New Explorations of Mina Loy's Ekphrastic Poetry

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New Explorations of Mina Loy’s Ekphrastic Poetry

Sara Dunton

BA Honours English, UNB, 2009

A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of

In the Graduate Academic Unit of English

Supervisor: Demetres Tryphonopoulos, PhD (English)

Examining Board: Mary Rimmer, PhD (English)

Anthony Tremblay, PhD (English)

Theodore Christou, PhD (Education)

This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies

THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK

July, 2011

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These explorations of Mina Loy’s ekphrastic work include close readings of three poems, written in the early 1920s, juxtaposed with images of the art objects they describe. The framework of reference for this examination is built upon the cultural contexts of Anglo-American modernism, particularly the contents of the “little magazines” that thrived during the 1910s and 1920s and featured leading visual artists, writers and theorists. Loy’s controversial contributions to those publications, her intense affiliation with the American avant-garde, and her training as a painter, lend credence to her selection of the ekphrastic mode. By examining each poem beside the image it addresses, and alongside other artwork relevant to Loy, this thesis presents a critical assessment of the radical movements of Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism that engrossed the poet and her contemporaries. Her astute (and ironic) deployment of the traditional ekphrastic mode, delivered in characteristically compressed modem verse, contains a cryptic commentary on the tenuous nature of abstraction and fragmentation. Scholarship in literary modernism revived Loy’s work in the 1980s to extol her feminist sensibility, and recent attention has been paid to her importance as an active member of a cultural revolution. The significance of her ekphrastic poetry, however, has been underappreciated, and deserves closer study, so that her voice can be added to the ongoing discourse on the paradoxical modernist mission to “make it new.” Dedication

To my patient and supportive husband, Gerry Chevrier, and our children, Emily and Daniel. Preface

In this thesis I position modernist Mina Loy inside her engagement with the art movements of the 1910s to determine how visual aesthetics and cultural contexts underpinned her ekphrastic poetry of the 1920s. I speculate that Loy effectively curated the three-way experience that ekphrasis facilitates between artist, art object and audience, to present a nuanced commentary on modernist tenets. My own discovery of

Loy’s work was, in itself, an inspiring ekphrastic encounter: when I first read Loy’s poem “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” I had studied Brancusi and could envision his sculpture, but I understood little about poetic structure and knew nothing about Loy. My own frame of reference, as an interior designer, had been built by the instruction of modernist theorists and practitioners. Not surprisingly, their teaching of design history was focused on visual art and architecture, and the notion of integrating literary history into an already demanding curriculum was never considered. Now, happily, thirty years later, I am able to investigate the design of modernist poetry within its cultural contexts.

In the same thirty-year span of time, although scholarship in literary modernism has restored Loy’s relevance, I believe it has neglected her ekphrastic poetry. A deep reserve of references to her modernist cohort of poets, aesthetic theorists and visual artists is contained within this particular body of Loy’s work, making it well suited to today’s methods of inter-textual and cross-textual investigation.

Loy’s deployment of the ekphrastic mode is pointedly self-referential. Trained as a painter, Loy naturally gravitated to expressions of ekphrasis—those meant “to evoke an image in the mind’s eye as intense as if the described object were actually before the reader” (Cuddon 252). Poetic explorations of art objects certainly aligned with her dual creative impulses; but they also addressed the declared mission of early modernism, to

“make it new,” which united artists and writers in their pursuit of abstract forms of expression. In the 1910s, Loy’s pared-down poetic style and keen attention to the visual nature of text were daring manifestations of this mission. Her compressed ekphrastic poems from the 1920s reflect not only her continued theoretical engagement with this pursuit, but also her active involvement with the radical art movements of Cubism,

Futurism, and Dadaism, which had vehemently instigated die rejection of past traditions and conventions. I contend that Loy understood that ekphrasis was profoundly relevant to the modernist experience because it simultaneously heralded and challenged these instigations. Loy deftly demonstrates that the ekphrastic poem, despite its traditional origins, can become a modem object of cultural significance.

Loy herself exerted a brief, but brilliant, impact on the Anglo-American avant- garde culture of the 1910s and 1920s. By the 1930s, critical discourse on her work came to a halt, and this cessation effectively confined her to that epoch. Unlike her contemporary Marianne Moore, who continued to write poetry until her death in 1972, and retained a high public profile, Loy slipped into relative obscurity. The omission of her work from the canon of Anglo-American modernist literature was undeserved, certainly, but understandable given the dominance of the male modernist giants—Eliot,

Pound, Williams, Stevens, to name but a few—whose work garnered the most attention well into the 1980s. That dominance, as feminist critics Virginia Kouidis and Carolyn

Burke rightly argued, was due to the masculinist bias of modernist studies of poetry.

Their recovery of Loy’s work, along with the concerted efforts of Rachel Blau

DuPlessis, Marissa Januzzi, and Roger Conover, revived interest in her distinct poetics. During the 1980s, Burke offered perhaps the most in-depth reading of modernist women’s poetics, “Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference,” which draws critical connections between Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. Conover produced a revised edition of Loy’s collected works,The Lost Lunar Baedeker (referred to as LLB in this study’s citations), which was published in 1996, and includes previously unpublished poems and a wealth of biographical information and social context derived from his detailed archival research of Loy’s manuscripts and correspondence. In the

1990s, Ellen Keck Stauder published an insightful essay on the “conceptions of art” in the work of Loy and Pound, and a thorough analysis of “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” one of the very few that has apparently been undertaken. Although both Stauder’s essays investigate the correlation between Loy’s poetics and her affiliations to art movements, neither addresses her use of the ekphrastic mode.

