Manuel Maples Arce
Estridentista Manifesto
Irreverent, affirmative convinced, we urge the intellectual youth of the State of Puebla, those uncontaminated by reactionary lethargy, those who don’t feel identified with the collective mainstream of a uni-systemized and anthropomorphous public to come and increase the triumphal ranks of stridentistas and LET US AFFIRM:
First: A profound contempt toward the ideological rancidolatry of some functional values, pugnaciously fired up in a cannibal hatred towards all anxieties and all renovating desires that shake the insurrectional hour of our mechanistic life.
Second: The possibility of a new art, vibrantly and enthusiastically youthful, new dimensionally structuralized, superimposing our vigorous spiritual anxiety, over the regressive efforts of coordinated madhouses, with police regulations, Parisian imports of inducement, and hurdy-gurdies at twilight.
Third: The exhaltation of the suggestive theme-atism of machines, the labor explosions that smash the mirrors of these subverted days. To live emotionally. To palpitate with time’s propeller. To put oneself in step with the future.
Fourth: The justification of a contemporary spiritual need. That poetry be truly poetry, not slobberings, as those written by Gabrielito Sanchez Guerrero, spiritual caramel of adhering chicks. That painting be also, painting of truth with solid and worthwhile concepts. Poetry, a successive explanation of ideological phenomena, by means of equivalent images orchestrally systematized. Painting, explanation of a static phenomenon, tridimensional, edited into two latitudes by dominant coloristic planes.
LET US SHIT: First:--On the statue of General Zaragoza, insolent comic opera bully, Wilian (sic) Duncan from the “film” interventionists of the empire, on top of the pedestal of collective ignorance. Horror to popular idols. Hatred towards the systematic eulogists. It is necessary to defend our youth, sickened by purist exegesists with official titles of university chair.
Charlie Chaplin is a cornerstone figure, representative and democratic.
Second:--On don Felipe Neridel Castillo, phonographic interpreter of perverted springlike hystericism, that make dandified beauties from pulque with ashes of latin phrases in order to enebriate his praying muses, on Manuel Rivadeneyra y Palacio, calculative budget mummy of 5 pesos a day, on Don José Miguel Sarmiento, official reciter for all kinds of familiar panderings in which Spring and the “jazz band” go tumbling into mirrors, and on some literary tobacconists, such as Delfino C. Moreno and don Enrique Gómez Haro.
Third:--On our compatriot Alfonso XIII, the Gaona of usurious shop keepers, Uncle Sam of the tennis shoe intelletuals, healer of the sick, comfort to the suffering, mystic rose, electionary spiritual vessel, traveling agent for a “foolish love” shop in Santa Clara; the great chatter-box.! (sic)
PROCLAIMING:--Stridentism as the only truth. To defend stridentism is to defend our intellectual dignity. Those not with us will be eaten by buzzards. Stridentism is the waarehouse supplying the entire world. To be stridentist is to be manly. Only eunuchs will not be with us. We will put out the sun with a blow from our sombrero.
HAPPY NEW YEAR.
Long Live Turkey Mole!
Puebla, January 1st, 1923.
Manuel Maples Arce, Germán List Arzubide, Salvador Gallardo, M.N. Lira,
Mendoza Salazar, Molina, two hundred signatures follow.
_____________________
Song from an Airplane
from Poemas interdictos (1927)
The shaking up of things is the best part of humanity. Goethe
I’m at the mercy
of all aesthetics;
sinister operator
of great systems,
my hands are
full
of blue continents.
Here, from this cabin,
I’ll wait the falling of the leaves.
Aviation
anticipates their shedding,
and a handful of birds
defends its memory.
Blossoming
Song
from the aerial roses,
enthusiastic
propulsion
from the new propellers,
inexpressible metaphor
clearing the ground on its wings.
Song.
Song.
From above, everything is
balanced and superior,
and life
is the applause that resounds
in the deep throbbing of the plane.
Suddenly
the heart
overturns the imminent panoramas;
all roads lead towards the solitude of time schedules;
subversion
of evident perspectives;
looping the loop
on the sky’s romantic springboard,
modern exercise
in the poem’s ingenious ambiance;
Nature climbing
the color of the firmament.
