Filippo Tommaso Marinetti: Rules for Aeropoetry

 Introduction

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) was the father of Italian Futurism, a prolific author and artist in many, many fields.  His best-known works—at least abroad—are the Futurist Manifesto and the Futurist Cookbook.  Besides these two works, only a handful of selections are available in English, and much of his work remains out of print in Italian (though Mondadori did publish a hefty selection of his plays in a two-volume paperback set 20 years ago; I'm lucky enough to have found a copy cheap by scavenging the poorly-marked back-catalogs of online booksellers).  One of his styles of work was the self-named "aeropoem," a poem meant to reflect the feeling of flying in an airplane, noted for its smashedtogethercontractions of words, though with an order: nouns are smashed with nouns, adjectives with adjectives, verbs with verbs.  This style was related to his wider concept of "words in freedom" (parole in libertà).  Below is a set of rules for the aeropoem, published in the introduction to his 1935 Aeropoem of the Gulf of La Spezia.  (Interestingly, this is the gulf in which Shelley drowned.)

Marinetti was not always a fan of syntax or punctuation, and this selection lacks the latter.


Rules for Aeropoetry

In the words in freedom of aeropoetry, one must

    1. Destroy the skeptic phrase of certain aviators who say that it’s boring in the sky So it happens to fliers not gifted with artistic quality and thus incapable of seeing creatively As in total sensibility and in the eyes of the combatant the danger of being struck by the batteries of enemy heights changed the color the form and the proportions of equal heights giving them an insistent menacing relief as if the state of suspension in the air and of the possible fall alters the color the form and the proportions of the aerial passage A beautiful aeropoetry will be that which will merit those new elegiac adjectives light zenithal A brute aeropoetry will be that accused of being massive weighty stony stuck earthly Thus is born the critical nomenclature of Aeropoetry

    2. Give minute by minute a synthesis of the world and how the radius of fuselage a center of worldly acoustic net The Words in liberty will be flying stars hill their flying pyramids or polyhedral architecture of rays-views-thoughts

    3. Visit and intimately know the most varied and complicated population of the clouds of the mists of the transparencies of the thicknesses and of the vacuums of atmosphere

    4. Destroy time by means of blocks of fused words (Example Battlefirebridgewood)

    5. Transform the fuselage of the Aeropoet in the conscious pivot of an enormous compass with many sensible needles to measure and sketch circles triangles diameters hypotenuses

    6. Not use earthly images Bind together all visible audible and tactile sensations to geometric figures (Example An ovoid sorrow a triangular dash a polyhedral cloud etc.)

    7. Give the conclusive and abbreviated simplifying sense that the straight line and the fly-over contain a sense opposed to that slow meticulous patient incoherent of the automobile on the street to S and that asthmatic bureaucrat of the railways trains tunnel and stations

    8. Give the sense of all depends on me all bears with me no one commands me

    9. In transfiguring and in lyrically intensifying every sensation stand well attentive to that which the parts and particles of the apparatus murmur and suggest deep voice of the diverse compensated woods temperatures tensions and colors of the metals of the paints of the cloths etc.

    10. Use the nomenclature of the plastic arts and especially that of music given that music is par excellence cosmic and outside time space

    11. Exclude in the imagining and in the metaphorizing the classic human sentiments and the classic harmony of human anatomy

    12. Evade by means of an elastic but solid lightness of aluminum the emphatic and puffed-up aviator rhetoric vaunt of traditionalist sedentary poets who have the shine of fear on the nose upwards

    13. Give to arithmetic a lyric dramatic coloring value

    14. Express the nautical and equestrian sensibility of fliers (tactilism) sensibility which replaces that facial (visible audible)

    15. Give the obsession of the rotative continuity of the propeller and the double pulsing of the motor and of the heart by means of brief essential onomatopoeia

    16. Isolate from time to time adjectives nouns verbs and blocks of words in order to synthesize the wandering and the nomadic psychology of the clouds of the fogs of the shadows and of the peaks of mountains

    17. Use the infinitive verb and the repetition of words in order to express the fever of competition that animates the aerial life

    18. By means of an alogical mixture of various tenses of verbs express the variety of the positions of the apparatus and the absolute possession of the air

    19. Rejuvenate every sensation of that typical provisionary artificial virginity just fallen from the sky which characterizes the trees and the houses seen in flight

    20. If the aeropoet sings at 3000 meters give his illusion of being enclosed in the air If the aeropoet sings at 300 meters box the images instead one in the other giving as if the succession of panoramas which are produced the one the other to infinity

    21. Make incessantly vibrate the possibility of an anarchic and murderous caprice from the materials which compose the apparatus of the temperatures and of the winds

    22. Multiply everywhere the theatrical magic of surprise


Source: F.T. Marinetti, L’aeropoema del Golfo della Spezia (Milan: A. Mondadori, 1935), 24-30.

Translation ©2024 B. P. Otto.  Licensed via CC BY-NC.  Feel free to redistribute non-commercially, as long as credit is given to the translator.

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