Maxwell Bodenheim

“ There are, again, American poets who have turned their eyes to Europe, yes, the fact is apparent—they have turned their eyes to Europe, and they can, on occasion, become cynical animals, discovering seven thousand different ways of describing the contortions that lead to sexual intercourse, and displaying breasts and limbs with an infinite amount of abandoned bravado. ”

“ It may be that I regard words as flexible lures seducing the essential emptiness of life, with little, false promises—promises of emotional and mental gain and reward; haloes and bludgeons with which a void may attain the mirage of toiling or dancing importance. And perhaps, in the desperate hope of achieving a proper festival of sound, I have summoned words to a reiteration of defeated antics, without in any way attempting to gain those exhausted futilities known as convictions and explanations. ”

“ Then deposit the lengthened confession of a sigh upon another drooping form known as Delicate Fantasy—an elusive Liar who ravishes colors without mentioning their names (not the endless blue, green, white, yellow, red, lavender, mauve, pink, brown, cerise, golden, orange, and purple of American Imagists) . They have kicked him into the cellar, damn them. ”

“ If I yield to the remorseful redundancy of a foreword, with its bedraggled battalions of fiercely insinuating words, it is from no mere desire to invite the ridicule of impatient time, or to rail against that host of vacant insincerities which betrays the animations of life. ”

“ Hatred, juvenile and deformed,
Earns the smirking oblivion
Of fat women mangling sound.
The wrangling babble of ignorance
Turns to silence underneath
The opium of innuendoes.
Acrobats appear and seem
To be raping phantom lovers
No longer beautiful and fresh
But mechanically endured.
Part of the audience is also
A battered stoic clasping worn-out mistresses. ”

“ In America, certain poets, with great gusto, have torn three buttons from their coats and are standing on their heads. Yawning, we turn the page to the greyly psychological school of poets—William James and Havelock Ellis, viewed with ecstasy behind a magnifying glass, while someone provides a blurred replica of Bach’s music.
That tantalizing obscurity of words, luring the nimbleness of mental regard—subtlety—and those deliberate acrobatics that form an original style—both are waiting for the melodrama, comedy and lecture to subside. ”

“ The roughly earnest gunman
Whose blundering insurrection
Clutches a cool device;
The man whose eyes are coins
Encased in viscous white;
The fox-like politician
Leaping on small prizes in the dark;
The farmer, lending his different costume
To the ox-like patience of earth;{2}
The manual laborers
With minds as minute and obscure as bricks,
And softly prominent hearts;
The factory-girls who try to scold
The murmur of their souls
With one hundred slang phrases—
All of them will lose
Their imaginary differences
In the lenient refuge of mud. ”

“ Again, they have heard of the European Dadaists, yes, undoubtedly they have heard of the European Dadaists, and they have now reduced the pronoun “I” to “i,” commenced their lines with small letters, and exhibited a brave and startling hatred for commas and separate words. In Europe, this literary revolution holds a distorted incisiveness and many an original thought, heaved up from the catastrophe of words. ”