Upon arrival I’ll deliver to you this journey of surprises,
perfect balance of my astronomic flight;
you’ll be expecting me in the evening’s madhouse,
thus, distances dispelled,
perhaps you will cry over the word autumn.
Cities of the north
of our America,
yours and mine;
New-York
Chicago,
Baltimore.
The governor regulates the day’s colors,
tropical ports
of the Atlantic,
oceanographical garden
of the blue seacoasts,
where merchant steamers
exchange signals;
emigrant palm trees,
fashionable cannibal river,
Spring, always you, so svelte in flowers.
Land where the birds made their swings.
Leafing through your scent things wither and fade,
and you smile and sparkle from a distance,
oh electoral lover, carrousel of glances!
I’ll launch the candidature of your love
today, that is supported fully by your throat,
the orchestra of wind and naked colors.
Something is taking place there in the heart.
The seasons turn
while I capitalize on your nostalgia,
and completely mislead by dreams and images;
the victory enlightens my senses
and Zodiac signs throb.
Solitude pressed against the infinite breast.
From this side of time,
I sustain the pulsing of my song;
your memory enlarges like a remorse,
and the half-opened landscape falls from my hands.
80 H.P.
The autumn avenues pass
under the withered musical balconies,
and the garden is like a red sparkle
amidst the bourgeois applause of the architectures
Corners ablaze with sunsets.
The succinct automobile
has at times
endearing
minerals.
For the interfering girlfriend
given to dangerous turns;
here is her balanced on a wire smile,
her Nordic hair,
and above all, the field,
strewn with caresses.
new
—spectacular
Latin
exclusive—
world
of her eyes.
In the motor { (The heart tight
lies the same song. like a fist)
At times flurries go by, jostled landscapes,
and momentarily
the road is narrow as a dream.
Between her fingers
the compass rose
defoliates
in the wind.
The tourist trees
at intervals
return with the evening.
They continue to lag
behind
in the outskirts
of memory
—oh the joyful riot of her whiteness!—
Tacubaya, { small
San Angel, musical circles.
Mixcoac.
Afterwards
only the meadows of time
Out there far away
armies
of the night
await us.
Spring
The allusive garden vague with expectations
and the heart awakens the ultimate things.
A puff of Radiolas
casts towards us
its rustle of glass.
The poets gloss over the resignation of day.
The wandering streets return from exile.
A tenuous hope led me to her caresses;
her sudden image moves me deeply;
her whiteness nestles in the latent evening,
and as she undoes her sighing bust
the trees reveal our cosmic secret.
Absence is the perfume she leaves on my breast.
I lose her in the dense crowds
of modern life,
and again I return,
to the field of sports with its authentic moons.
I bet on her smile in a game of poker,
musical lectures flooded with tears.
When I place in her hands
the check of my goodbye,
somnambulant expressions
dismiss our shadows,
and the seasickness of the port.
Spring sings
the do re mi of her lessons.
Suddenly the obscure undoing of the cell.
I’ll negotiate with the birds her sanguine memory.
My life in the world fell apart
But my heart has never stopped beating.
At the final sunset of my deepest decline
Will at least the sound of my steps remain
the ocean’s forecast?
May a stifled sob reward me when I die!
May the ocean thunder it’s crystal verse!
May the primordial spring shine splendor in your eyes,
And my dust sprout a rosebush for you.
Bolshevik Super-Poem in Five Cantos (1924)
To the workers of Mexico
I
Here is my poem
to the new city,
brutal
and multinspired.
Oh city all tense
with cables and efforts
all loud
with motors and wings.
Simultaneous explosion
of new theories,
a little outside of
On the spatial plane
Whitman and Turner
and a little closer
to Maples Arce.
Russia’s lungs
blow toward us
the wind of the social revolution.
The literary assaulters of flyzippers
will understand nothing
of this new sweating beauty
of the century,
and the ripe
moons
that fell,
are this corruption
that comes to us
from the intellectual sewers.
Here is my poem:
Oh strong city
and multiple,
completely made of iron and steel!
The wharves. The docks.
The crane-derricks.
And the sexual fever
of the factories.
Urbe:
Escorts of streetcars
that scour the subversive streets.
