You may be here looking for information on rainbows and such; in which case you need Spectrum.
Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments was a small volume of poetry published in 1916 by American writers Witter Bynner, who wrote under the pseudonym "Emanuel Morgan", and Arthur Davison Ficke, who wrote as "Anne Knish."
Spectra was preceded by a brief manifesto outlining the methods of Spectrism as a school:
- "In the first place, it speaks, to the mind of that process of diffraction by which are disarticulated the several colored and other rays of which light is composed. . . ."
- "In its second sense, the term Spectric relates to the reflex vibrations of physical sight, and suggests the luminous appearance which is seen after the exposure of the eye to intense light, and, by analogy, the after-colors of the poets initial vision."
- "In its third sense, Spectric connotes the overtones, adumbrations, or spectres which for the poet haunt all objects of both the seen and unseen world. . . "
- If I were only dafter
- I might be making hymns
- To the liquor of your laughter
- And the lacquer of your limbs.
- And the lacquer of your limbs.
- If bathing were a virtue, not a lust
- I would be dirtiest.
- To some, housecleaning is a holy rite.
- For myself, houses would be empty
- But for the golden motes dancing in sunbeams.
- Tax-assessors frequently overlook valuables.
- Today they noted my jade.
- But my memory of you escaped them.
By now, several flaws in the plan are apparent. First, the poems are not all that bad, and some, like Morgan's above, contain some fairly good lines. Both Bynner and Ficke realized after they had written the Spectra poems that in attempting to produce deliberately outrageous poetry, they had let their mental guard down, and produced some of their most interesting work. Much of their later verse in a more serious vein was influenced by their own experiments in Spectra.
From the perspective of the present, the world has endured much worse in the way of poetic experiments during the Age of Charlatans in the twentieth century. The Spectra poems are probably the most widely remembered work of either Bynner or Ficke.