Reading through the poetry for today, both by Apollinaire and in the Perloff text, I was quite struck by the strong primitivist note that permeated the words and images of Futurism.  Perhaps because I adore dystopian novels above all other genres, my image of the future is nearly the opposite of what was envisioned in these pre-war writings, of which my best description must be the words terrifying, destructive, and exuberant.  The future I tend to envision is a stark, sterile skyline that speaks of past glories and the potential of humankind, but which is bereft of that life which gave rise to it.  It is best embodied in Zamyatin's We, with its glass spires and blasted wastelands. 

In contrast, however, the Futurism of these poems is a rich, vibrant one full of the ecstasy of living, a paradoxically pure amalgamation of raw primitive humanity and the pristine, elevated intellect.  It embraces paradoxes of war and peace into itself, not resolving them but striking them against one another to make sparks, energy.  Hangars built from the bones of mammoths, the Red Square of Moscow at sundown (Perloff, 159), and even the hollow-eyed hunger of dead mice for dinner, stretched out on the table (Perloff, 156) --these images stuck with me.

In contrast, I turn to the art from Stieglitz's magazine, and I am--to be frank and bare my ignorance--at a loss.  The images are interesting, and from an artistic standpoint, I appreciate them, but they say nothing to me of the energy that bubbles from the texts.  They seem to attempt to capture the potential energy in machinery, as there is a definite motif of the mechanical about them, but I find them irreconcilably static after two hours of puzzling over them.  That said, I greatly look forward to discussing them in class and perhaps gaining a foothold.  The tension between energy and starkness in this entire set of material is killing me.