The shop windows attack the sidewalks,
and the sun, sacks the avenues.
At the edge of the days
tariffs of telephone poles
momentary landscapes march past
through systems of ascending tubes.
Suddenly,
oh the green flash
of your eyes!
Under the naïve venetian blinds of the time
the red battalions pass.
The cannibal romanticism of Yankee music
has been nesting in the masts.
Oh international city!
Towards what remote meridian
did that ocean liner head?
I feel the distancing of everything.
The crumpled sunsets
float amid the panoramas rubblework.
Spectral trains head out
towards the beyond
far away, gasping of civilizations.
The disconnected multitude
paddle about musically in the streets.
And now, the bourgeois thieves, they will start shaking
because of the riches
they stole from the people,
but someone hid beneath their dreams
the spiritual explosive pentagram.
Here is my poem:
Pennants of hurrahs rise in the wind,
hairs catch fire
and tomorrows held captive in the eyes.
Oh musical
city
all made of mechanical rhythms!
Tomorrow, perhaps,
only the live flame of my verses
shall enlighten the humble horizons.
II
This panorama’s new profundity
is a projection towards interior mirages.
The resounding crowd
today overflows the communal plazas
and the triumphant hurrahs
for obregonism
reverberate in the sunlight of the facades.
Oh romantic girl
shooting flames of gold!
Perhaps between my hands
only the vivid moments remained.
The landscapes dressed in yellow
fell asleep behind the windows,
and the city, enraged and intense,
has remained trembling on the ropes.
The applause is that wall.
--My God!
--Have no fear, it’s the romantic wave of the multitudes.
Later, above the overflow of silence,
the tarahumara night will go on waxing.
Black out your windows.
Amidst the machinery of insomnia,
the lust, are millions of eyes
that spread themselves over flesh.
A bird of steel
has taken to his north toward a star.
The port:
distant flames,
smoke from the factories.
Over the musical laundry cord
your memory is exposed to the sun.
A transatlantic goodbye leaped from the cabin.
The motors sing
over the dead panorama.
The afternoon, riddled with windows,
floats over telephone wires
and between inverted
crossbeams of time
are hung the machines’ good-byes
Your marvelous youth
burst one morning
between my fingers,
and on the empty water
of mirrors,
shipwrecked the forgotten faces.
Oh poor syndicalist city
scaffolded
with hurrahs and shouts!
The workers
are red
and yellow.
There is a flowering of pistols
following the springboard of speeches,
and while the windbags outshine one another,
someone’s white bride
sheds her petals.
IV
Amid the thickets of silence
the darkness licks up the sunset’s blood.
The falling stars,
are dead birds without sleep
in the mirrored water.
And the artillery shots
resounding from the Atlantic
grow silent,
at last,
in the distance.
Over the masts and spars of Autumn,
blows a nocturnal wind:
it is the wind from Russia,
of great tragedies,
and the garden,
yellow,
sinks into ruin in the shade.
Suddenly, your memory,
sparkles in the dull interiors.
Your words of gold
sift through my memory.
The rivers of blue blouses
overflow the locks of the factories,
and the trunks of agitators
gesticulate their speeches over the pavement.
The strikers hurl
stones and insults,
and life, is a tumultuous
conversion towards the left.
At the edge of the pillow,
the night, is a precipice;
and insomnia,
continues to rummage in my brain.
Whose voices are those
that float in the dark?
And these trains that howl
towards the devastated horizons.
The soldiers
will sleep tonight in hell.
My God!
And from all this disaster,
only a few
white pieces
of her memory,
remain in my hands.
V
The savage hordes of the night
threw themselves upon the terrified city.
The bay,
blooming
masts and moons,
pours
over the ingenious musical score
of its hands,
and the distant scream
of a steamer
towards Nordic seas.
Farewell
to the shipwrecked continent!
Among the threads of your name
remain the feathers of birds.
Poor Celia María Dolores;
the panorama is within us.
Under the axe strikes of silence
the architectures of iron are devastated.
There are waves of blood and storm clouds of hate.
Desolation.
The marijuana speeches
of the representatives
splatter her memory with shit,
but,
over the multitudes of my soul
she has thrown her tenderness.
Ocotlán
yonder far away.
Voices.