In the last decade, critical attention to Loy has aligned with the impetus to examine modernist literary and visual production within cultural contexts defined by technology and marketing, and within a broad range of social contexts including immigration and urbanization. Alex Goody’s study, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural

Study o f Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude, Steinsituates Loy well within these contexts, and pays particular attention to her connections to Marcel Duchamp, the pioneer of conceptual art who shared the avant-garde spotlight with Loy. Most recently,

Lara Vetter has centered her study, Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, on Loy, H.D. and Jean Toomer, and offers close readings of Loy’s poems that allude to

“entangled discourses on religion and heterodoxy, sexuality and gender, and technology and popular science” (Vetter 27). Both Goody and Vetter have performed cross-textual research that extends beyond scholarly publications into popular material to frame the cultural settings for their analyses.

This thesis is built upon not only the described scholarship on Loy, but also die

“little magazines” of the 1910s and 1920s that housed the poetry, artworks, and criticism contributed by Loy and her contemporaries. To some extent, therefore, my methodology leans towards establishing cultural contexts through these cross-textual references; but, to an equal degree, I rely upon the inter-textual interpretation of paintings and sculpture originating from the art movements that engrossed Loy. My own curatorial selection is at times speculative: two of Loy’s ekphrastic poems studied herein name specific art objects, while the third names none. I suggest that none of these poems has attracted sufficient critical attention. Apart from Stauder’s work on “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” my research has determined that ‘“The Starry Sky’ of Wyndham Lewis” has seldom been discussed, and that “Marble” has not been addressed since Conover published it in 1996.

Juxtaposing these ekphrastic works with images of the art objects they describe can only enhance the potential for new interpretations. A century ago, modernist writers and artists alike employed this device of juxtaposition to destabilize realistic representations. Today, scholars of literary modernism are exploring the effects that this technique, and other key visual devices such as fragmentation, collage, and geometric composition, had upon the patterns and design of fiction and poetry (cf. Roston, Mao,

Mahaffey, Hickman). Given Loy’s inherent advantage as a visual artist, and her deployment of these methods as a poet, the relevance of her work within current discourses on modernism must be acknowledged. Most importantly, in this discussion, by enclosing these new interpretations of artwork and poetry within the cultural contexts of the art movements and literary publications of her epoch, Loy’s poetic voice reveals more than an informed critique of modem art Her astute deployment of the ekphrastic mode, delivered in characteristically compressed modem verse, contains a cryptic commentary on the tenuous nature of abstraction and fragmentation and, I believe, an embedded lament for a banished past. Ekphrasis enables Loy to expose the paradox underlying die modernist mission, that all attempts to shun realistic representation will inevitably be thwarted by the tangibility of what has come before, and what remains as evidence in the present TABLE OF CONTENTS

A bstract...... ii

Dedication ...... iii

Preface...... iv

Table of Contents ...... ix

List of Figures ...... x

Introduction ...... 1

One: Futurism, Flux, and ‘“The Starry Sky’ of Wyndham Lewis”...... 11

Two: America, Abstraction, and “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” ...... 45

Three: New York Dada, Duchamp, and “Marble” ...... 87

Afterw ord...... 108

Works Cited and Consulted ...... 112

Curriculum Vitae

ix LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1. Umberto Boccioni, The Street Enters the House, 1911. 22 Oil on canvas. Sprengel Museum, Hanover. Rpt. in Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. http://www.sprengel-museum.de/vl/englisch/02munds/boccioni/ub Is a.html

Fig. 2. Wyndham Lewis, The Starry Sky, 1912. 35 Pencil, pen and ink, wash, gouache, collage. Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London. Rpt. in Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.

Fig. 3. Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, 1912. 48 Oil on canvas. Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection, The Philadelphia Museum of Art Rpt in H. H. Amason, History o fModem Art. New York: Abrams, 1978. http://librarv.artstor.org.proxv.hil.unb.ca/librarv/welcome.html-l

Fig. 4. Mina Loy, L ‘Amour dorlotepar les belles dames, 1913. 54 Oil on canvas. Collection of Roger J. Conover. Rpt. in Donald Friedman, The Writer‘s Brush. Minneapolis: Mid-List, 2007.

Fig. 5. Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird, 1919/1920. 71 Bronze, stone, and wood. Art Institute of Chicago. Rpt. in Richard N. Masteller, “Using Brancusi.” American Art 11.1,1997.

Fig. 6. Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird, 1919/1920. 73 Bronze, stone, and wood. Artist’s Photograph. Rpt. in The Little Review 8, Autumn 1921. http://librarv.artstor.org.proxv.hil.unb.ca/librarv/welcome.html-l

Fig. 7. Mina Loy,Marcel Duchamp, Tinman, 1953. 89 Mixed mediums, tin cans and found materials. Collection of Roger J. Conover. Rpt. in Donald Friedman, The Writer’s Brush. Minneapolis: Mid-List, 2007.

x Fig. 8. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. Bienecke Library. Rpt. in Alex Goody,Modernist Articulations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. http://librarv.artstor.org.proxv.hil.unb.ca/librarv/welcome.html-l

Fig. 9. Unknown, Apollo, 468-460 BCE. Detail from West Pediment, Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Marble, over-life size. Museum, Olympia. Rpt. in Horst de la Croix and Richard G. Tansey, Gardner’s Art Through the Ages. New York: Harcourt, 1975. Introduction

It is difficult to appraise the work of Mina Loy in perspective.... Though I printed the work she gave me almost in toto, much of it puzzled me at the time. I felt that she might have made a greater effort to communicate herself more clearly. She did not have to compromise with the reader, but with a stricter artistic conscience. If some of her work still looks haphazard, the best of it remains provocative and wears well in the proverbial test of time.

