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Thread: a manifesto

  1. #1
    The Wolf of Larsen WolfLarsen's Avatar
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    a manifesto

    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 “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!
    "...the ramblings of a narcissistic, self-obsessed, deranged mind."
    My poetry, plays, novels, & other stuff on Amazon:
    http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=ntt_athr...or=Wolf Larsen

  2. #2
    Artist and Bibliophile stlukesguild's Avatar
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    1. All great Writers should gather at the entrances of the major publishing houses and urinate on their doorsteps!

    Any artistic statement or "manifesto" that presumes to tell the artist what he or she "SHOULD" be doing SHOULD be burned at once.

    2. All great Poets should use the pages of the country’s most prestigious literary magazines as toilet paper!

    Got rejected again, eh?

    3. All “poets” that rhyme should be castrated at once!

    Rhyme is simply one element of the "music" of poetry. The poet is free to employ it or not at will. As with any element of art, there are some artists who will use it well, and some who will employ it in a mundane and cliched manner.

    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!

    SHOULD, SHOULD, SHOULD.... Why SHOULD art be immoral and blasphemous. The ability to shock means nothing. It is the tired trick of the juvenile attempting to gain attention... and believing this in itself makes it all worthwhile. The great artists of the past rarely set out to intentionally shock. That art which did shock did so because the form or language broke away from that which with the audience was familiar... not simply because the artist meant to shock of challenge the audience, but rather because the content... the experience of the artist called for a new form.

    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!

    Artists work within a given tradition. They may build upon this tradition, invert certain elements, reject others, expand and expound... but there is no art which is wholly new and without precedent.

    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!

    I have long marveled at the unabashed ego of the Romantics and their heirs. They exhibit a mentality rather like the self-centered teenager who imagines the entire world revolves around him or her. The question which immediately comes to mind is "who decides who is or is not an Artist?"

    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.

    A sculptor is just as aware of certain rules as the good writer. Rules of grammar, like rhyme, are but one more element of the art of writing. They may be ignored... abandoned... inverted... and turned upside down... when necessity so demands.

    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!

    Iconoclasm has existed from time immemorial in all the arts... to the point that it might be seen as part of the tradition. What most iconoclasts fail to see is that it has rarely been the iconoclasts railing against the tradition who have effected the greatest innovations... but rather it has long been those who are the most knowledgeable and enamored of the given tradition who have been the best prepared and most likely to change the face of art as we known it (Monteverdi, Picasso, Cervantes, Dante, Beethoven, Manet, Caravaggio, James Joyce, J.L. Borges, T.S. Eliot, Wagner, Michelangelo, etc...)

    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!

    When was life ever different? The Renaissance under which Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, and Fra Angelico labored... producing imagery at once dynamic and explosive... as well as elegant, contemplative, and beautiful... was a period of constant wars, bloody vendettas, assassinations, poverty, rape, pillage, and torture. But is was also a period of courtly elegance, deep spiritual belief, and love. It has never been other than Dickens envisioned: the worst and the best of times.

    While we have Stravinsky and Bartok (not to mention Richard Strauss) we also had Debussy:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_7loz-HWUM

    Vaughan Williams:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKz6X...eature=related

    Korngold:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZoGQd...eature=related

    Barber:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGMwNe9WWmE

    even Mahler:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CjoCAemK6Y

    Along with Pollock we have the shimmering abstract impressionism of Phillip Guston:



    [COLOR="rgb(139, 0, 0)"]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![/COLOR]

    Ah! Finally a statement that makes sense. Delete 1-10 and you'll do just fine.
    Beware of the man with just one book. -Ovid
    The man who doesn't read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read them.- Mark Twain
    My Blog: Of Delicious Recoil
    http://stlukesguild.tumblr.com/

  3. #3
    WolfLarsen you are an egotistical fool. If you were even slightly more rational I would be offended by your anti-religious ravings, but as it is, you're not worth taking offense. I believe and hope that you'll be alone in following this "manifesto."

    And I suppose you want to castrate Chaucer, Shakespeare, Yeats etc. for rhyming? Because you're somehow a better artist? Give me a break.
    Last edited by Venerable Bede; 09-16-2011 at 02:02 AM.
    “Yesterday's rose endures in its name, we hold empty names.”
    ― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

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