Prose from Poetry Magazine
The Final Manifesto
First in a series of eight manifestos.
Introduction
"History will forget you and salute us."
- 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.
Poet Joshua Mehigan grew up in upstate New York and earned a BA from Purchase College and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. He is the author of the poetry collections The Optimist (2004), winner of the Hollis Summers Poetry Prize and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Accepting the Disaster (2014), which was cited in the Times Literary Supplement and the New York Times Book Review...