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Joseph Stella's Reality Frenzy
Skyscrapers blindly menace the sea. Stella studies Oriental writing: dream
poems, and prose that shows love's carnal paint. Exactly. Manhattan painted as
a Futurist reality: speed machines, violence machines, machines that force the
eye to see. Humans as metaphors for energy. Mere metaphors. Irrelevant.
Exactly. Towers of light, towers of bodies, towers of dream and frenzy and
pleasure and towers of poems and towers and walls and towers. And and and and
and and. And the sea is a writing machine. Not a rush of monstrous lines. But
the beams moved a little closer. Knife-like. Brilliant. Exactly. A writing
machine. Stella shows delight in the monstrous rush of crowds, the Coney Island
Chimera. Beginning to see the light. Manhattan's monstrous like the machine's
dream of love. Like reality's battle for sense. Like the machine's battle with
reality. Like machine and reality in nightmare love. But metaphors of what? And
which was he? These are enough. Hidden. Unheard of. Exactly. These are not
enough. The brilliant sea pre-figuring poems that rush and force and dream and
menace and delight. Be afraid. Stella dreams of the city, the Oriental frenzy
of Manhattan. Monstrous paint, dangerous paint, but not the full reality. He
painted with speed and violence. Style not sense. The eye shows the painter the
machine of reality. Style not delight. Speed and energy. Energy not sense.
Skyscrapers full of eyes and metaphors for battle. Closer. Closer. Enough.
Stella's beginning to see the city. Crowds. Streets. Lights. Violence. The
monstrous reality of a Futurist Shakespeare pre-figuring the painted lines. New
York, New York! Exactly. The city's a poverty machine, a pleasure machine.
Painted beams and miles and miles of eyes. Crowds in a frenzy of carnal awe. A
nightmare that Stella could not dream of. But he painted it. And the miners
were alarmed at the knife-like reality of the paint, and the machines were mere
humans, and Shakespeare was irrelevant, a mere machine, and writing was
irrelevant, and studies of light were irrelevant, they were not painted, not by
Stella. And poems were beginning to be like skyscrapers. Stella's metaphors
were towers of light. A dream of light. A frenzy. Exactly. Exactly. Enough.
[Cut-up source text: Michael Pye, Maximum City (London: Picador, 1993):
174]
This poem is included in You Are Here, Simon Turner's first collection, published by Heaventree Press
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Joseph Stella’s Reality Frenzy