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ED HERMANN:
Welcome to Poetry Lectures presented by poetryfoundation.org. In this program, we change direction a bit. If you read Poetry Magazine, you may recall an issue that featured some contemporary manifestos.

JOSHUA MOHEGAN:
History will forget you and salute us.

A.E. STALLINGS:
There are no tired rhymes. There are no forbidden rhymes.

ED HERMANN:
That was Joshua Mohegan and A.E. Stallings, who wrote two of the manifestos featured in the February issue of Poetry. The reason Poetry published these manifestos was that February, 2009 marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of the Futurist Manifesto by F.T. Marinetti. That same month, the Poetry Foundation co-sponsored an event with the Museum of Modern Art in New York in which four poets, A.E. Stallings, along with Charles Bernstein and Thomas Sayers Ellis read their own manifestos as well as historical works by Marinetti and other futurist writers. But as you'll hear in a moment, this was no ordinary reading. The setting was the garden lobby at MoMA. Museum visitors often pass through this lobby on the way to see other galleries, and many in the audience were people who just happened to be there. Not quite sure what to make of the proceedings.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN:
We intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort, and to fight against moralism.

ED HERMANN:
Some of the readings were preceded by blasts on a horn or whistle, and throughout the event, a video showed people reading.

SPEAKER:
Like Serpents, Serpents of explosive breath, a roaring car that seemed to ride on machine gun fire.

ED HERMANN:
This daylong event made enough material for two podcasts. In the next program, we'll hear from Joshua Mohegan and Thomas Sayers Ellis. In this program, we feature Charles Bernstein and AE Stallings. Let's begin with Bernstein. He's the author of more than 20 books of poetry, three books of essays, and the editor of several poetry anthologies. In the 1970s, he co-founded the influential journal Language, and he currently teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. Here is Charles Bernstein reading his manifesto, manifest aversions, conceptual conundrums and implausibly deniable links.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN:
Gentlemen and ladies, children of all ages, the poetry circus continues in the main lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. My piece is called Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums and Implausibly Deniable Links. I should note in terms of this in Poetry magazine, that for many of us, the manifesto, especially as represented in Mary Ann Claus's wonderful anthology manifesto, a century of Isms is itself a literary art form. And what makes it a remarkably resilient one, that it is still despised by those who claim to be poetry lovers and literary people who claim that we don't need any manifestos anymore because poetry should have no ideas. Poetry should not be about thought, poetry should have no positions. And yet somehow it does. I love originality so much, I keep copying it. 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 an overlay of a set of incommensurable possibilities linked together around an 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 liar. The poet's tired, poetry abhors a narrative. "I did not paint it to be understood, but I wish to show what such a scene was like," JMW Turner, 1842. Language Poetry, a loose affiliation 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 un rebuked. I was born yesterday and I'll die tomorrow. This is so and so is this, but neither is important. That is theirs and nears not here, but neither is important. Never twill, never twine, nor peep, nor bleat, nor pipe, neither is 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. (PHONE RINGS) Oh, excuse me. I, I think I have to take this. Hello? Yeah, I'm in the middle of something right now. Yeah. No, no, no. I'm., I'm, I'm busy. Can I call you back? It'll be four or five minutes. I tell you what, I want you to hold the price on the Boccioni. I don't want to go up on that. But the Carrara, let's, let, let's see where it goes. But I think we can go up two or 3,000 on it.

I really want that, OK? I'm sorry. OK. Alright. Thanks very much. OK. Bye bye. Sorry about that. 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 sin. The watercolors in watercolors. I am an observant Jew. I look closely at the things around me as if they were foreign. Sandy as a sugar doughnut, salty as a red rose. You're either asleep or awake or will be. I am not a secular man, but in moments of crisis I turn to agnosticism for the comfort it gives me 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. And late at night, 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 acknowledgment that makes words charms, Talisman of the Fallen World. Poetry is a holding space, a folded grace in which objects held most dear disappear, returning as radiant moments of memories forgiving home for Aquila 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 thing 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 endures it all the same.

