Spectra: A Book Of Poetic Experiments (1916)

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments was a small volume of poetry published in 1916 by American writers Witter Bynner (1881-1968), who wrote under the pseudonym "Emanuel Morgan", and Arthur Davison Ficke (1883-1945), who wrote as "Anne Knish. " Spectra was preceded by a brief manifesto outlining the methods of "Spectrism" as a school. With this vague program, the two poets adopted personas for their namesakes. The poems in the collection were not given titles, merely opus numbers. "Emanuel Morgan" was a rhyming Whitman, full of bacchanalian, bardic blatherskite. "Anne Knish" was the archetypal poetess, full of oracular ipse dixits, sensual, enigmatic, and vaguely scandalous. In 1916, most Americans were unfamiliar with Eastern European cooking and had never heard of knishes; the pseudonym was intended to be exotic and slightly oriental. Spectra was meant to be the starting point of a hoax of exposure, after the manner of the Taxil hoax or, more recently, the Sokal Affair. They meant the Spectra poems to mock the pretensions of these several schools, and endeavored to make them deliberately bad.