Alfred Kreymborg, A History o f American Poetry; Our Singing Strength, 490.

Alfred Kreymborg’s reminiscence of Mina Loy has the tone of a memory long- past, when in fact he wrote it in 1929, only thirteen years after British-born Loy arrived in New York City to join die avant-garde circle of American poets published in

Kreymborg’s little magazine, Others. Loy was to become a prominent participant in what Kreymborg called the “glamorous years of the poetic civil war” that engaged

Anglo-American poets and artists in the 1910s and 1920s, although she actually lived in

New York for only two short years, from 1916 to 1918. The editors ofOthers and its contributors were engaged in a vigorous re-making of the literary and visual arts, as were many of the small journals on both sides of the Atlantic. Kreymborg’s nostalgic tone, voiced on the eve of 1930, is a testament, perhaps, to the exhausting intensity of their activities in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Loy was already well known in these circles when she came to America, her work having been published in

Camera Work, Trend and Rogue, three distinctly avant-garde American journals that were as concerned with visual culture as they were with literary culture, which suited

Loy’s credentials. Trained as an artist among the Post-Impressionists and Cubists in

Paris, strongly influenced by French Symbolist style and English Art Nouveau style

(Kouidis, DIB 263), Loy had exhibited her artwork at the prestigious Paris Salon d’Automne in 1906. It was primarily her writing, however, not her paintings, that garnered the most attention in the American journals; indeed, Loy fascinated American audiences before she stepped foot in Greenwich Village. Her free verse, radical in its form and sexual content, was enhanced by her reputation as a “New Woman.” She was indeed provocative and should be distinguished not only by her best work, as

Kreymborg claims, but also, as I will argue, by her under-acknowledged work. New readings of Mina Loy’s ekphrastic poetry from the 1920s reveal embedded commentaries on modernism that are surprisingly relevant to today’s discourse on the now century-old movement that “perceived its own mission as a call for necessary rupture” (Perloff, Modernism par.6). When Loy turns her attention to art works and artists as poetic subject matter, she stimulates the same complex interactions between word/image and writer/artist that were underpinning modernism’s mission. I propose that these poetic texts be read as deliberate commentaries on the ekphrastic mode itself and as clever assessments of the interdependent modernist tenets of literary and visual production.

These tenets exemplified the modernists’ mission to “make it new” in both visual and verbal representation: Loy’s deft use of the ekphrastic technique in her 1920s poetry aligns with the modernist campaign to overturn the persistent eighteenth-century dictum that poetry, being active and temporal in nature and painting, being static and spatial, were distinct arts - “two friendly, reasonable neighbours [who] will not at all permit that one of them shall make too free with the most intimate concerns of the other” (65) that

Gotthold Lessing decreed in Laocodn, or the Limits o f Painting and Poetry, in 1766.

Loy and her avant-garde contemporaries inverted this premise, inspired by the principles 3 of Futurism, Cubism, Imagism and Vorticism. Poems became objects suspended in space, while kinaesthetic images shifted across painted canvases. Fragmentation and juxtaposition became primary devices for artists and poets, enforced by their use of synaesthetic effect - “the confusion of different kinds of sense-impressions” (Baldick

254) - to uphold the credo that “encountering modem art require[d] an engagement of the mind and all senses of the body” (Masteller 60). In broad terms, most of Loy’s poetic contributions to die modernist canon between 1914 and 1925 certainly exemplify these characteristics, but within this prime period of production her work demonstrates a marked shift in content and style at the decade’s turn. Her work from the 1910s is distinguished by her “borrowings” from French poetry and Imagism and her integration of the principles of art movements, specifically Cubism and Futurism (Perloff,

“English” par. 4). In the 1920s, Loy’s compressed style remains, as does her inventive diction; but she moves her subject matter away from the highly personalized, eroticized content of her 1910s work and turns her attention towards modernist contemporaries.

She composes poems about her fellow writers, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce, both of whom she knew and greatly admired (Kouidis, DLB 264) and she writes two directly ekphrastic poems about the work of two highly influential visual artists, “Brancusi’s

Golden Bird” and “The Starry Sky of Wyndham Lewis,” published in 1922 and 1923, respectively.

This study of Loy’s ekphrastic poetry will focus on these two works and a third much lesser-known one, “Marble,” published in 1923 and will examine each poem alongside its corresponding artwork, artist and art movement In approaching each grouping, as one would during a museum visit first circulating the art object then 4 reading its accompanying label, the encounter will move from initial sensation to informed reaction. Loy effectively assumes the role of curator in her selection of the object to initiate this type of gallery encounter, for she understands that the encounter entails the “complicated mix of seeing and being seen, of looking through one’s own eyes and making judgments based on the critical discourses in the air” (Paul 27)}

During the course of this examination, the encounters with Loy’s poems will be presented within a cultural gallery, framed by content from the little magazines that today “provide loci of identification and difference, allowing us to map the lines of connection, influence, conflict and resistance that entangled the many strands of modernism” (Churchill and McKible, “Little Magazines” 2). From within this gallery, die designated space of this thesis, Loy’s retrospective evaluation of modernist visual culture will emerge. Read as a subset of Loy’s oeuvre, this trio of poems yields insights into Loy’s assessment of modem art and modes of expression and can be read as a concise critique of both. Given the intensity of the “isms” and the diversity of forms that engaged Anglo-American and European modernists in the 1910s, Loy’s 1920s perspective reflects not only their “mission to rupture” but also evaluates the outcomes.

