Self Portrait, 1915

Corrado Govoni was already well-known as a Symbolist poet when he started experimenting with Futurist techniques around 1910. This self portrait was the first poem-image in his most radical work, Rarefactions and Words in Freedom (1915). ‘Words in freedom’ was a poetic style developed by F. T. Marinetti between 1912 and 1913, which did away with syntax and punctuation, and introduced a greater visual dimension to works of literature. In this way, the Futurists sought to expand the expressive range of their writings. It was also their belief that the immediacy, concision and dynamism of this new approach would make their poetry more attuned to the modern sensibility, with its “love of speed, abbreviation, and the summary”. (1)

(1) F. T. Marinetti, ‘Destruction of Syntax – Imagination without Strings – Words-in-Freedom’ (1913), in Umbro Apollonio (ed.), Futurist Manifestos (Boston: MFA Publications, 2001), pp. 95-106 (p. 98).