ED HERMANN:
That was Charles Bernstein reading his manifesto, which was first published in Poetry magazine in February, 2009. By the way, the cell phone interruption was, as you may have suspected, intentional. The caller was Bernstein's wife, the painter, Susan B, who was in the audience. Our next performer is A.E. Stallings, who studied classics in Athens, Georgia, and now lives in Athens, Greece, where she has published two books of poetry and a translation of the Roman poet Lucretius. Here's A.E. Stallings reading her Presto manifesto.

A.E. STALLINGS:
I think Charles’s point that the manifesto is itself a literary genre is a very important one. When we were commissioned to write some manifestos, poets were to try to write manifestos, I had trouble wrapping my mind around what is a manifesto. I'm a poet who's associated with received forms and poetry. And once I decided that the manifesto was a kind of received form, it fell into place. So, the manifesto is about outrageous language, outrageous statements, which is kind of refreshing in an era where so much language is house trained and it's a language that is also playful, but serious in its playfulness. So, I sort of was trying to work with that, and I was thinking of what I could say that for poets anyway would, would create would be provocative. And the thing that seemed to, I don't know, exercise poets one way or the other for me seems to be rhyme. So, (LAUGH) this is Presto manifesto. The freedom to not rhyme must include the freedom to rhyme. Then verse will be free. All rhyme 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 and rhymes across different parts of speech, whereas in many other languages, rhyme is merely a coincident jingle of accidents. 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 (INAUDIBLE), 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. Rhymes 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. Consonants 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 line length. A rhyme lets us hear the end of the line so lines may be of any 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. C also, chime, climb, climb, crime, dime, grime, I'm, lime, mime, paradigm, pantomime, prime, rhyme slime, sublime, time, time.

ED HERMANN:
That was A.E. Stallings reading Presto Manifesto, which was first published in Poetry magazine. In the remainder of this program, we'll hear Goldstein and Stallings reading futurist manifestos from the early 20th century. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti is considered the founder and primary inspiration for the futurist movement. Marinetti was born in Egypt and educated in Paris. He spent the 1890s writing poems in French, dabbling in symbolism. But by the early 20th century he became increasingly fascinated with cars, machines and the speed of the new mechanized world. On February 20th, 1909, he announced his attack on all things, old and traditional with the publication of the Futurist Manifesto.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN:
100 years ago today, in the greatest newspaper of the world, Le Figaro, Paris, 1909, FT Marinetti published his founding and manifesto of Futurism, from which I will now read excerpts in a translation by Mr Lawrence Rainey. One, we intend to sing to the love of danger and fearlessness. Two, courage, boldness and rebelliousness will be the essential elements of our poetry. Three, up to now literature has exalted contemplative stillness, ecstasy and sleep. We intend to exalt movement's aggression, feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the slap and the punch. Four, we affirm that the beauty of the world has been enriched by a new form of beauty. The beauty of speed. A racing car with a hood that glistens with large pipes resembles a serpent with explosive breath, a roaring automobile that seems to ride on grapeshot that is more beautiful than the victory of Samothrace. We intend to him man at the steering wheel. The ideal axis of which intersects the earth itself hurled ahead in its own race along the path of its orbit.

Six, henceforth, poets must do their utmost with art or splendor and generosity. There is number seven. There is no beauty that does not consist of struggle. No work that lacks an aggressive character can be considered a masterpiece. Eight, we stand on the last promontory of the centuries, why should we look back over our shoulders? Time and space died yesterday. We already live in the absolute, for we have already created velocity, which is eternal and omnipresent. Nine, we intend to glorify war, the only hygiene of the world. Militarism, the destructive gesture of emancipators, beautiful ideas worth dying for and contempt for women. Ten, we intend to destroy museums, libraries, academies of every sort, and to fight against moralism, feminism and every utilitarian or opportunistic cowardice.