What is particularly effective about Loy’s use of ekphrasis, I believe, is her brilliant deployment of the self-referential nature of the technique itself, one which enforces the connection between the poet herself (as critic and creator), the artist (as subject of poem and creator of artwork), the artwork and the audience—the readers of the poem who by default are viewers of the artwork. Loy simultaneously respects the classical origins of

1 Catherine Paul examines the shifting mission of museum curators in the early twentieth-century, who “saw their task as one of education and as an opportunity to share their knowledge with people who had not been exposed to art as they had” (22) and their influence upon modernist poets who shared this aim. 5 the rhetoric itself and subverts the traditional form with her modernist style, tackling the issues of verbal and visual representation that consumed her cohort.

Wyndham Lewis and Constantin Brancusi figured most prominently within that cohort: Lewis as a poet, essayist and Cubist painter and Brancusi as a controversial sculptor of abstract forms. Both artists were highly influenced by the Cubist and Futurist movements of the early 1900s in Europe (as was Loy) from which Expressionism and

Abstraction claim heritage (Amason 220). Lewis’s turn to Cubism, Futurism and subsequently to Vorticism (co-created with Ezra Pound) and his prolific literary output in the 1910s made him a prominent figure in Anglo-American intellectual exchanges.

The Starry Sky, a quintessential Cubist drawing, was produced in 1912 and published in

The Little Review in 1917 (Conover, LLB 202 n27); Loy’s poetic representation was included in the first printed collection of her works, Lunar Baedeker, published by

Robert McAlmon’s Contact Publishing Company of Paris, in 1923. She addressed, or perhaps paid tribute to, Brancusi’s work in equally direct fashion, including artist and artwork in the title of her 1922 poem, which was featured in the November 1922 issue o f The Died alongside a photograph of the sculpture taken by Brancusi in his studio. The

American avant-garde knew of toe Romanian-born Brancusi in toe early 1910s, when it

2 These three artistic and literary movements overlapped chronologically and ideologically in toe 1900s and 1910s. “Cubism originated in France with Georges Braque (1882-1963) and Pablo Picasso (1881-1973) [and] pursued a conceptual approach to art grounded in artistic subjectivity, formal experimentation and self- conscious understandings of toe dynamism and instability of toe modem world” (Doss 61). The Futurists, led by Italian Filippo Marinetti (1876-1944), “advocated a complete break with tradition and aimed at new forms, new subjects and new styles in keeping with the advent of toe mechanistic age” (Cuddon 336). Vorticism, toe most short-lived of toe three movements, “combined toe Futurist attention to speed and movement with toe Cubist use of geometry and structure, thereby suggesting toe intention to concentrate more on style than on content” (Prudente par. 9). 6 turned to its European contemporaries for inspiration following the famous Armory

Show art exhibition in 1913. Brancusi’s sophisticated abstracted forms exemplified the modernist mission to reject realistic mimesis and “make it new” in all forms of artistic expression. Reading Loy’s poetic presentations of Lewis’s painting and Brancusi’s sculpture will generate discussions of the literary and visual modes at play within her poetics and within the subjects of her ekphrastic attention.

While these two poems offer identifiable starting points of discussion on modernist movements and methods, complete with specified art objects to envision, the third ekphrastic poem, “Marble,” offers undefined parameters and unspecified subject matter: its date of origin is uncertain, its artwork is unnamed, its publication history is incomplete and it appears to have attracted no critical attention.3 In terms of the museum visit analogy, then, “Marble” sits alone in a bare gallery, unaccompanied by supporting text and cultural reference points and wide open for interpretation. A close encounter with this poem will reveal the same concepts that Loy tackles with Brancusi and Lewis, but it will also tender exchange on the resiliency of Dadaism and Marcel Duchamp’s influence in Loy’s career and facilitate speculation on Loy’s assessment of visual culture. This speculation is due in minor part to die obscurity of the poem, but in major part to the poet’s “signature elusiveness” (Shreiber and Tuma 12), which Alfred

Kreymborg was certainly referring to in 1929 when he suggested that Loy might have communicated more clearly, “but with a stricter artistic conscience” (490). From this

3 Roger Conover includes “Marble” in his 1996 edition of Loy’s poems, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, using the text from the “first and only known published version” of the poem that was published in 1923 in a prospectus for a new journal, the Paris-based transatlantic review, edited by Ford Madox Ford. Conover deems “Marble” to be “among the most obscure of Loy’s published poems” (203 n 28). 7 study’s present-day perspective, Loy’s “Marble” allows a wide berth for new elucidations about the modernist ethos of the 1910s and 1920s.

It is important to balance this perspective, however, with readings of contemporary texts from these decades, paying close attention to their publication dates.

The temporal aspect of the progression from avant-garde to early modernist to late modernist is critical. As the intensity of purpose rose in the mid-1910s in America, the degrees of interconnectedness stepped up as well, as did the schisms between expatriate

Americans, English modernists and newly invigorated Americans. For players like

Kreymborg, who had been at the forefront of the avant-garde movement since its inception in the United States—often cited in modernist discourse as the year 1913— a retrospective report from the late 1920s was one imbued with an intense involvement in literary production and publication. His subjective history of poetry is already assessing

Loy’s historical impact a mere five years after her last poem appeared in print and only fourteen years since he printed her explicitly sexual poem “Love Songs” in the first issue of his own little magazine in 1915.

