The Future as Destruction of the Past

Futurists held impossible tenets. The poem had to come "from nowhere." It had to be without rules and derived from no conscious models, coming freely and uniquely from the person who wrote it. The use of any form was a kind of enslavement, whether it was as innocuous as meter or as saccharine as rhyme.

Their words often painted pictures of the things most valued by the Futurists: speed, violence, technology, chaos. They fought against the values and regimes of the past. And who could blame 'em? I wouldn't want to live in pre-Revolution Russia.

There is something I admire about Futurism--the way it embraces our darker nature, perhaps, but the poetry they produced I can't seem to stomach. In reading poems from Vladimir Mayakovsky, I feel at times that it could have been written by those marginalized, trench-coated boys from Columbine. There are a lot of exclamation points, a lack of coherence, and big doses of anger. Some of the poems read more like confused rants, though with obvious moments of beauty.

I have to give the boy props for leaving a poem as his suicide note. It's so Seymour Glass (hello, Salinger fans).

I admit that I enjoyed reading the Futurist Manifesto by Marinetti. I read it a few years ago when I was in a Zen-ish phase of my life, and was initially appalled and annoyed by its bravado and complete lack of empathy. On reading it again, how could you not love lines like this: "We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness." Kinda cool, right?

Despite the bits of loveliness, I think I'll always find Futurists self-deluded. As much as we may wish, we can't come from nothing, from nowhere, from no one. But apparently we can die trying.