not a poetic form. It is a cry of the mind turning back on
itself, and it is determined to break apart its fetters,
even if it must be by material hammers!
Bureaus de Recherches Surréalistes, 15, Rue de Grenelle
Signed: Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Baron, Joë Bousquet, J.-A. Boiffard, André Breton, Jean Carrive, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Paul Élaurd, Max Ernst, et al.
Modern History Sourcebook:A Surrealist Manifesto:The Declaration of January 27, 1925
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1925surrealism.html
Isidore Isou founded Letttrisme. At the beginning of
the movement, he was its sole practioner. Others soon
joined him. The movement evolved steadily, energetically,
and at times perhaps confusingly from the late 1940s to
the present. Its internal vocabulary has changed othen,
and even its name has sometimes morphed into other
names. Still, these basic writings by Isou make up a good introduction to Lettriste theory.
- Karl Young
MANIFESTO OF LETTERIST POETRY -Isidore Isou
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lettrist/isou-m.htm
Once we lived safely beneath our stratum of air.
Now we are waves spouting in the cosmos.
How can we expect our words to remain wrapped up
in the atmosphere of the sentence?
Let them be reunited, like ourselves, to cosmic space
--word constellations on the white page.
Every word is an abstract picture.
A surface. A volume.
A surface on the page. A volume when spoken.
Gamier emphasized the necessity for a break
with the old rhythms:
The rhythms of poetry have succeeded in deadening
the reader's mind.
We listen to the purring of Racine but do not understand it.
In poetry we become aware of the universe--for it to be
based upon the enumeration of feet is an absurdity.
It makes no difference whether FER or AVION have one
or two syllables. What counts is their meaning, the space
which the words themselves occupy upon the printed page,
the vibrations they set up in fact the volume which they
enclose-immense and horizontal in the case of FER, infinite
but with a note of disquiet for AVION
The structure of the sentence would also have to go:
The structure of the sentence has caused the same
damage as the rhythms of poetry. What a difference there is between: "The tiger is coming to drink at the river bank"
and the single name: TIGER!
The poet is left with words stripped of all worn out
structural trappings:
Words are as hard and as scintillating as diamonds.
The word is an element.
The word is a material.
The word is an object.
For those who know how to look at them, some words
possess a remarkable topography.
TRANSATLANTIQUE, for instance, rocks and seas,
peaks and abysses--why, even the moon cannot be
any richer in craters and parched valleys, in rhythms
and beauties.
Words are the visible aspects of ideas just as the trunk
and the foliage are the visible aspects of a tree.
Underneath are the roots, the ideas.
We must grind our well-worn language to dust--
in other words, make the individual words scintillate.
We must do away with imprecise terms, adjectives,
for example--or again use them as nouns, as substance,
that is to say, as material.
But the word cannot be set on the page unless it is in harmony with the atmosphere of the poem.
What is more, the value of each word is modified
by the fact that the poem belongs no longer to a flux
but to a static system.
manifesto for a new poetry visual and phonic by pierre garnier
http://www.391.org/manifestos/pierregarnier_manifesto.htm
Manifesto for Concrete Poetry (1952-55)
Öyvind Fahlström: Sweden
http://www.ubu.com/papers/fahlstrom01.html
Essentials of Spontaneous Prose
by Jack Kerouac
http://www.sixgallerypress.com/kerouac.html
Larkin on Poetry's Pleasure Principle
http://www.mrbauld.com/larkinpl.html
I fell in love — that is the only expression I can think of
— at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though
sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very
well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even
learned to beat them now and then, which they appear
to enjoy.
Notes on the Art of Poetry, Dylan Thomas
"Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961
The best craftsman always leaves holes and gaps
in the works of the poem so that something that
is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or
thunder in. The joy and function of poetry is,
and was, the celebration of man, which is also
the celebration of God.
Notes on the Art of Poetry, Dylan Thomas
"Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes
it technically tick, and say to yourself,
when the works are laid out before you, the vowels,
the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms,
"Yes this is it. This is why the poem moves me so.