Most tellingly, in his 1929 History, Kreymborg includes his assessment of

Loy—“curious, exotic and beautiful”(488)— in a chapter entitled “Originals and

Eccentrics.” His description of ter cultural credentials reveals the risqte “otherness” that die editor was seeking to characterize Others:

Visiting the shrines of modem art and literature in Paris and Florence and

being accepted as a coeval in the maddest circles, Miss Loy, who is an

artist as well as a poet, imbibed the precepts of Apollinaire and Marinetti

and became a Futurist with all the earnestness and irony of a woman 8

possessed and obsessed with the sum of human experience and

disillusion. (488)

Kreymborg discerned that Loy’s foreign allure and her affiliation with die radical avant- garde in Europe were potent Most importantly, her scandalous verse reinforced the mission he was developing with his magazine and his devoted coterie of writers—to promote “the poet” as America’s new leader of the avant-garde. Suzanne Churchill reports on an article Kreymborg wrote forThe Morning Telegraph in August 1915, in which he proclaims that “[vjers libre, or free verse, as we have come to call it, has taken the place of cubism and futurism in public popularity. The painter has had his inning.

The poet is here now, to mock and jeer” (“Vers Libre and Vers Librists” sec.2,1; qtd. in

Churchill, Others 6).

Loy did more than jeer with her poetic voice between 1913 and her arrival in the

United States in 1916: she was “attacking the sentimental head on...including expectations of ‘poetic language’ and particularly suitable language for the ‘lady poet’

(Taylor 57-58). The infamous lines of the opening stanza - “Pig Cupid his rosy snout /

Rooting erotic garbage / ‘Once upon a time’ / Pulls a weed white star-topped / Among wild oats sown in mucous membrane”—illustrate Loy’s blunt and decidedly

“unfeminine” language. “Love Songs” stirred controversy for Kreymborg but also helped establish Loy’s reputation:

Loy’s lines were praised and scorned by Victorians and [Greenwich]

Villagers of all stripes. Some readers had the sensation of Scotch tape

being peeled off their eyes; some considered her poems erotic, other

pornographic. [...] Her love songs had scent—too much civet for some, 9

too much theelin for others. Kreymborg got what he was after—an

incendiary response to his expressly abrasive magazine. (Conover,

(Re) Introducing 246)

When Roger Conover surmises that Loy’s poems were too “scented,” and Kreymborg implies that her affiliation with the “maddest” of avant-garde circles defines her, Loy’s ekphrastic poetry gains new credence: her avant-garde language evokes scent, in the true synaesthetic fashion4 that enhances the ekphrastic encounter and her painterly sensibility is unequivocally avant-garde. Most importantly, I contend, Loy embodies the quality of

“otherness” which, according to theorist W. J. Mitchell, underpins the relationship between word and image that defines the ekphrastic technique/ and she possesses the feminist sensibility that aligns with gender otherness and informs her ekphrastic work.

Mitchell posits that “from die semantic point of view, from the standpoint of referring, expressing intentions and producing effects in a viewer/listener, there is no essential difference between texts and images” (Mitchell, Picture Theory 160) to demonstrate, as Loizeaux continues, that “images can tell stories and make arguments, too” (14). But Mitchell also emphasizes that the ekphrastic poem, despite its efforts to conflate verbal and visual effects, still houses the tension between word and image that had persisted since the classical separation of art and poetry: “Ekphrastic poetry is the

4 J.A. Cuddon defines synaesthesia as “the mixing of sensations (from the Greek, ‘perceiving together’); the concurrent appeal to more than one sense; the response through several senses to the stimulation of one.. .for instance, “hearing” a colour or “seeing” a smell. (889) 5 Cuddon defines ekphrasis (from the Greek, ‘description’) as “the intense pictoral description of an object [...] A more generous account would define ekphrasis as virtuosic description of physical reality (objects, scenes, persons) in order to evoke an image in the reader’s eye as intense as if die described object were actually before the reader” (252). 10 genre in which texts encounter their own semiotic ‘others,’ those rival, alien modes of representation called the visual, graphic, plastic, or ‘spatial’ arts” (Picture Theory 156).

Loizeaux extends Mitchell’s notion of this encounter to suggest that the traditional notion of gender representation, which is historically contained within the ekphrastic genre, serves as a fitting starting point for feminists to challenge notions about the production and reception of images of women. She begins her examination of feminist ekphrasis (which includes Loy’s modernist contemporary, Marianne Moore, but excludes Loy) with Mitchell’s observation that “the treatment of the ekphrastic image as female other is commonplace” {Picture Theory 168), backed by the “long history in western discourse identifying time and language as male and space and picture as female” (80). Within the ekphrastic arena, therefore, these contrary concepts of spatiality and temporality, the very ones most modernists intently inverted, are brought into play alongside the equally potent ideas of gender representation, which were far more entrenched and were in fact elaborated upon by the masculinist modernists, most notably by Ezra Pound. Loy’s frank sexual subject matter and “unladylike” diction certainly drew public attention, enforced by her New Woman persona; but she, like other women writers (particularly Gertrude Stein, as will be discussed), challenged entrenched ideas about gender not only through content but also through their own radical revisions of poetic form. Given Loizeaux’s succinct statement that “ekphrasis provides the structure within which the power of language and the power of the image and hence the power of their makers, can both be flexed and proved” (121), Loy’s verbal renderings of art objects promise to prove themselves as incisive histories of modernist visual culture and pointed commentaries on the theories housed therein. 11

Chapter One: Futurism, Flux and “‘The Starry Sky’ of Wyndham Lewis”

The flux of life is pouring its aesthetic aspect into your eyes, your ears—and you ignore it because you are looking for your canons of beauty in some sort of frame or glass case to tradition. Modernism says: Why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious, the thousand odds and ends which make up your sensory every day life?

