A Manifesto Against Manifestos

Manifestos are short-lived documents at critical junctures to rouse a self-described poetic group to action and to separate it from other self-described groups trying to do the same. This separation seems to clarify everyone’s minds as they enter into elective affinities, publishing and publicizing each other’s work, also nourishing the hope that they will knock their opponents out of contention, heralding their own arrival on the scene. They need opposition in order to prosper, and for that enemy’s existence, they should indeed be thankful. Classicists need modernists and poststructuralists need structuralists in the same way that darkness defines sunlight. In this analogy, which is shadow, and which is light? It depends where one is sitting.

In either case, the principles each group defines to be eternal turn out over time to be contingent, therefore subject to change as new movements come along and new manifestos are written. This is true even when a movement hearkens to the past and insists that its principles are eternal, having always been the truth. We create our own precursors to the extent that we need them and worship their ways. Or else we claim to be completely novel, without ancestors, disruptors simply breaking the mold. However, over time, grand, universal statements start to sound more and more like position papers and the latter, at a remove of some years, read as either quaint or tedious—as yesterday’s news.  

In 1821, Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” I happen to agree with him, but what that claim means to me might not mean the same as it does to another. We might both believe it for different or even opposite reasons. That is why we are all arguing about such pregnant phrases, because everybody wants a crack at describing or even prescribing what everybody else ought to be doing when they sit down to write a poem, and also what they ought not to be doing. Manifestos, like Martin Luther’s famous theses, often require strict devotion, groupthink, and inner repentance from perceived aesthetic sins, otherwise a poet is cast into outer darkness. They are ultimately less foundational philosophy than they are dogma, always already in practice, meant to call out the wrongdoing of others—in this case, one’s poetic competitors.  

I, too, have my dogma, but I recognize it as such and try to keep it minimal. My entire credo, not affiliated with any movement while perhaps reminiscent of several, may be summed up in one short command: “Write poetry first with the ear, second with the eye, third with the mind.” Everything else is negotiable. I believe that each poem coming into existence wants to be sui generis, a species of which there exists only one specimen. The natural world teaches us that this reality is not possible and that a daisy, even if you give it to your beloved, is not unique and that hundreds of thousands of them meanwhile cover hillsides and meadows in the spring, looking identical from a distance. Their essential beauty can be accounted for by strict and comparable scientific data. But that is no reason not to try every time to make your daisy unique. A poet probably will not succeed, but that hope keeps a poet going from poem to poem.  

Once we get caught up in legislating in a specific way how everybody must write, else be counted lesser, we have taken ourselves off our own poetic game. Like underarm deodorant, ideally a poet’s fragrant manifesto, for hygienic reasons, should only be used by a poet, rather than passed around to everybody. Besides, when has a manifesto kept everybody else from doing exactly what they want? In a sense, the fewer people who read a poet’s manifesto, the better, because its real value is to a tight in-group. It is a speech made to the handful of players in the locker room before each game, rather than slogans chanted by tens of thousands of people in the stands. Its greatest value is as an esoteric document, its existence rumored rather than confirmed, one that should perhaps be kept under lock and key, never reproduced, and only brought out for special occasions to remind the cognoscenti what they believe. Ultimately, a manifesto belongs to the realm of the sacred, in a religion without a priest or even an officiant.  

What do I believe personally, to govern my practice? First, that a poem makes for a poor essay or treatise. Rhetoric plays a very specific and strategic role in any poem, and it is not the same role as the one favored by preachers and politicians. If we want to talk about social justice, for instance, we must do it on the downlow. Nobody goes to a poem to be lectured about how he ought to behave, or to hear a poet grind his ax. Archibald MacLeish got it right when he wrote, “A poem should not mean/But be.” The most we can do is to teach by example, somewhat witlessly, by refining people’s ear and making language deadened by overuse come alive again, so that those people can actually hear words in a fresh way, remembering that Ralph Waldo Emerson described dead language as “fossil poetry.” Possibly, just possibly, then readers will snap out of their complacency, see the world more as it is, or could be, and start to think about things with greater refinement. That is why I say, “First with the ear, second with the eye, third with the mind.”  

I publish poems in magazines that do not necessarily agree with one another about their aesthetic or political principles. One week I will have something appear in a classical magazine; another week one in an anarchist magazine; a third, in an avant-garde magazine. None of them fully accords with the others, but does that matter? Must I profess exclusive loyalty to any of them? Call me promiscuous, but I do not claim to contain multitudes, but like Walt Whitman in “Song of Myself," I say “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself.” My only job is to be the best poet I can, guided by half-unconscious drives and motives, lost in a creative process, a flux that guides me as much as I guide it. It exercises subtle laws unknown to me but binding on my practice. I am only trying to satisfy an inner need, a chronic urge. What happens to that poem and how it later gets received, praised or rejected, when it goes out into the world is another matter entirely. When it comes to manifestos and adherence to movements and groups, I am faithless. But I have enormous faith in myself and in my muse, who regularly reminds me not to wander into any clubhouses.  

Johnny Payne is the arts editor at Merion West. Johnny is a poet, novelist, playwright, and essayist. He has worked extensively in Latin American Studies, especially literature under dictatorship and Quechua oral tradition. He directs the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing at Mount Saint Mary’s University, Los Angeles. He earned his doctorate from Stanford University.