ED HERMANN:
That's Charles Bernstein reading from the Futurist Manifesto. As you can hear, Marinetti strikes a tone of militant nationalism, glorifying machines, speed and violence. This was no mere artistic pose. Marinetti became an early supporter of Mussolini and the fascists. He even tried to make futurism the official state art of Italy. But Mussolini wasn't all that interested in art.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN:
11, we shall sing the multicolored and polyphonic tidal waves of revolution in the modern metropolis shall sing the vibrating nocturnal fervor of factories and shipyards burning under violent electrical moons, bloated railroad stations that devour smoking serpents. Factories hanging from the sky by the twisting threads of spiraling smoke bridges like gigantic gymnasts who span rivers flashing at the sun with the gleam of a knife. Adventurous steamships that sent the horizon, locomotives with their swollen chest pawing the tracks like massive steel horses bridled with pipes. And the oscillating flight of airplanes whose propeller flaps at the wind like a flag and to applaud like a delirious crowd. It is from Italy that we are flinging this to the world. Our manifesto of burning and overwhelming violence with which today we establish futurism for we intend to free this nation from its fetid cancer of professors, archaeologists, tour guides, and antiquarians. For much too long, Italy has been a flea market.

We intend to liberate it from the countless museums that have covered it like so many cemeteries, museums, cemeteries, identical, really. In the horrible promiscuity of so many bodies scarcely known to one another. Museums, public dormitories in which someone is put to sleep alongside others he hated or didn't know. Museums, absurd slaughterhouses for painters and sculptors who go on thrashing each other with blows of line and color along the disputed walls that once a year you might make a pilgrimage, much as one makes an annual visit to a graveyard. I'll grant you that, that once a year you can deposit a wreath of flowers in front of the Mona Lisa. I permit you that, but I cannot countenance the idea that our sorrows are daily shepherded on a tour through museums or our weak courage, our pathological restlessness. Why would we wish to poison ourselves? Why wish to rot? And what is there to see in an old painting beside the laborious distortion of the artist who tried to break through the insuperable barriers, which blocked his desire to express fully his dream.

To admire an old painting is the same as pouring our sensibility into a funerary urn instead of casting it forward into the distance in violent spurts of creation and action. Do you wish to waste your best strength in this eternal and useless admiration of the past activity and activity that will only leave you fatally spent diminished crushed? I declare in all truth that a daily visit to a museum, library, cemeteries of futile effort, (INAUDIBLE) of crucified dreams, record books of broken assaults is as dangerous for artists as a prolonged guardianship under the thumb of one's family is for certain young talents, intoxicated with their own genius and their ambitious aims. For the sickly, the ill or the imprisoned, let them go and visit. The admirable past is perhaps a solace for their troubles. But we intend to know nothing of it. Nothing of the past. We are strong and youthful. Futurists, futurists, futurists, futurists. And so, here they are, here they are, go ahead. Set fire to the shelves of the libraries, turn aside the course of the canal, flood the museums.

Oh, that joy of seeing all the glorious old canvases floating adrift on the waters, shredded and discolored, seize your patches and hammers and tear down hideously, tear down the vulnerable critics. The oldest of us is 30. So we have at least a decade left. When we are 40, others who are younger and stronger will throw us into the wastebasket like useless manuscripts. We want it to happen. They will come against us, our successors. They come from far away from every direction, extending predatory claws, sniffing dog like at the doors of the academies for the good smell of our decaying minds. Long since promised to the library's catacombs. But we won't be there. They will find us at last one wintry night in an open field beneath a sad roof, drummed by monotonous rain, crouched beside our trembling airplanes. And in the act of warming our hands by the dirty little fire made by the books we are writing today, flaming beneath the flight of our imaginings. Painting with contempt and anxiety, they will storm around us all of them, exasperated by our lofty daring, will attempt to kill us.

Driven by a hatred, all the more implacable because their hearts will be intoxicated with love and admiration for us. In their eyes, strong and healthy and justice will radiantly burst. Art, in fact, can be nothing if not violence, cruelty, injustice. The oldest of us is 30, and we have already cast away treasures, thousands of treasures, forced love, boldness, cunning and raw willpower have thrown them away impatiently, furiously, heedlessly, without hesitation, without rest, screaming for our lives. We are still not weary, our hearts feel no tiredness because they are fed with fire, hatred and speed. Are you astounded? Of course, you are, because you can't even recall having been alive standing erect on the summit of the world. Yet once more, we fling our challenge to the stars. You raise objections. Stop, stop. We know them. We've understood. The refined and mendacious mind tells us that we are the summation and continuation of ancestors. May be suppose it so, but what difference does it make?