It is because of the craftsmanship." But you're back again
where you began. You're back with the mystery of having
been moved by words.
Notes on the Art of Poetry, Dylan Thomas
—"Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961
I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved and devious craftsman in words, however unsuccessful the result
so often appears, and to whatever wrong uses I may
apply my technical paraphernalia. I use everything and
anything to make my poems work and move in the direction
I want them to: old tricks, new tricks, puns,
portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion, paronomasia,
paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes,
vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm. Every device there is in
language is there to be used if you will.
Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes,
and the twisting and convolutions of words, the inventions
and contrivances, are all part of the joy
that is part of the painful, voluntary work.
—Notes on the Art of Poetry, 1961 "Poetic Manifesto" -
Dylan Thomas
http://www.wordspy.com/WAW/Thomas-Dylan.asp
After Free Verse: The New Non-Linear Poetries by Marjorie Perloff
http://articles.poetryx.com/21/
Regarding "Neo-formalism" or "New Formalism,"
I didn't hear those terms until around 1986 or 1987.
Also, I believe the term "neo-formalism" was coined
by someone alarmed that younger poets were
becoming curious about form. New Formalism was never organized or announced in the way that, for instance,
F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound organized and announced
Imagism. This distinction is worth making because
many people today are understandably suspicious
of movement-mongering and have accused formal poets
of grandstanding. But this whole business was thrust
on poets from the outside. And most everyone who
has been associated with New Formalism is uncomfortable
with that label. "Formalism" in particular suggests that
one is less than normally concerned with content,
which is not true of the poets who have been called
New Formalists. If there was a sense of collective
enterprise, as you put it, it developed slowly and loosely.
And it involved people who had many different concerns
and who probably were similar merely in their desire to
write well and to break away from modes that perhaps
had grown stale.
An Interview with Timothy Steele
http://instructional1.calstatela.edu/tsteele/TSpage2/WalzerInter.html
An Invitation to My Demented Uncle by Marilyn Hacker
http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=2659
Poetry of Play, Poetry of Purpose: The Continuity of American Language Poetry
John R. Woznicki
http://www.moriapoetry.com/woznicki.htm
KARAWANE
OR, THE TEMPORARY DEATH OF THE BRUITIST
Why I (Do Not) Write Poetry:
A Manifesto on Art & Modern Life
I do not write poetry to communicate.
If you want to communicate something to someone,
write them a letter, post a manifesto in laundromats
and on telephone poles, or call a talk radio show.
More people will receive your message than read your poetry.
I do not write poetry to describe things: a perfect day,
a flower, my grandmother’s warm cookie-baking kitchen.
Artists who paint pictures of flowers end up selling their
work out of trucks in a K-Mart parking lot.
Dancers who act things out are mimes.
Other artists have figured out ways to express their vision without strict description. You say live in the world, engage it.
The world around me is too cynical for hearts and flowers
and pretty little words. They are too hardened to wars and hatred and have been told for too long that they are racist, materialistic, and worse. They have already stopped
listening. We have to find new ways to get our point
across.
Karawane Manifesto
by Laura Winton
November 2001
http://www.391.org/manifestos/laurawinton_karawane.htm
Heresy and the Individual Talent by Jeff Gundy
http://www.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/2002dec/gundy_essay.php
Heaney has written a manifesto for a poetry committed
to strengthening the spirit against any such 'attractively
defeatist proposition' as Larkin's poem offers. Because
of this, he has been accused of cheer-leading boosterism - wrongly I feel. The strength of his position is demonstrated
by the extraordinary volumes Seeing Things (1991),
The Spirit Level (1996, a year after his Nobel Prize)
and last year's Electric Light. Heaney is now able to be
open to pure wonder: this has not been arrived at simply,
as the present volume shows.
