Manifesto Project , livre ebook

The
MANIFESTO
Project
Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics
Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher, Editors
Jay Robinson and Nick Sturm, Associate Editors
Mary Biddinger, John Gallaher, eds., The Monkey & the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics
Robert Archambeau, The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World
Rebecca Hazelton & Alan Michael Parker, eds., The Manifesto Project
The
MANIFESTO
Project

Edited by Rebecca Hazelton & Alan Michael Parker
New Material Copyright © 2017 by The University of Akron Press
All rights reserved • First Edition 2017 • Manufactured in the United States of America. • All inquiries and permission requests should be addressed to the Publisher, the University of Akron Press, Akron, Ohio 44325-1703.
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ISBN : 978-1-629220-49-9 (paper)
ISBN : 978-1-629220-50-5 (ePDF)
ISBN : 978-1-629220-51-2 (ePub)
A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI NISO Z 39.48–1992 (Permanence of Paper). ∞
The views contained herein are those of the individual authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editors, the Akron Series in Contemporary Poetics, or The University of Akron Press.
Cover: Felicia van Bork, How to Breathe Again , 2016, monotype collage, 30 x 22 in. Photo: Christopher Clamp, Jerald Melberg Gallery, www.jeraldmelberg.com . Reproduced with permission. Cover design by Tyler Krusinski.
The Manifesto Project was designed and typeset by Amy Freels. The typeface, Mrs. Eaves, was designed by Zuzana Licko in 1996. The display type, Oswald, was designed by Vernon Adams in 2012. The Manifesto Project was printed on sixty-pound natural and bound by Bookmasters of Ashland, Ohio.
Contents
Introduction: More Manifestos, Please
Lisa Ampleman | There is Nothing New Under the Sun. Make it New.
Sandra Beasley | The Scientist Speaks
Sean Bishop | Slow Poetry
Susan Briante | Big Data Birdsong
Stephen Burt | Manifest Stephanie
Jen Campbell | Manifesto
Kara Candito | Destroy Yourself!: Some Notes on the Poetics of Travel
Bruce Cohen | Poetry Manifesto
Erica Dawson | Confessional Activism
Sean Thomas Dougherty | In the Absence of Others I Wanted Something Brave
Jehanne Dubrow | Manifesto of the Radically Uncool
Rebecca Morgan Frank | Listen Up! A Manifesto
Elisa Gabbert and Kathleen Rooney| Some Notes on Manifestos
Hannah Gamble | Manifesto
Noah Eli Gordon | On the Poem’s Animal Sound
David Groff | The Promise of Radical Content
Cynthia Hogue | An Exhilarant Attentiveness
Doyali Farah Islam | A Private Architecture of Resistance
Genevieve Kaplan | Attending the Poem
Vandana Khanna | My Poetry Talks with an Accent
Matthew Lippman | untitled
Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine | The Racial Imaginary
Cecilia Llompart | untitled
Randall Mann | Usually Against Ideas
Corey Marks | The Wily Narrative
Joyelle McSweeney | Rose Cum Manifesto
Erika Meitner | Some Notes Toward A Manifesto
Orlando Menes | Manifesto
Susan Laughter Meyers | Manifesto: Willing to Fetch the Water
Jennifer Militello | The Incongruence Manifesto
Tyler Mills | Manifesto // 22 Dictums // On Balance in the Making of What Escapes Us, i.e. The Poem
Jacqueline Osherow | Opportunism: A Manifesto (With Apologies to Coleridge and Kubla Khan )
Emilia Phillips | X: A Manifesto of Poetics
Kevin Prufer | A Manifesto
Joshua Robbins and Jeffrey Schultz | Subscendentalism
Zach Savich | Living Hand Poetics
Martha Silano | Three Choices: A Manifesto
Sean Singer | Manifesto
Marcela Sulak | Steel Songs: A Poetry Manifesto
Maureen Thorson | A Poetics of Responsibility
Afaa Weaver | What Lies Inside Us: Connectedness in Language and Being
Jillian Weise | Biohack Manifesto
Valerie Wetlaufer | Inscribing the Domestic Daily
Rachel Zucker | Dear Christine
Contributors
Acknowledgments
Indices
Card Catalogue
Books
Articles, Essays, Letters, & Manifestos
Fairytales, Plays, & Poems
Blogs, Constitutional Amendments, Supreme Court Cases, & Videos
Fauna
Birds
Fish & Shellfish
Insects & Spiders
Mammals
Reptiles
Proper Names
Proper Nouns
Who’s Missing
Introduction
More Manifestos, Please
When we announced the call for submissions for The Manifesto Project , many poets and writers shared the link to the project on social media, expressing support and interest in reading the book. They were specific in their support, not just sharing and “liking,” but saying, “this is needed” and “I have always wanted something like this.” Some even contacted us regarding use of the text in the classroom. One woman seemed to want us to use her lesson plan as a manifesto.