We don't want to listen. War to anyone who repeats those infamous words to us. Lift up your heads standing erect on the summit of the world. Yet once more, we fling our challenge to the stars.

ED HERMANN:
Between the readings, video monitors played images of people with aphasia, a language impairment due to brain injury. Reading from Marinetti’s Manifesto. Artist Luca Buvoli says his purpose in having people with speech disorders read the manifesto was to slow down and fragment the language as a critique of the violence and aggression in our society.

LUCA BUVOLI:
Patriotism, the just destructive gesture of the anarchists, beautiful ideas worth dying for and contempt for women.

SPEAKER:
De, de, de, danger to habit of prep, po, po, po, po, promise.

ED HERMANN:
The ideas in Marinetti manifestos and other theoretical writings provided fertile sources for experimentation in the visual, performing and literary arts throughout the 20th century. Art Deco, surrealism and Dada, all show the influence of futurism. Composers as varied as Igor Stravinsky, George Eint and Edgard Varese were influenced by futurist ideas. Neo futurist theatre companies emphasize speed and brevity in their productions, but Marinetti principal tool in his assault on history is the written word. Next, we hear another work by Marinetti, Destruction of Syntax, read by AE Stallings.

A.E. STALLINGS:
I'm going to read a few sections from Destruction of Syntax, Imagination Without Strings, Words and Freedom by Marinetti. This is about the futurist sensibility. One, acceleration of life to today's swift pace, physical, intellectual and sentimental equilibrium on the chord of speed stretched between contrary magnetism, multiple and simultaneous awareness in a single individual. Dread of the old and the known, love of the new and unexpected (LAUGH) Dread of quiet living, love of danger, and an attitude of daily heroism. Destruction of a sense of the beyond, and increased value of the individual whose desire is Viva la Vie in (INAUDIBLE) phrase, the multiplication and unbridled of human desires and ambition and exact awareness of everything inaccessible and unrealized in every person. Semi equality of man and woman and a lessening of the disproportion in their social rights. Disdain for amour, sentimentality or luxury produced by the greater freedom and erotic ease of women, and by the universal exaggeration of female luxury.

Let me explain. Today's woman loves luxury more than love. A visit to the dressmaker's establishment, escorted by a paunchy, gouty banker friend who pays the bills, is a perfect substitute for the most amorous rendezvous with an adored young man. The woman finds all the mystery of love in the selection of an amazing ensemble, the latest model, which her friends still do not have. Men do not love women who lack luxury. The lover has lost all his prestige. Love has lost its absolute worst. A complex question, all I can do is to raise it. A modification of patriotism, which now means a heroic idealization of the commercial, industrial and artistic solidarity of a people. A modification in the idea of war, which has become the necessary and bloody test of a people's force. The passion, art and idealism of business, new financial sensibility. Man multiplied by machine, new mechanical sense, a fusion of instinct with the efficiency of motors and concord forces, the passion, art and idealism of sport, idea and love of the record.

New tourist sensibility bred by ocean liners and great hotels. Annual synthesis of different races, passion for the city, negation of distances and nostalgic solitudes, ridicule of the holy green silence and the ineffable landscape. The earth shrunk by speed, new sense of the world, to be precise. One after the other, man will gain the sense of his home of the quarter, where he lives, of his region, and finally of the continent. Today he is aware of the whole world. He little needs to know what his ancestors did, but he must assiduously discover what his contemporaries are doing all over the world. The single man, therefore, must communicate with every people on earth. He must feel himself to be the axis, judge and motor of the explored and unexplored infinite, vast increase of a sense of humanity and a momentary, urgent need to establish relations with all mankind. A loathing of curved lines, spirals in the tourniquet, love for the straight line, the tunnel, the habit and visual foreshortening and visual synthesis caused by the speed of trains and cars.

