When I started Library Manifesto up again as a blog, “The Final Manifesto,” by poet and essayist Joshua Mehigan, came to mind. “The Final Manifesto” was published in a special issue of Poetry magazine as part of a series commemorating the centennial of F.T. Marinetti’s “Futurist Manifesto.”  The poem can double as a list of all the fears and negative thoughts about blogging that have been running through my mind.  In fact those thoughts kept me from starting the blog for a year. I laughed when I first saw the poem, but reading it again now strikes a stronger chord. It is a reminder to push for something beyond the status quo and to break the rules.

I hope LM will find its place. In the meantime, I’ll learn to silence the self-doubts and be open to the next manifesto that comes along to replace this one.

The Final Manifesto

1. We see you.
2. We know who you are.
3. Your ideas are worthless.
4. Your aesthetic is stupid.
5. Your “technique” is a welter of narcissism, superstition, and habit.
6. 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.
7. You should be kept as a pet.
8. You are a Philistine, the Paul Bunyan of decadence, an acromegalic fraud.
9. You are a minnow, a speck, a stain.
10. The genre humain is sick, and you are to blame.
11. You are a necrophiliac.
12. You are a museum of irrelevance.
13. It will take years to make Art vital and important again.
14. You are from this moment forbidden.
15. As the Italians say, Parla quando piscia la gallina.
16. We are here now.
17. Our aesthetics is empirically grounded.
18. Our taste will be raised to principle.
19. You and your band of jays will be flushed out.
20. Yes, Art is resurrected today: Victory is ours!
21. History will forget you and salute us.
22. Here you are, and here is oblivion.
23. This is the final manifesto, and the only one.

        -The Final Manifesto by Joshua Mehigan