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
Seamus Heaney
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=cache:lMn4x341VLsJ observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,680088,00.html+heaney+manifesto&hl=en
Three Things to Forget About Contemporary Poetry
http://www.cprw.com/Pietrzykowski/threethings.htm
Poems Should Not Be
About protest marches,
about newspaper photographs
(even if the man shielding his son from bullets has a name, and looks eternal,
even if the blood dipped hands, spread wide at the window, look eternal),
about elections, about television screens,
about fathers, especially, dead ones,
about domestic tasks, about vices,
about children, about God, about paintings,
(enough already with mystery and art, with divinity tucked into words, mucked onto canvas,
enough already with epiphanies of any kind, in museums or churches, on roads and old barstools)
about drinking hard, about getting hard,
about getting laid, about waking up unexpectedly calm,
(already seen that man's round, unwieldy stomach, this woman's delicate breast,
already known the sweat and wine scent of bodies in the morning)
about worry, about worry, about worry,
about flowers, about, especially, roses,
about what will be missed by the living,
about what will be missed by the dead,
(too many anecdotes, devoid of music, devoid of rhythm, devoid,
too many parables, disguised as music, disguised as rhythm, disguised)
about poetry, about language,
about reading, about poetry.
Poems Should Not Be by David Wright
http://www.redriverreview.com/A55656/RRR.nsf/5ef64cfabe55efc786256a9800264f58/ebd701366c698de186256a9800272a41%21OpenDocument
1.To use the language of common speech, but to employ
the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely
decorative word.
2.We believe that the individuality of a poet may often
be better expressed in free verse than in conventional
forms. In poetry, a new cadence means a new idea.
3.Absolute freedom in the choice of subject.
4.To present an image. We are not a school of painters,
but we believe that poetry should render particulars
exactly and not deal in vague generalities, however
magnificent and sonorous. It is for this reason that
we oppose the cosmic poet, who seems to us to shirk
the real difficulties of his art.
5.To produce a poetry that is hard and clear, never
blurred nor indefinite.
6.Finally, most of us believe that concentration is of
the very essence of poetry.
the Imagist manifesto
http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/imagism-def.html
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy
and rashness. The essential elements of our poetry will
be courage, audacity and revolt. Literature has up to
now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber.
We want to exalt movements of aggression,
feverish sleeplessness,
the double march, the perilous leap,
the slap and the blow with the fist. We declare that
the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new
beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with
its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with
explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to
run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the
Victory of Samothrace. We want to sing the man at
the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth,
itself hurled along its orbit. The poet must spend himself
with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase
the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece
that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be
a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force
them to bow before man.
We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries!
What is the use of looking behind at the moment when
we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible?
Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in
the absolute, since we have already created eternal,
omnipresent speed. We want to glorify war - the only
cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive
gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill,
and contempt for woman. We want to demolish museums
and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist
and utilitarian cowardice. We will sing of the great crowds agitated
by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored
and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals:
the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops
beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous
railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories
suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke;
bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the
diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers
sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing
on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes
for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose
propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the
applause of enthusiastic crowds.
MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM
http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/T4PM/futurist-manifesto.html
Part 8 of Dada Manifesto on Feeble Love and Bitter Love
VIII
TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM
Take a newspaper.
Take some scissors.
Choose from this paper an article of the length you want
to make your poem.
Cut out the article.
Next carefully cut out each of the words that makes up
this article and put them all in a bag.
Shake gently.
Next take out each cutting one after the other.
Copy conscientiously in the order in which they left
the bag.
Them poem will resemble you.
And there you are - an infinitely original author of
charming sensibility, even though unappreciated
by the vulgar herd.*
http://www.ralphmag.org/AR/dada.html
Manifesto: The Revolution of the Word
Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems
and plays still under the hegemony of the banal
word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive
naturalism, and desirous of crystallizing a viewpoint...
we hereby declare that:
1. The revolution in the English language is an
accomplished fact.
2. The imagination in search of a fabulous world
is autonomous and unconfined.
(Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid courted by Incapacity....Blake)
3. Pure poetry is a lyrical absolute that seeks an
a priori reality within ourselves alone.
(Bring out number, weight and measure in a
year of dearth....Blake)
4. Narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection
of a metamorphosis of reality.