Look down on cities and countryside, dread of slowness, pettiness, analysis and detailed explanations, love of speed, abbreviation and the summary. Quick, give me the whole thing in two words, love of depth and essence in every exercise of the spirit. Death of free verse. Free verse once had countless reasons for existing, but now is destined to be replaced by words in freedom. The evolution of poetry and human sensibility has shown us the two incurable defects of free verse. One, free verse fatally pushes the poet towards facile sound effects, banal double meanings, monotonous cadences, a foolish chiming, and an inevitable echo play, internal and external. Two, free verse artificially channels the flow of lyric emotion between the high walls of syntax and the weirs of grammar. The free intuitive inspiration that addresses itself directly to the intuition of the ideal reader finds itself imprisoned and distributed like purified water for the nourishment of all fussy, restless intelligences.

When I speak of the canals of syntax, I am neither categorical nor systematic. Traces of conventional texts and even of true logical sentences will be found here and there in the words in freedom of my unchained lyricism. This inequality and conciseness and freedom is natural and inevitable, since poetry and truth is only a superior, more concentrated and intense life than that which we live from day to day like the latter is composed of hyper alive elements and moribund elements. By the imagination without strings, I mean the absolute freedom of images or analogies expressed with unhampered words and with no connecting strings of syntax and with no punctuation. Up to now, writers have been restricted to immediate analogies. For instance, they have compared an animal with a man or with another animal, which is almost the same as a kind of photography. They have compared, for example, a fox terrier to a small thoroughbred. Others, more advanced might compare the same trembling fox terrier to a little morse code machine.

I, on the other hand, compare it with gurgling water. In this there is an ever vast degradation of analogies. There are ever deeper and more solid affinities however remote. Analogy is nothing more than the deep love that assembles distant, seemingly diverse and hostile things and orchestral style at once. Polychromatic, polyphonic and polymorphous can embrace the life of matter only by means of the most extensive analogies. When in my battle of Tripoli, I compared a trench bristling with bayonets to an orchestra, a machine gun to a femme fatale. I intuitively introduced a large part of the universe into a short episode of African battle. Images are not flowers to be chosen and picked with parsimony. As Voltaire said, they are the very lifeblood of poetry. Poetry should be an uninterrupted sequence of new images, or it is mere anemia and green sickness. The broader their affinities, the longer will images keep their power to amaze. With word, the imagination without strings and words and freedom will bring us to the essence of material.

As we discovered new analogies between distant and apparently contrary things, we will endow them with an ever more intimate value. Instead of humanizing animals, vegetables and minerals and outmoded system, we will be able to animalize, vegetize, mineralized, electrify or liquefy our style, making it live the life of material. For example, to represent the life of a blade of grass, I say, tomorrow I'll be greener. With words and freedom, we will have condensed metaphors, telegraphic images, maximum vibrations, nodes of thought, closed or open, fans of movement, compressed analogies, color balances, dimensions, weights, measures and the speed of sensations. The plunge of the essential word into the water of sensibility, minus the concentric circles that the word produces. Restful moments of intuition, moments and two, three, four, five different rhythms. The analytic exploratory poles that sustain the bundle of intuitive strings.

ED HERMANN:
A.E. Stallings reading Marinetti's, Destruction of Syntax. Next, we'll hear from Carlo Carra, a painter who, along with other artists, wrote the manifesto of futurist painters. In typical futurist rhetoric, they vowed to fight the fanatical, senseless and snobbish religion of the past. Carra is best known for his fiery 1910 painting, The Funeral of the Anarchist Galli. Here again is A.E. Stallings reading Carlo Carra's, The painting of sound, noises and smells.

