writing.
Certain they know where poetry lives, there are always multitudes who impatiently scurry about in search of it but, whenever asked the precise location of its lodgings, they invariably answer: It’s moved.
Only after heaving everything overboard are we capable of reaching our own nothingness.
The Chinese don’t paint nature, they dream it.
Before the appearance of Rembrandt no one suspected that light could produce the drama and inexhaustible variety of conflicts of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
The dissection of Monet’s eyes has proven that Monet possessed the eyes of a fly: eyes compelled by innumerable micro-eyes to distinguish with perfect clarity the most subtle shades of a color but that, as befits autonomous eyes, perceived those shades independently, without involving a synthetic vision of conjunction.
In music, pleonasm is called variation.
Flaubert’s prose distills a sweat so cold that we are obliged to change our undershirts unless we can warm up with his personal letters.
The Cubists made the mistake of believing that an apple was a theme less literary and more frugal than the buttocks of Madame Recamier.
The silence of El Greco’s pictures is an ascetic, Maeterlinckian silence that fascinates the painted characters, twists their mouths, makes their eyes go crazy and diaphanizes their noses.
Wagner is not to be admired because at some time he may have bored us, but despite the fact that at some time he may have bored us.
Even though the fountain pen may reminisce about the lachrymatorium, not even crocodiles have the right to confuse tears with ink.
The Greek Venuses have a pulse of forty-seven. Spanish Virgin Mothers, one hundred and three.
We aspire to be that which we authentically are, but while we think we are achieving our goal, we are invaded by the satiety of feeling full of ourselves.
We strive not to plagiarize ourselves, to be always distinctive, to renew ourselves with each poem but, at the same time as our scant or fruitful output is formed and tended, we must recognize that throughout our existence we are writing a single, unique poem.
There comes a time when we aspire to write something worse.
THE MANIFESTO OF MARTIN FIERRO
OPPOSING the hippopotamic impermeability of an “honorable public”;
Opposing the funereal solemnity of the curator and the professor, which mummifies whatever it touches;
Opposing the book of prescriptions, which inspires the lucubrations of our “finest” minds and their evident infatuation with ANACHRONISM and MIMETISM;
Opposing the absurd compulsion to bolster our intellectual nationalism, pumping up empty values that deflate like balloons at the first pinch;
Opposing the inability to contemplate life without scaling the shelves of libraries;
And, above all, opposing the quaking dread of being in the wrong that paralyzes even the impetuous passion of youth, now more weak-kneed than any retired bureaucrat;
MARTIN FIERRO feels the indispensable need to define himself and to call upon those who may be capable of perceiving that we are in the presence of a NEW sensibility and a NEW understanding, one that, as it reconnects us with ourselves, enables us to discover unsuspected panoramas and new means and forms of expression.
MARTIN FIERRO accepts the consequences and responsibilities of locating himself, because he knows that his good health depends on it. Instructed by his predecessors, his anatomy, the meridian in which he travels, he consults the barometer and the calendar before stepping out on the street with all his senses fully alive and his mentality primed to greet the present day.
MARTIN FIERRO knows that “everything is new under the sun” if everything is seen with up-to-date eyes and is expressed with a contemporary accent.
MARTIN FIERRO , accordingly, takes more pleasure in a transatlantic liner than in a Renaissance palace and maintains that a good Hispano-Suiza
Certain they know where poetry lives, there are always multitudes who impatiently scurry about in search of it but, whenever asked the precise location of its lodgings, they invariably answer: It’s moved.
Only after heaving everything overboard are we capable of reaching our own nothingness.
The Chinese don’t paint nature, they dream it.
Before the appearance of Rembrandt no one suspected that light could produce the drama and inexhaustible variety of conflicts of Shakespeare’s tragedies.
The dissection of Monet’s eyes has proven that Monet possessed the eyes of a fly: eyes compelled by innumerable micro-eyes to distinguish with perfect clarity the most subtle shades of a color but that, as befits autonomous eyes, perceived those shades independently, without involving a synthetic vision of conjunction.
In music, pleonasm is called variation.
Flaubert’s prose distills a sweat so cold that we are obliged to change our undershirts unless we can warm up with his personal letters.
The Cubists made the mistake of believing that an apple was a theme less literary and more frugal than the buttocks of Madame Recamier.
The silence of El Greco’s pictures is an ascetic, Maeterlinckian silence that fascinates the painted characters, twists their mouths, makes their eyes go crazy and diaphanizes their noses.
Wagner is not to be admired because at some time he may have bored us, but despite the fact that at some time he may have bored us.
Even though the fountain pen may reminisce about the lachrymatorium, not even crocodiles have the right to confuse tears with ink.
The Greek Venuses have a pulse of forty-seven. Spanish Virgin Mothers, one hundred and three.
We aspire to be that which we authentically are, but while we think we are achieving our goal, we are invaded by the satiety of feeling full of ourselves.
We strive not to plagiarize ourselves, to be always distinctive, to renew ourselves with each poem but, at the same time as our scant or fruitful output is formed and tended, we must recognize that throughout our existence we are writing a single, unique poem.
There comes a time when we aspire to write something worse.
THE MANIFESTO OF MARTIN FIERRO
OPPOSING the hippopotamic impermeability of an “honorable public”;
Opposing the funereal solemnity of the curator and the professor, which mummifies whatever it touches;
Opposing the book of prescriptions, which inspires the lucubrations of our “finest” minds and their evident infatuation with ANACHRONISM and MIMETISM;
Opposing the absurd compulsion to bolster our intellectual nationalism, pumping up empty values that deflate like balloons at the first pinch;
Opposing the inability to contemplate life without scaling the shelves of libraries;
And, above all, opposing the quaking dread of being in the wrong that paralyzes even the impetuous passion of youth, now more weak-kneed than any retired bureaucrat;
MARTIN FIERRO feels the indispensable need to define himself and to call upon those who may be capable of perceiving that we are in the presence of a NEW sensibility and a NEW understanding, one that, as it reconnects us with ourselves, enables us to discover unsuspected panoramas and new means and forms of expression.
MARTIN FIERRO accepts the consequences and responsibilities of locating himself, because he knows that his good health depends on it. Instructed by his predecessors, his anatomy, the meridian in which he travels, he consults the barometer and the calendar before stepping out on the street with all his senses fully alive and his mentality primed to greet the present day.
MARTIN FIERRO knows that “everything is new under the sun” if everything is seen with up-to-date eyes and is expressed with a contemporary accent.
MARTIN FIERRO , accordingly, takes more pleasure in a transatlantic liner than in a Renaissance palace and maintains that a good Hispano-Suiza
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