(Enough! Or Too Much!....Blake)
5. The expression of these concepts can be achieved
only through the rhythmic 'hallucination of the word.'
(Rimbaud)
6. The literary creator has the right to disintegrate
the primal matter of words imposed on him by
textbooks and dictionaries.
7. He has the right to use words of his own fashioning
and to disregard existing grammatical and syntactical
laws.
(The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction....Blake)
8. The 'litany of words' is admitted as an independent
unit.
9. We are not concerned with the propogation of
sociological ideas, except to emancipate the
creative elements from the present ideology.
10. Time is a tyranny to be abolished.
11. The writer expresses. He does not communicate.
12. The plain reader be damned.
(Damn braces! Bless relaxes...Blake)
(Signed) Kay Boyle, Whit Burnett, Hart Crane,
Caresse Crosby, Harry Crosby, Martha Foley, Stuart
Gilber, A.L. Gillespie, Leigh Hoffman, Eugene Jolas,
Elliot Paul, Douglas Rigby, Theo Rutra,
Robert Sage, Harold J. Salemson, Laurence Vail.
Manifesto: The Revolution of the Word
by Eugene Jolas
http://www.sixgallerypress.com/jolas.html
With regard to a false interpretation of our enterprise,
stupidly circulated among the public, We declare as follows
to the entire braying literary, dramatic, philosophical,
exegetical and even theological body of contemporary
criticism:
We have nothing to do with literature; But we are quite
capable, when necessary, of making use of it like anyone
else, Surrealism is not a new means or expression, or an
easier one, nor even a metaphysic of poetry.
It is a means of total liberation of the mind and of all
that resembles it. We are determined to make a Revolution.
We have joined the word surrealism to the word revolution
solely to show the disinterested, detached, and even
entirely desperate character of this revolution.
We make no claim to change the mores of mankind,
but we intend to show the fragility of thought, and on
what shifting foundations, what caverns we have built
our trembling houses.
We hurl this formal warning to Society; Beware of your
deviations and faux-pas, we shall not miss a single one.
At each turn of its thought, Society will find us waiting.
We are specialists in Revolt. There is no means of action
which we are not capable, when necessary, of employing.
We say in particular to the Western world: surrealism exists.
And what is this new ism that is fastened to us? Surrealism
is not a poetic form. It is a cry of the mind turning back on
itself, and it is determined to break apart its fetters,
even if it must be by material hammers!
Bureaus de Recherches Surréalistes, 15, Rue de Grenelle
Signed: Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, Jacques Baron, Joë Bousquet, J.-A. Boiffard, André Breton, Jean Carrive, René Crevel, Robert Desnos, Paul Élaurd, Max Ernst, et al.
Modern History Sourcebook:A Surrealist Manifesto:The Declaration of January 27, 1925
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1925surrealism.html
Isidore Isou founded Letttrisme. At the beginning of
the movement, he was its sole practioner. Others soon
joined him. The movement evolved steadily, energetically,
and at times perhaps confusingly from the late 1940s to
the present. Its internal vocabulary has changed othen,
and even its name has sometimes morphed into other
names. Still, these basic writings by Isou make up a good introduction to Lettriste theory.
- Karl Young
MANIFESTO OF LETTERIST POETRY -Isidore Isou
http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/lettrist/isou-m.htm
Once we lived safely beneath our stratum of air.
Now we are waves spouting in the cosmos.
How can we expect our words to remain wrapped up
in the atmosphere of the sentence?
Let them be reunited, like ourselves, to cosmic space
--word constellations on the white page.
Every word is an abstract picture.
A surface. A volume.
A surface on the page. A volume when spoken.
Gamier emphasized the necessity for a break
with the old rhythms:
The rhythms of poetry have succeeded in deadening
the reader's mind.
We listen to the purring of Racine but do not understand it.
In poetry we become aware of the universe--for it to be
based upon the enumeration of feet is an absurdity.
