Spectra A Book of Poetic Experiments   By: Arthur Davison Ficke (1883-1945)

A BOOK OF POETIC EXPERIMENTS

BY

ANNE KNISH AND EMANUEL MORGAN

NEW YORK MITCHELL KENNERLEY 1916

COPYRIGHT 1916 BY MITCHELL KENNERLEY

PRINTED IN AMERICA

CONTENTS

PAGE To Remy de Gourmont (Emanuel Morgan) vii Preface (Anne Knish) ix

SPECTRA BY EMANUEL MORGAN OPUS PAGE 1 Drums 53 2 Hope 14 6 If I Were Only Dafter 56 7 A Bunch of Grapes 8 9 Frogs' Legs on a Plate 57 13 A Peacock Feather 11 14 I Had Put Out My Leaves 51 15 Despair Comes 6 16 The Guillotine 20 17 Needles and Pins 46 29 Knives 31 31 Thank God that We Can Laugh 27 40 Two Cocktails Round a Smile 35 41 Spectres 2 45 The Locust Tree 49 46 No Other Angle 40 47 Giver of Bribes in the Brightness of Morning 37 55 The Impossible 43 62 Three Little Creatures 16 63 Spears 23 78 I Am Beset 63 79 Only Lovers 66 101 The Piano 61 104 Madagascar 59

SPECTRA BY ANNE KNISH OPUS PAGE 1 The Seconds Bob By 41 40 I Have not Written That You May Read 26 50 The Piano Lives in a Dusk 1 67 I Would Not in the Early Morning 10 76 Years Are Nothing 4 80 Oh, My Little House of Glass 52 88 So We Came Back Again 36 96 You Are the Delphic Oracle 33 118 If Bathing Were a Virtue 7 122 Upstairs There Lies a Sodden Thing 39 126 His Eyes 12 131 I Am Weary 18 134 Listen, My Friend 21 135 In a Tomb of Argolis 64 150 Sounds 29 151 Candle, Candle 15 181 Skeptical Cat 62 182 He's the Remnant of a Suit 60 187 I Do Not Know Very Much 58 191 The Black Bark of a Dog 48 195 Her Soul Was Freckled 55 200 If I Should Enter to his Chamber 45

TO REMY DE GOURMONT

POET, a wreath! No matter how we had combined our flowers, You would have worn them being ours. . . . On you, on them, the showers O roots beneath! EMANUEL MORGAN.

PREFACE

THIS volume is the first compilation of the recent experiments in Spectra. It is the aim of the Spectric group to push the possibilities of poetic expression into a new region, to attain a fresh brilliance of impression by a method not so wholly different from the methods of Futurist Painting.