ANTI-MANIFESTO
THE masterKEY TO THE FIELDS or DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE
Welcome to the Eye of the Hurricane, red with fire fever and intoxication. Madame Poetry's just had a nervous breakdown.
Welcome to the heart and chaos of the Tsunami.
The barrelhouse beast is on the loose - les sangliers sont lâchés.
Welcome to the Other Side.
To the great open Fields of desire.
The poets we present here are going to take you right into the Danger Zone,
far beyond the school gates and academies,
congresses and factories,
far beyond the billboards,
blind bodies and LIES of a decaying civilization where people are taught to accept the muppet costume of happy tea-party mediocrity
instead of feeling and experimenting with their own colours and codes, for they are afraid and
they've been systematically conditioned to grow fear and moral beetroots to shield themselves against the convulsive, subterranean beauty of the Ugly as well as its magnificent irruptions,
let alone,
and most importantly,
its blasting, menacing effects on the sleeping pre-programmed/overdosed outlook of things;
for between the sensitive individual and the object of their vision(s) and desire - that is,
the Fields -,
they have built up walls, shielded windows or maximum security barbed wired fences,
and on these walls our all-time self-proclaimed Caesars, judges, priests and censors have daubed plaques that say:
"NO TRESPASSING",
"FORBIDDEN",
"WRONG",
"MAD",
"VULGAR",
"GAY",
“ANORMAL”,
"UGLY",
"SIN",
"POOR",
"SCHIZOPHRENIC",
and so many other limiting terminologies and stupid chains
as cynically as arbitrarily established
with the aim of preventing us from getting hold of ourselves,
of our visions, bodies and minds.
- Or then again,
on those same windows
they have set up all the most stunning and prettiest visions of Amida on earth
blanded with artificial beauty and entertainment,
mass media heroes and golden holidays,
in order to drug us all with the illusion
we are limitlessly free and
fantastically immortal within the limited realm of all the experiences they offer and sell,
so long as we all stay ON ON ON ON ON there!
That's how we have exchanged magic for logic,
initiatic rites for disposable entertainment,
Yopo for Hoeschts & barbiturics.
That's how we have been moving towards our so-preached
Evolution.
Love your security, Heaven like a package!
We believe that poets, regardless of their particularities and styles, are those who tear away/throw off all the veils,
who strive to pull down all the walls,
those who are not afraid of Language,
who break all the holdbacks and windows of their own fears and ghosts in order to reach for the Fields and
discover the music of things,
the dance and the poetry of it all
(even though some windows and blocks when 'broken' might provoke bleeding and pain,
cos they are our bodies too,
- when the rupture - the image of a broken window -
appears as the very image of a wound,
a broken window as a wound charged up with both perplexity and pleasure,
but one that also means an exit, a space, a possibility,
an experimental devenir pregnant with happening,
and which aims for both ecstasy & transfiguration,
even if going thru pain.)
And at the same time they need to reach inside of themselves,
they too want to dance outside the breathless cage;
they want to dance in the rain,
hang out with strangers,
be kidnapped by guiding spirits and rebels into kind of a paradoxical freedom
instead of carrying on following the flock conformed & bound in a sheep costume or a uniform,
just to die in a war or in a beautiful promising career,
and thus end up neck-deep in a certain pre-determined order of things or whatever - a cornered Sysiphus trapped in a demented dream who will never realize the dimension of his/her cell;
- no way, "life is way too short", they realize, and, instead of dragging in and serving that predictable order, they will break the mirror & drop out, hit off the open road
& establish “other connections”,
de-construct chains and routines in order to reconstruct/reinvent other webs based on temporary temples,
hallucination zones,
experimental playgrounds.
Taboo?
hm, what an insult to their lewd beauty!
Leave them alone!
They're willing to jump all red lights & run over all taboos.
They want to get drunk and
stay drunk,
“on wine, virtue, poetry, whatever” (1).
So based on such insights, let it be known that
our poetry’s aim is to
provoke the tearing away of all the veils and walls,
so that we become the lords of our own sensations and spirits.
No social order shall ever impede us from reaching for the fields
where the horses of our subjectivity
run
wild.
Having said that, don't expect to find here mass cliched poetry or literature for frigid intellectual contemplation,
much less pamphlets for new anti-models of this and that.
The poets you'll meet on this page come from all backgrounds and experiences,
yet all of them share the same desire for both a free spontaneous writing and life style.
They are mad, possessed, schizophrenic, deserters, adulterous, provocateurs, irreverent, cynical, difficult and complex.
They also are way simpler than one can imagine.
They are growing flowers in countryside gardens.
They are puking flowers and debris in tropical forests and rooms, in toilets and onstage,
in the face of everything and everyone,
as if they're ripping their hearts out and mutilating their faces and dreams before the broken mirror of the world and time.
They’re doing it for revolutionary purposes,
for spiritual purposes,
or just for the holy hell of it!
At best, they are Prometheus who have "stolen the yellow bird living in the Devil's sex" (2),
with enough chaos within themselves to "give birth to a dancing star" (3),
as our pal Zarathustra said,
and with open veins and pores and eyes they Blake around
and "see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wild flower,
hold infinity in the palm of the hand and eternity in an hour" (4),
coz "every particle of the world is a mirror and in every atom lies the blazing light of a thousand suns - the Secret Rose Garden" (5).
Yeah, these Beautiful Monsters are on the loose
& they've got the Key to the Fields,
to another vision,
not an unattainable megabaroque Beyond,
but an emergential outburst of the Marvellous here and now,
the Key,
la Clé des Situations (6),
the "Tjurunga key capable of recconecting the poet's blood
as well as their deepest being
to a vaster & more exuberantly dangerous realm of experiences" (7),
so BURN ON,
go ahead,
out of the library and
into the streets,
don't be afraid,
non stop,
the Key the Key the Key,
to ourselves,
to the world,
to something,
to jazz,
to love,
to enlightenment -
or more simply to another way to feel and (re)write the word
LIFE.
Now get ready for the reading!
The open fields are here now, - enjoy yourself! :
"en ce bordel où tenons notre état" ( "in this brothel where we ply our trade" ) - François Villon
written by Henrik Aeshna
Tsunami bOOKS, always politically sexually gramatically incorrect
July 3 2011
Notes:
(1) Baudelaire
(2) Joyce Mansour
(3) Nietzsche
(4) Blake
(5) Mahmud Shabestari, 14th century Sufi poet, in The Secret Rose Garden - Gulshan-i Raz or Gulshan-e Raz - Persian : گلشن راز
(6) André Breton, in Amour Fou
(7) Henrik Aeshna