It makes no difference whether FER or AVION have one
or two syllables. What counts is their meaning, the space
which the words themselves occupy upon the printed page,
the vibrations they set up in fact the volume which they
enclose-immense and horizontal in the case of FER, infinite
but with a note of disquiet for AVION
The structure of the sentence would also have to go:
The structure of the sentence has caused the same
damage as the rhythms of poetry. What a difference there is between: "The tiger is coming to drink at the river bank"
and the single name: TIGER!
The poet is left with words stripped of all worn out
structural trappings:
Words are as hard and as scintillating as diamonds.
The word is an element.
The word is a material.
The word is an object.
For those who know how to look at them, some words
possess a remarkable topography.
TRANSATLANTIQUE, for instance, rocks and seas,
peaks and abysses--why, even the moon cannot be
any richer in craters and parched valleys, in rhythms
and beauties.
Words are the visible aspects of ideas just as the trunk
and the foliage are the visible aspects of a tree.
Underneath are the roots, the ideas.
We must grind our well-worn language to dust--
in other words, make the individual words scintillate.
We must do away with imprecise terms, adjectives,
for example--or again use them as nouns, as substance,
that is to say, as material.
But the word cannot be set on the page unless it is in harmony with the atmosphere of the poem.
What is more, the value of each word is modified
by the fact that the poem belongs no longer to a flux
but to a static system.
manifesto for a new poetry visual and phonic by pierre garnier
http://www.391.org/manifestos/pierregarnier_manifesto.htm
Manifesto for Concrete Poetry (1952-55)
Öyvind Fahlström: Sweden
http://www.ubu.com/papers/fahlstrom01.html
Essentials of Spontaneous Prose
by Jack Kerouac
http://www.sixgallerypress.com/kerouac.html
Larkin on Poetry's Pleasure Principle
http://www.mrbauld.com/larkinpl.html
I fell in love — that is the only expression I can think of
— at once, and am still at the mercy of words, though
sometimes now, knowing a little of their behavior very
well, I think I can influence them slightly and have even
learned to beat them now and then, which they appear
to enjoy.
Notes on the Art of Poetry, Dylan Thomas
"Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961
The best craftsman always leaves holes and gaps
in the works of the poem so that something that
is not in the poem can creep, crawl, flash, or
thunder in. The joy and function of poetry is,
and was, the celebration of man, which is also
the celebration of God.
Notes on the Art of Poetry, Dylan Thomas
"Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961
You can tear a poem apart to see what makes
it technically tick, and say to yourself,
when the works are laid out before you, the vowels,
the consonants, the rhymes or rhythms,
"Yes this is it. This is why the poem moves me so.
It is because of the craftsmanship." But you're back again
where you began. You're back with the mystery of having
been moved by words.
Notes on the Art of Poetry, Dylan Thomas
—"Poetic Manifesto" in the Texas Quarterly, Winter 1961
I am a painstaking, conscientious, involved and devious craftsman in words, however unsuccessful the result
so often appears, and to whatever wrong uses I may
apply my technical paraphernalia. I use everything and
anything to make my poems work and move in the direction
I want them to: old tricks, new tricks, puns,
portmanteau-words, paradox, allusion, paronomasia,
paragram, catachresis, slang, assonantal rhymes,
vowel rhymes, sprung rhythm. Every device there is in
language is there to be used if you will.
Poets have got to enjoy themselves sometimes,
and the twisting and convolutions of words, the inventions
and contrivances, are all part of the joy
that is part of the painful, voluntary work.
—Notes on the Art of Poetry, 1961 "Poetic Manifesto" -
Dylan Thomas
http://www.wordspy.com/WAW/Thomas-Dylan.asp
After Free Verse: The New Non-Linear Poetries by Marjorie Perloff
http://articles.poetryx.com/21/
Regarding "Neo-formalism" or "New Formalism,"
I didn't hear those terms until around 1986 or 1987.