A.E. STALLINGS:
It is indisputably true that silence is static and sounds, noises and smells are dynamic. Sounds, noises and smells are nothing, but different forms and intensities of vibration. And any succession of sounds, noises and smells and presses on the mind and arabesque of form and color. We must measure this intensity and perceive these arabesques. The painting of sounds, noises and smells rejects all muted colors, even those obtained directly and without using tricks like patinas and glazes. The banality of those velvets silks and flesh tints which are too human, too refined, too soft, and flowers, which are too pale and drooping, grays, browns and all muddy colors. The use of pure horizontal and vertical lines and all other dead lines. The right angle, which we consider passionless, the cube, the pyramid and all other static shapes, the unities of time and place. The painting of sounds, noises and smells calls for one, reds, reds, the reddest reds that shout. Greens that can never be greener, greens that scream, yellows as violent as can be, polenta yellows, saffron yellows, brass yellows.

All the colors of speed, of joy, of carousing and fantastic carnivals, of fireworks, (INAUDIBLE) and music halls, all colors seen in movement, colors experienced in time and not in space. The dynamic arabesque, which is the sole reality created by the artist in the depth of his feeling. The clash of all the acute angles which we have already called the angles of will, oblique lines, which fall on the observer, like so many bolts from the blue, along with lines of depth. The sphere, the ellipse that spins, the upside down cone, the spiral, and all the dynamic forms, which the infinite power of an artist genius are able to uncover. Respective obtained, not as the objectivity of distances, but as a subjective penetration of hard and soft, sharp and dull forms as a universal subject, and is the sole reason for a painting's existence. The significance of its dynamic construction, polyphonic architectural whole. Architecture is usually thought of as something static. This is wrong. What we have in mind is an architecture similar to the dynamic musical architecture, a seat achieved by the futurist musician Pratella.

Architecture is found in the movement of colors of smoke from a chimney and in metallic structures when they are experienced in a violent, chaotic state of mind. The inverted cone, the natural shape of an explosion, the slanting cylinder and cone, the collision of two cones at their apexes. The natural shape of a waterspout with flexible or curving lines, a clown jumping dancers, the zigzag and the wavy line. Ellipsoidal curves considered as straight lines in movement, lines and volume seen as plastic transcendentalism. That is according to their characteristic degree of curvature or bleakness determined by the painter's state of mind, echoes of lines and volumes in movement. Plastic complementarity for both forms and colors based on the law of equivalent contrast and on the opposite poles of the spectrum. This complimentarianism derives from an imbalance of forms, which are hence forced to move. The consequent elimination of the complements of volumes. We must reject these because like a pair of crutches, they allow only a single movement, forward and backward and not the total movement, which we call spherical expansion in space.

The continuity and simultaneous, simultaneity of the plastic transcendence of the animal, mineral, vegetable and mechanical kingdoms, abstract plastic holes corresponding not to our sight, but to the sensations was derived from sounds, noises, smells and all the unknown forces that surround us. These polyphonic and polyrhythmic abstract plastic holes correspond to a requirement of inner and harmonics that we futurist painters believe to be indispensable to pictorial sensibility. We future painters maintain that sounds, noises and smells are incorporated in the expression of lines, volumes and colors, just as lines, volumes and colors are incorporated in the architecture of a musical work. Our canvas is therefore expressed the plastic equivalent of the sounds, noises and smells found in theaters, music halls, cinemas, brothels, railway stations, ports, garages, hospitals, workshops, etc. This is truth. In order to achieve this total painting, which requires the active cooperation of the senses, a painting, which is a plastic state of mind of the universal.

You must paint as drunkard, sing and vomit sounds, noises and smells.

ED HERMANN:
That was A.E. Stallings reading the painting of sound, noises and Smells by Carlo Carra. The final reading we'll hear in this program is unusual for futurist writings, in that it's by a woman. Mina Loy was admired as a poet by Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, but she considered herself a visual artist. She appears in the biographies of many other writers and artists, including Hemingway, Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce. But her own life and work remain largely unknown. After studying art in London and Munich, she moved to Paris in 1903, where she met Apollinaire and Picasso and became a frequent guest of Gertrude Stein. She also had a brief affair with Marinetti. When she moved to New York in 1916, her aphorisms on Futurism was already known among artists there, and her love songs had created a scandal when published in an upstart rival to poetry magazine. She died in Colorado in 1966, leaving behind an unfinished biography of Isadora Duncan and an unpublished collection of poems from the 1940s.

