ARTICLE
The Final Manifesto
First in a series of eight manifestos.- We see you.
- We know who you are.
- Your ideas are worthless.
- Your aesthetic is stupid.
- Your “technique” is a welter of narcissism, superstition, and habit.
- All your little tiny ideas, all your whoring attempts at creation, and you yourself are nothing, nobody wants you, we despise you, it’s in our nature.
- You should be kept as a pet.
- You are a Philistine, the Paul Bunyan of decadence, an acromegalic fraud.
- You are a minnow, a speck, a stain.
- The genre humain is sick, and you are to blame.
- You are a necrophiliac.
- You are a museum of irrelevance.
- It will take years to make Art vital and important again.
- You are from this moment forbidden.
- As the Italians say, Parla quando piscia la gallina.
- We are here now.
- Our aesthetics is empirically grounded.
- Our taste will be raised to principle.
- You and your band of jays will be flushed out.
- Yes, Art is resurrected today: Victory is ours!
- History will forget you and salute us.
- Here you are, and here is oblivion.
- This is the final manifesto, and the only one.
This essay originally appeared in the February 2009 issue of Poetry.
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Introduction
Poetry Can Be Any Damn Thing it Wants by Mary Ann Caws
Other Manifestos from the February Issue
Manifesto of the Flying Mallet by Michael Hofmann
Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links by Charles Bernstein
The Eighties, Glory Of by Ange Mlinko
Annie Get Your Gun by D.A. Powell
Perform-A-Form: A Page Vs. Stage Alliance by Thomas Sayers Ellis
Presto Manifesto! by A.E. Stallings
Leave the Manifesto Alone: A Manifesto by Hate Socialist Collective
About the Author
Poet Joshua Mehigan grew up in upstate New York and received a BA from Purchase College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College.
Influenced by the poetry of Philip Larkin, Jorge Luis Borges, and Edgar Bowers, Mehigan writes intelligent, morally . . .
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COMMENTS (6)
On February 3, 2009 at 7:56 pm Jazmin wrote:
Poetry free
On February 9, 2009 at 2:42 am Sean Smith wrote:
Poetry free?
"You are a Philistine, the Paul Bunyan of
decadence, an acromegalic fraud"
This is iambic pentameter with some
poetic license (21 syllables, 20 if the "e"
is silent in the acromegalic word ([ack-
ruh-meg-uh-lick)). I had to look up two
of the words in the dictionary to get it.
I bet you pronounced it ack-row, I did
too. :)
This is poetry.
On February 10, 2009 at 2:22 pm Kelly Graham wrote:
what is the translation : Parla quando piscia la gallina.
On February 23, 2009 at 4:08 pm jameson_hughes wrote:
"You [should] speak [only] when the hen pisses," i.e., never.
On March 3, 2009 at 4:30 pm Dan Williamson wrote:
I do like 14.
I wish it could be so,
particularly in Boston.
On March 16, 2010 at 9:18 pm Suzy Fitzgerald wrote:
There is something so incredible about this piece. I love the format, I love the title and I like #7 as simple as it seems.
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