But despite such enthusiasm for sharing the open call and for the project itself, many early enthusiasts did not themselves submit. Younger poets begged off, telling us they weren’t established enough. Older poets were too busy. Although we ultimately had a great response and had to choose between great options, it was clear that had this book merely been a poetry anthology, we would have been flooded with submissions from the get-go. It was the writing of a manifesto that gave people pause.
Why is that? One thousand words of prose is nothing, even for a poet, and the call was very broad and open to interpretation. We didn’t put clear parameters on what we thought a manifesto was; not that we knew what a contemporary manifesto would look like. Our own initial conceptions of a manifesto mainly came from early twentieth century examples, such as the Futurists and Dada, or a little later, pretty much anything Pound wrote about his feelings, or a standard, Frank O’Hara’s “Personism,” which parodies the idea of a manifesto and then somehow turns achingly sincere.
None of these, however, seems exactly relevant today, and there’s a reason for that. Manifestos are responses to their current circumstances: political, economic, technological (and more). Manifestos assess the current situation, and look to the future. They aren’t just descriptive, they’re prescriptive—they are calls for action and demands for change, either implicitly or explicitly. Manifestos are inherently revolutionary, and because of this, they have an expiration date—the status quo and the revolutions it inspires ever-shifting. We just don’t know when that date will be. It’s only later that we look at something like The Declaration of Independence and say, “Okay, that’s great, way to found the country, but why “all men” and not “all people?” Why is it that you really meant “all white men and no ladies”? Also, that Creator mention is just going to be a headache later. Donna Harraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” was the newest and greatest in the mid ’90s, but now seems pretty self-evident. The egalitarian claims put forth in “The Hacker’s Manifesto” are a little harder to swallow in light of the recent #gamergate on twitter, the doxxing of female game designers, and the harassment of Anita Sarkesian. None of this is necessarily due to a lack of vision on the writer’s part—the circumstances have changed. For a manifesto to remain relevant, it would also have to be fungible, and adaptable to circumstances.
The manifestos in this volume reflect our contemporary circumstances. They zing with zeitgeist. Some, like “The Racial Imaginary” by Beth Loffreda and Claudia Rankine, or Orlando Menes’s “Manifesto,” concern the intersections of racial or cultural identity and writing. Others confront gender (among other things), such as Valerie Wetlaufer’s “Inscribing the Domestic Daily,” or Stephen Burt’s “Manifest Stephanie.” There are global perspectives here, such as Susan Briante’s “Big Data Birdsong,” which examines the place of poetry in a world of big data, or Kara Candito’s “Destroy Yourself!: Some Notes on the Poetics of Travel.” Several manifestos look at poetic composition, and many manifestos are concerned with what poetry can do and what it doesn’t do. There are -isms here, as in Jacqueline Osherow’s “Opportunism” and Joshua Robbins and Jeffrey Schultz’s “Subscendentalism.” There are manifestos that draw from a long lineage of prior manifestos, and there’s more than one manifesto that denies the very notion of a manifesto. The poets in this anthology differ widely, which makes their points of commonality all the more startling.
In assembling this anthology, we asked each poet to give us two poems along with his or her manifesto. As typical anthology practice goes, this might seem a bit backward. The usual order of operations is that a poet writes a poem, someone deems it to be Good, and the poem is henceforth enshrined in an anthology. For this project, however, we thought to hand the sacred oils over to the authors themselves, so that they could anoint as they saw fit. The poets are, after all, the ones declaring the principles. Let’s see those principles in action.
The world of poetry can seem very small in comparison to other arts, such as music and film, which have cultural and monetary cachet, and miniscule in the general world of commerce. Poets easily feel isolated and ineffectual. But poets have opinions galore, and think of their work in so many different ways—and are willing, as we see in this volume, to step on toes.
Stepping on toes has value. Calling for change, even a small change, can have wider repercussions, can cast doubt on larger institutions. It’s revolutionary. Whether you agree with him or not, when Donald Hall criticized the “McPoem” for its bland, safe, generic qualities, the logical extension of that critique was a criticism of the MFA system that spawned such results. What are the artistic repercussions of an educational system—an expensive one at that—aimed at “producing” artists? We don’t have answers to this challenging question; we’re both products of this system, and nonetheless poets who aim to maintain our skepticism regarding i