Also, I believe the term "neo-formalism" was coined
by someone alarmed that younger poets were
becoming curious about form. New Formalism was never organized or announced in the way that, for instance,
F. S. Flint and Ezra Pound organized and announced
Imagism. This distinction is worth making because
many people today are understandably suspicious
of movement-mongering and have accused formal poets
of grandstanding. But this whole business was thrust
on poets from the outside. And most everyone who
has been associated with New Formalism is uncomfortable
with that label. "Formalism" in particular suggests that
one is less than normally concerned with content,
which is not true of the poets who have been called
New Formalists. If there was a sense of collective
enterprise, as you put it, it developed slowly and loosely.
And it involved people who had many different concerns
and who probably were similar merely in their desire to
write well and to break away from modes that perhaps
had grown stale.
An Interview with Timothy Steele
http://instructional1.calstatela.edu/tsteele/TSpage2/WalzerInter.html
An Invitation to My Demented Uncle by Marilyn Hacker
http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmArticleID=2659
Poetry of Play, Poetry of Purpose: The Continuity of American Language Poetry
John R. Woznicki
http://www.moriapoetry.com/woznicki.htm
KARAWANE
OR, THE TEMPORARY DEATH OF THE BRUITIST
Why I (Do Not) Write Poetry:
A Manifesto on Art & Modern Life
I do not write poetry to communicate.
If you want to communicate something to someone,
write them a letter, post a manifesto in laundromats
and on telephone poles, or call a talk radio show.
More people will receive your message than read your poetry.
I do not write poetry to describe things: a perfect day,
a flower, my grandmother’s warm cookie-baking kitchen.
Artists who paint pictures of flowers end up selling their
work out of trucks in a K-Mart parking lot.
Dancers who act things out are mimes.
Other artists have figured out ways to express their vision without strict description. You say live in the world, engage it.
The world around me is too cynical for hearts and flowers
and pretty little words. They are too hardened to wars and hatred and have been told for too long that they are racist, materialistic, and worse. They have already stopped
listening. We have to find new ways to get our point
across.
Karawane Manifesto
by Laura Winton
November 2001
http://www.391.org/manifestos/laurawinton_karawane.htm
Heresy and the Individual Talent by Jeff Gundy
http://www.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/2002dec/gundy_essay.php
Heaney has written a manifesto for a poetry committed
to strengthening the spirit against any such 'attractively
defeatist proposition' as Larkin's poem offers. Because
of this, he has been accused of cheer-leading boosterism - wrongly I feel. The strength of his position is demonstrated
by the extraordinary volumes Seeing Things (1991),
The Spirit Level (1996, a year after his Nobel Prize)
and last year's Electric Light. Heaney is now able to be
open to pure wonder: this has not been arrived at simply,
as the present volume shows.
Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971-2001
Seamus Heaney
http://www.google.com.au/search?q=cache:lMn4x341VLsJ observer.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,6903,680088,00.html+heaney+manifesto&hl=en
Three Things to Forget About Contemporary Poetry
http://www.cprw.com/Pietrzykowski/threethings.htm
Poems Should Not Be
About protest marches,
about newspaper photographs
(even if the man shielding his son from bullets has a name, and looks eternal,
even if the blood dipped hands, spread wide at the window, look eternal),
about elections, about television screens,
about fathers, especially, dead ones,
about domestic tasks, about vices,
about children, about God, about paintings,
(enough already with mystery and art, with divinity tucked into words, mucked onto canvas,
enough already with epiphanies of any kind, in museums or churches, on roads and old barstools)
about drinking hard, about getting hard,
about getting laid, about waking up unexpectedly calm,
(already seen that man's round, unwieldy stomach, this woman's delicate breast,
already known the sweat and wine scent of bodies in the morning)
about worry, about worry, about worry,
about flowers, about, especially, roses,
about what will be missed by the living,
about what will be missed by the dead,
(too many anecdotes, devoid of music, devoid of rhythm, devoid,
too many parables, disguised as music, disguised as rhythm, disguised)
about poetry, about language,
about reading, about poetry.
Poems Should Not Be by David Wright
http://www.redriverreview.com/A55656/RRR.nsf/5ef64cfabe55efc786256a9800264f58/ebd701366c698de186256a9800272a41%21OpenDocument