Originally Posted by
WolfLarsen
Somebody requested something more concise than the essay. Well here you go:
THE WOLF LARSEN MANIFESTO
1. All great Writers should gather at the entrances of the major publishing houses and urinate on their doorsteps!
2. All great Poets should use the pages of the country’s most prestigious literary magazines as toilet paper!
3. All contemporary “poets” that rhyme should be castrated at once!
4. Poetry and prose should be immoral and blasphemous! If your poetry shocks and offends religious extremists, puritanical feminists, politicians, black nationalists, white supremacists, and everybody else than you’re probably doing something right! The paintings of Picasso, the symphonies of Mahler, and the sculptures of Rodin shocked and offended many people too! The last thing the world needs is more boring polite “literature”!
5. If you write prose just like ten thousand other writers than why bother writing? Garbage men contribute far more to society than “writers” and “poets” that write like everybody else! No two authors or poets should read even remotely alike!
6. From this day forward the words Poet, Writer, Sculptor, Playwright, Painter, Composer, and all other Artists should appear in capitals. After all, some guy named god who doesn’t even exist appears in capitals and since Artists are greater than god than words like Poet and Artist should be capitalized.
7. There is no god as written in the bible. Rather, every Human Being that lives on earth is a god because Humans are the most creative animals on the planet. Therefore, Artists are gods!
8. Who cares about the rules of grammar? Take a baseball bat and SMASH the rules of grammar into pieces! Language must obey the wishes of the Writer. The Writer should take language and mold it and reshape it as he sees fit just like a Sculptor.
9. Poets and Writers need to look at the rest of the art world and learn. Poetry and fiction currently appear to be the most backward mediums of the art world. Painting has raced forward like a fast car, jazz music has run forward like a rabbit, even classical music in the last hundred years has left the writing world behind in both innovation and boldness. Writing and poetry are progressing forward at a crawl – just like a snail. All Poets and Writers should think of themselves as wrecking ball operators – we must SMASH the literary world as we know it into bits with a bold and revolutionary writing!
10. The system we live under has nothing to offer but endless wars, prisons, poverty, homophobia, racial and gender discrimination, class oppression, anti-sex puritanism, and human extinction from nuclear war. The literary establishment has nothing to offer us but airport novels, censorship (in the form of political correctness), pretentious “literary” magazines filled with hack “poetry” that sometimes even rhymes, and the never ending boring banal “well-polished” “well-crafted” “literary” fiction whose main purpose seems to be to help insomniacs fall asleep. Bartok’s symphonies don’t help people fall asleep! Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring caused a riot when it was first played! Jackson Pollock’s paintings can hardly be considered sleepy! Poetry and literature must become explosive, chaotic, alive, exciting, dynamic, etc. – just like the times we live in!
11. More than anything else remember there is no one else like you on the entire planet! So why should you write like everybody else? Write like nobody else writes! If you’re not creative than why should future generations bother reading your writing? Every Writer should be his own literary movement! Every Writer should be his own literary revolution!
Add the list of innovators!
