“This volume is the first compilation of the recent experiments in Spectra. It is the aim of the Spectric group to push the possibilities of poetic expression into a new region,—to attain a fresh brilliance of impression by a method not so wholly different from the methods of Futurist Painting,” wrote Anne Knish in her preface to Spectra (Mitchell Kennerly, 1916), a collection coauthored by Anne Knish and Emanuel Morgan. These were the respective pseudonyms of Arthur Davison Ficke and Witter Bynner, coconspirators in a literary hoax intended to mock Modernism and its offshoots. In The Spectra Hoax, poet William Jay Smith asserts, “Spectra is indeed one of the greatest literary hoaxes ever perpetrated in America.” About the poem, he writes, “One day at luncheon Witter Bynner purposely slipped off his chair and fell noisily to the floor, his motive being, says Ficke, the ‘commendable one of startling the attending waitress into violent hysterics.’ When order had been restored [...] the hostess remarked sadly but patiently, ‘How terrible to entertain a lunatic!’ Mr. Bynner, ‘with a shriek of voluptuous and joyous recognition,’ dashed immediately to the study, where in the person of Emanuel Morgan he wrote down his renowned ‘Madagascar.’”