"something for which electronics has no language"

(citation: title phrase borrowed from Murray Bookchin's Utopia not futurism lecture, 1978)

Hello friends,

How are you this eclipse week? I am wrapping up a Creative writing through reading class I've been taking, and preparing for a short workshop I'm offering on Neurodiversity at work with a partner organization. The snow and ice are slowly melting away, and the sun is re-enchanting me as spring rolls around.

This week I wanted to share with you a poem I read at an open mic in November 2024 at the Draft Reading Series. It was an honour to read alongside this fabulous and diverse group of writers and poets. I received the video from the Draft team recently, I've linked to the timestamp when my reading starts, it's five minutes long!

I leave you with links to my sources and inspirations for this poem, Dreaming an alternate past for the futurist manifesto:

I worked on this poem at a poetry class I took last year facilitated by Tyler Pennock at university of guelph continuing education. We read Billy Ray Belcourt’s blackout poem Treaty 8 in his collection NDN Coping Mechanisms in this class, which inspired this work where I erase parts of the incendiary manifesto of futurism to reveal another story, another possible reality.

I came across The Futurist Manifesto while flipping through magazines in my bookshelf feeling my way into a seed for a writing prompt. In an essay by Sarah Scott in Culturala magazine’s first print issue, Disappearance, I spotted it, and went down the wikipedia link rabbit hole and here we are!

The Futurist Manifesto, (Italian: Manifesto del Futurismo) was written by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and published in 1909. Marinetti expresses an artistic philosophy called Futurism that was a rejection of the past and a celebration of speed, machinery, violence, youth and industry. It also advocated for the modernization and cultural rejuvenation of Italy.

As I delved into Futurism and read the Manifesto, I was struck by the emphasis and passion for industrialization, speed, growth, with a simultaneous disdain for the past, and a desire to dominate the earth — All forces we deal with in this settler colonial late stage capitalist dystopia we are in, then and now, over a century later. It told me a story of the power of art and poetry to move people into action, and the great responsibility that comes with it.

• When Futurism led to Fascism, and why it could happen again
• More on futurism and it’s artists
• Full translated text of the Manifesto in English

After I worked on this, I read this lecture Murray Bookchin gave, at the Toward Tomorrow Fair in Amherst, Massachusetts, on August 24, 1978, called "Utopia, not Futurism: Why doing the impossible is the most rational thing we can do". It was shared by Toi Smith in their newsletter series The Deepening. I love when my universe keeps bringing me back to themes that I have become recently obsessed with! I highly recommend reading the whole lecture, I love how he talks about the language we use that comes from the world of electronics:

We’re beginning to develop a language which has nothing whatever in common with ecology. It has a lot to do with electronics. We talk of input. ‘Give me your input. Plug in!’ [laughter] Well, I don’t ‘plug in’, I discuss [applause]. Machines ‘plug in’. Radar is the language that produced it and the military is the language that produced the words ‘plug in’.

‘Give me your input’. That is not what I want. I don’t want your output, I want you. I want to hear your words. I want to hear your language. I’m not engaged in ‘feedback’ with you [laughter], I’m engaged in a dialogue, a discussion. It isn’t your ‘feedback’ I want, I want your opinion. I want to know what you think. I don’t want to have a circuit plugged into me where I can get your ‘feedback’ and you can get my ‘input’. [laughter]

...

Please, I’m making a plea here, and if you think I’m talking about language, I think you would be wrong. I’m not talking about language, I’m talking about sensibility. A plant does not have ‘input’ or ‘output’. It does something for which electronics has absolutely no language—it grows! It grows! [applause]. And let me tell you another thing, it not only grows, it does more than change; it develops.

— Murray Bookchin, Utopia not futurism lecture, 1978

That's all for this week folks, take it easy, and I'll see you next week <3