Mina Loy, “Gertrude Stein.” transatlantic review 2.3,2.4 (1924)

Bom in 1882 in England, the daughter of an English Protestant mother and a

Hungarian Jewish father, the artistically gifted Loy was reportedly at odds with her family from an early age, demonstrating the very “nervous” temperament that unsettled her conservative Victorian parents and foreshadowed her becoming a New Woman.6

Sent overseas at age seventeen to study art in Munich, she returned briefly to London before moving to Paris in 1903 to continue studying art (Kouidis, DLB 263). It was there that Loy married her fellow art student, Stephen Haweis. She pointedly did not take his name but instead changed her birth surname, Lowy, to Loy, a fact that alludes to her affinity with late Victorian suffragettes challenging stringent, late Victorian social codes and to her rebellion against her family; but despite her liberated gestures, Loy was not immune to personal and societal pressures. Loy biographer Virginia Kouidis reports that soon after Loy and Haweis moved to Florence in 1906, after the death of their first child in 1905, Loy continued her painting career and gave birth to two children. Kouidis

(writing in 1980 on the cusp of feminist criticism) also records that Loy was “frequently

6 Elaine Showalter provides insight into the conflated “nervous” and “artistic” attributes that characterized the New Woman in late nineteenth-century England and Europe: “The New Woman was also the nervous woman. Doctors linked what they saw as an epidemic of nervous disorders including anorexia, neurasthenia and hysteria with the changes in women’s aspirations. Women’s conflicts over using their gifts, moreover, would doom them to lives of nervous illness” (40). 12 ill. She also suffered from neurasthenia, which probably originated in her unpreparedness for motherhood, financial worries and marital unhappiness” (263).

During this personally challenging but pivotal developmental period as an artist,

Loy’s painterly sensibility and by default her poetic sensibility, were closely aligned with the succession of art movements of the decade - Symbolism, Post-Impressionism and then Cubism - which were embraced by the European avant-garde community that

Loy joined. Hie Cubist movement had been percolating in Paris since 1908, spearheaded by painters Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque and enthusiastically supported by this close-knit community, which included Gertrude Stein, French

Symbolist writers and critics of all ages and one of Cubism’s most eager proponents, critic Guillaume Apollinaire. In true nascent modernist spirit, Cubism was resisting its

Post-Impressionist predecessors whose work was still occupying the galleries and salons of England and France.

Challenging longstanding artistic conventions such as atmospheric

perspective and illusionism, Cubism pursued a conceptual approach to art

grounded in artistic subjectivity, formal experimentation and self-

conscious understandings of the dynamism and instability of the modem

world. Two styles emerged: Analytic Cubism, in which objects were

broken down (‘analysed’) into fragmented, cube-like forms; and

Synthetic Cubism, a collage aesthetic based on the juxtapostion of

seemingly unrelated shapes and objects. (Doss 61)

7 Haweis’s and Loy’s first child, Oda Janet, was bom in 1904 and died in 1905. Their daughter Joella (bom in 1907) and son Giles (1909-1923) were bom in Florence. Haweis left Loy and his children in 1913 to travel to the South Seas; the couple divorced in 1917. (Kouidis, DIB 263) 13

In the formative years of her artistic career between 1903 and 1914, spent first in Paris

(in the frequent company of Gertrude Stein) and then in Florence, Loy’s poetry evolved and eventually overtook painting as her primary mode of expression in the heady atmosphere of these two manifestations of the radical Cubist movement Most certainly, her training and the Paris intellectual community informed her poetic style, as Loy biographer Carolyn Burke explains:

Loy approached the blank page as if it were a canvas. She was, like

Apollinaire, a “podte fondd en peinture.” While [Ezra] Pound’s sense of

the artist’s relation to form focused on the poet-sculptor’s forceful mental

imprint upon matter, both Loy and Stein were more concerned with the

physical properties of language as the “belle mati&re” itself. By 1912,

although resident in Florence, Loy was sufficiently familiar with Cubism

and had read enough of Stein’s manuscripts to grasp die implication of

these “new forms,” for both poetry and prose. When the Futurists arrived

there in 1913, she had already been thinking about a kind of writing in

which point of view, like perspective in painting, could be displaced, the

structure of the line or sentence loosened and punctuation discarded so

that words might lie side by side. (“Getting Spliced” 107)

One of Loy’s earliest poems demonstrates this displaced painterly perspective.

Appropriately entitled “Italian Pictures,” it was written in Florence in the summer of

1914, on the brink of war and the breakup of her marriage to Haweis and in die heat of her whirlwind affair with Futurist leader Filippo Marinetti (Conover, LLB 177 n3).8 In the second section of the poem, “The Costa San Giorgio,” Loy’s shifting viewpoint and abandonment of punctuation reflect not only her experiments with form but also her turn towards the physicality of the poem itself. The extended gaps between words and the jarring capitalization of BROKEN HEADS next to ICE CREAM accentuate the visual aspect of the printed text and the materiality of its language. The combination of the compressed structure and absent punctuation, most importantly, reflect Stein’s influence, since, as Burke contends, Stein “had learned from Cezanne and the Cubists before the war, that juxtaposition could be utilized as the formal principle of sustained modernist writing” (“Getting Spliced” 100).