Here's Charles Bernstein reading Mina Loy's Aphorisms on Futurism.

CHARLES BERNSTEIN:
OK. So, this is the aphorisms on futurism by Mina Loy. It's somewhat quieter work, not meant to be read in a big hall like this. Die in the past, live in the future. The velocity of velocity arrives in starting in pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed. And form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision. The straight line and the circle are the parents of design form the basis of art. There is no limit to their coherent variability. Love the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it. Love the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it. Open your arms to the dilapidated to rehabilitate them. You prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened, but the future is only dark from outside. Leap into it. It explodes with light. Forget that you live in houses, that you may live in yourself. For the smallest people live in the greatest houses. But the smallest person potentially is as great as the universe. What can you know of expansion?

Who limits yourselves to compromise? Hitherto, the great man has achieved greatness by keeping the people small. But in the future, by inspiring the people to expand to their fullest capacity. The great man proportionately must be tremendous. A God, love of others is the appreciation of oneself. May your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self sympathy. The future is limitless. The past, a trail of insidious reactions. Life is only limited by our prejudices, destroy them and you cease to be at the mercy of yourself. Time is the dispersion of intensiveness. The futurist can live a thousand years in one poem. He can compress every aesthetic principle in one line. The mind is a magician bound by assimilation. Let him lose. And the smallest idea conceived in freedom will suffice to negate the wisdom of all forefathers. Looking on the past, you arrive at yes, but before you can act upon it, you have already arrived at no. The futurists must leap from affirmative to affirmative.

Ignoring intermittent negations must spring from stepping stone to stone of creative explorations without slipping back into the turbid stream of accepted facts. There are no (INAUDIBLE) on the absolute to which man may pin his faith. Today is the crisis of consciousness. Today is the crisis of consciousness. Today is the crisis of consciousness. Consciousness cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms as offered by creative genius. It is the new form for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant that molds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it. Consciousness has no climax. Consciousness has no climax. Today is the crisis of consciousness. Let the universe flow into your consciousness. There is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not recreate. Unscrew your capability of absorption and grasp the elements of life. Whole misery is the disintegration of joy, intellect of intuition, acceptance of inspiration. Cease to build your personality with the objections of irrelevant minds.

Not to be a cipher in your ambient, but to color your ambient with your preferences. Not to accept experiences at face value, but to readjust activity to the peculiarity of your own will. These are the primary tentative steps toward independence. Man is a slave only to his own mental lethargy. You cannot restrict the mind's capacity. Therefore, you stand not only in abject servitude to your perceptive consciousness, but also to the mechanical reactions of the subconsciousness that rubbish heap of race, tradition and believing yourself free. Your least conception is colored by the pigment of retrograde superstitions. Here are the fellow lands of mental spatiality that futurism will clear, making place for whatever you are brave enough, beautiful enough to draw out of the realized self. To your blushing, we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies that you being weak, whisper alone in the dark. They are empty of your shame. And so, these sounds shall dissolve back to their innate senselessness, thus shall evolve the language of the future through derision of humanity.

Through derision of humanity, as it appears to arrive at a respect for man as he shall be, except the tremendous truth of futurism leaving all those knickknacks.

ED HERMANN:
That was Charles Bernstein reading Aphorisms on Futurism by Mina Loy. The reading was part of futurism and the new manifesto, which took place on February 20th, 2009, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The event was a collaboration of the Museum of Modern Art and the Poetry Foundation. You can hear more excerpts from the event on the Next Poetry Lectures podcast, which will feature Thomas Sayers Ellis and Joshua Mohegan. You can read the contemporary manifestos published in Poetry magazine, as well as a wide selection of historical poetics essays in the Poetry Learning lab at poetryfoundation.org. You'll also find articles about poetry and online archive of more than 8,000 poems and other audio programs to download. I'm Ed Herrmann. Thanks for listening to poetry lectures from poetryfoundation.org.