We English make a tepid blot On the messiness Of the passionate Italian life-traffic Throbbing the street up steep Up up to the porta Culminating In the stained frescoe of the dragon-slayer

The hips of women sway Among the crawling children they produce And the church hits the barracks Where The greyness of marching men Falls through the greyness of stone

Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction Hoarsely advertised as broken heads BROKEN HEADS and the barber Has an imitation mirror And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves

8 Conover also records the November 1914 publication of “Italian Pictures” in The Trend, “one of the most elusive of the many elusive magazines in which Mina Loy was published” (178 n3), which was edited by Carl Van Vechten and folded after only three issues appeared. 15

Shaving ICE CREAM Licking is larger than mouths Boots than feet Slip Slap and the string dragging And the angle of the sun Cuts the whole lot in half (LLB 10-11)

Loy deftly demonstrates the Synthetic Cubist “collage aesthetic” in these three stanzas extracted from “Italian Pictures.” She presents three consecutive pictures that suggest a moving eye across a hectic street scene, but she makes no direct link between them.

Most significantly, each of these three stanzas presents a separate narrative, but collectively they become a collage and present a fractured painterly representation—a non-consecutive rendering of an Italian street scene. The first stanza offers the “tepid blot” of English seeking the “stained frescoe”; the second equates the “greyness” of marching men falling through the “greyness” of stone and conflates the church with the barracks to suggest a graveyard, so that one image blends into the next to imply another.

The third stanza bursts into full Cubist presentation and physical language—half-rotten oranges, broken heads, licking, slapping boots, dragging string—all jumbled and then, with the certainty of a Georges Braque or a Picasso, “the angle of the sun / Cuts the whole lot in half,” just as Loy’s fractured lineation and irregular stanzas cut through the poem’s form.

Stein’s impact on Loy’s modernist form before 1912 is often overshadowed by the much-heralded appearance of Pound’s Imagism in 1913;9 but in fact, Loy’s early

9 Pound’s famous dictum and the three guiding principles of Imagism appeared in the March 1913 issue of the little magazine, Poetry. The dictum, “An ‘Image’ is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” was the opening sentence to Pound’s essay, “A Few Don’ts by an Imagiste.” The preceding essay, 16 technique is far more grounded in Cubism than Imagism and more aligned with Stein in spirit. Jane Goldman looks to Stein’s poetry from 1914 (the same year as Loy’s “Italian

Pictures”) to differentiate between the two most arguably influential modernists of the day:

Unlike Pound and H.D., Stein was never an Imagist. Her collection of

poems Tender Buttons (1914) is highly experimental: in it she tests

poetry almost into prose; experiments in rhythm, repetition and grammar.

Although perhaps some of her poetry appears imagistic on the page,

Stein’s disruptive organisation of language makes for a dynamism very

much at odds with the haiku-Uk.Q stasis of Imagism. (176)

The same dynamism and disruption characterize Loy’s “Italian Pictures.” In these three cited stanzas, the first two display Imagist-like unadorned language, but their simple static character is destabilized by the erratic juxtaposition of unrelated images in the third. Herein lies what Burke identifies as “an important counterstrain of modernist poetics—centered on the modalities of joining and separation, union and disunion”

(“Getting Spliced” 100) that Loy employs to great effect

Loy’s poetic technique demonstrates her affiliation with Stein’s manipulation of textual “entities” like clauses and fragments; but it also reveals her understanding of visual images as unstable entities whose meaning could be altered by the position or perception of the viewer. Burke contrasts Pound’s definition of the image as a fixed

attributed to F. S. Flint, presented the equally renowned principles: “1. Direct treatment of the “thing” whether subjective or objective; 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation; 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome” (Poetry 6.1 [March 1913]: 198- 206). 17 entity—a “complex,” albeit an instantaneous one—with Loy’s understanding of the image as an unstable substance:

Although Pound, at this time (1913-1915) appears to have had faith in the

image, or artistic form in general, as numinously given, Loy, as a trained

artist, knew that images were inherently unreliable and no more

numinous with meaning than anything else. She also knew that images

could dissolve, shatter, break into their components, fade out, or prove

unrecognizable from different angles of vision. (“Getting Spliced”108)

While Loy explored the mutability of images from this artistic viewpoint and Pound immersed himself in the “abstract speculations about the representational power of language” (Beasley, EPVCM 52), both their investigations into the reliability of words and images connect to the work of die English theorist, T.E. Hulme. Hulme’s influence upon Pound—particularly upon Pound’s “orchestration” of the second phase of

Imagism, which followed Hulme’s own first phase—is well documented,10 but Hulme’s effect on Loy must be extracted from her own writing. This will first be tracked through her attraction and poetic responses to Futurism and then through her ekphrastic tribute to

Wyndham Lewis.

Hulme had gained recognition before 1913 for his reinterpretations of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s analysis of the perceptual image. “Hulme highlights

10 George Bomstein summarizes the first two phases of Imagism: “Dominated by the assertive T.E. Hulme fresh from his Cambridge expulsion, the first phase involved a group of young writers in 1908-09 who first formed a Poets’ Club and then reconstituted themselves as members of a School of Images dedicated to accurate expression without verbiage. The second phase, orchestrated by Pound himself, may be dated from November 1912, when he humorously included in his Ripostes volume five brief lyrics labeled ‘The Complete Poetical Works of T.E. Hulme’”(28). 18

Bergson’s nominalism,” Rebecca Beasley explains, “where words are understood as part of the conceptual ordering process that falsifies reality and he consistently asserts the compensatory ability of visual perception”(EPVCM 57). Most importantly, for this discussion, Hulme writes (likely in 1911 or 1912, according to Beasley) that although

Bergson

has not created any new theory of ‘art’, by the acute analysis of certain

mental processes he has enabled us to state more definitely and with less

distortion the qualities which we feel in art: To use the metaphor which

one is by now so familiar with - the stream of the inner life and the

definite crystallized shapes on the surface - the big artist, the creative

artist, the innovator, leaves the level where things are crystallized out into

these definite shapes and, diving down into the inner flux, comes back

with a new shape which he endeavours to fix. Great painters are men in

whom has originated a certain vision of things which has become or will

become the vision of everybody. Once the painter has seen it, it becomes

easy for us all to see it. (194)

Although Hulme appears to be addressing visual artists exclusively and while he might well have been indirectly referencing die Cubists, his re-interpretation of Bergson’s evocation of the creative process applies equally well to the Futurists (and soon after,

Vorticists) who positioned the concepts of flux and dynamic movement at the centre of their theories and practices and both purposefully created codependent styles for literary and visual expression. This energetic elision of the arts appealed to Loy, as did the short-lived but intense influence of the “great painter,” Italian Futurist leader Filippo 19

Marinetti, whose “energy reignited her creativity and incited her dormant animus”

(Conover, LLB 179 n4) during their brief affair in 1913.

Marinetti was first and foremost a poet and propagandist He was also a visual artist and while he was not a “great painter” in literal terms, he did fit Hulme’s description, for he certainly believed he had “originated a certain vision” when he initiated a series of anarchist manifestoes in 1908. “Much of the spirit of futurism,” notes art historian H.H. Amason, “reflected the flamboyant personality of Marinetti himself.. .and its philosophy stemmed primarily from Henri Bergson and Friedrich

Nietzsche” (220) with its celebration of “both the ‘death’ of all conventional codes of communication and the ‘birth’ of a new artistic alphabet” according to Teresa Prudente

(par. 2). Prudente elaborates upon Marinetti’s Futurist bombastic manifestoes:

Target of the Futurists’ vehement criticism was, in fact, the concept of

art seen as mimesis, which led, in their opinion, to a still representation

of life (“literature has, so far, exalted thoughtful stillness, ecstasy,

sleep...”) and which was no longer able to reproduce the kaleidoscopic

modem experience. The refusal of the previous tradition not only

included the rejection of Romantic poetry but also a criticism of

psychological and realistic narrative, which, in Futurist conception,

prevented, with its static reflection, the subject’s immersion in the flux

of life, (par.2)

When a group of like-minded, politicized painters, including Loy’s friends Carlo Cani,

Giacomo Balia and Umberto Boccioni, joined Marinetti in 1909, the Futurist movement became a powerful union of visual and literary artists who, like their Cubist cohort, 20

“paid homage to the idea of simultaneity of vision, of metamorphosis and of motion that constantly multiplied the moving object” (Amason 220). Under Marinetti’s forceful and highly effective manipulation of his cultural manifestoes, he demonstrated that “poetry could get in on the action by taking part in movements linking literature to the visual arts” (Dasenbrock 227). Marinetti undoubtedly incited Loy’s poetic impulse and output, building upon their shared aesthetics about the notions of collage and fragmentation shared by the Futurists and the Cubists. “His manifestos calling for the revisualization of language, the abolishment of punctuation and the liberation of words from conventional syntax,” according to Roger Conover, “appealed to Loy’s already experimentally inclined temperament” (LLB 179 n4) and, indeed, informed but did not entirely dictate her poetic style in the mid 1910s.

It is quite reasonable to extrapolate that the collective of Futurist painters had as much, if not more, influence than Marinetti upon Loy’s poetics and that their tactics reinforced her notions of creative consciousness. Carolyn Burke supports this contention:

Her contacts with the futurist painters Cani and Balia, who broke images

and figures in motion into a painterly version of the successive frame in a

cinematic sequence, demonstrated that the poetic image was what the

mind determined it could be: it had no fixed objective reality. It might or

might not be mimetic or representational and more likely than not, it

resembled those unstable mental pictures being discussed by the new

theory of psychoanalysis. (“Getting Spliced”108) 21

Returning to “The Costa San Giorgio,” the middle poem from “Italian Pictures,” Loy’s connection to the Futurist painters can be discerned. These two verses follow those cited earlier:

Fluidic blots of sky Shift among roofs Between bandy legs Jerk patches of street

Interrupted by clacking Of all the green shutters From which Bits of bodies Variously leaning Mingle eyes with the commotion (LLB 11-12)

Loy presents a street scene in which die fractured images of people—“bandy legs” and

“bits of bodies”— are mixed with urban clatter and “patches of street.” The physical objects cannot be realistically rendered and most tellingly, they “mingle eyes with the commotion” as if to undermine the co-dependent processes of representation and viewing. If read alongside Umberto Boccioni’s 1911 oil painting, The Street Enters the

House (see fig.l), moreover, “The Costa San Giorgio” becomes decidedly ekphrastic.

The ruptured street invades the doorways and front stoops of the onlookers (some of whom appear calm) to invoke the notions of clamour and fluidity of modem life that cities had come to personify. When this painting was exhibited at the first Futurist exhibition in London in 1912, its accompanying text explained: “.. .we do not limit the scene to what the square frame of the window renders visible; but we try to render the sum total of visual sensations which the person has experienced.. .This implies the simultaneous of the ambient and, therefore, the dislocation and dismemberment of Fig. 1. Umberto Boccioni, The Street Enters the House, 1911. Oil on canvas. Sprengel Museum, Hanover. Rpt. in Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000. 64. 23 objects, the scattering and fusion of details” (“The Exhibitors to the Public” 12; qtd. in

Edwards 62). Loy’s own interpretation, particularly her juxtaposition of “broken heads” and “oranges half-rotten,” presents a similar rendering. This pairing of poem and painting yields early evidence of Loy’s appreciation of ekphrasis as a mode entirely suited to the modernists’ interconnected visual and literary means of expression.11

As further testament to Loy’s appreciation of this interconnectedness and her merging of Cubist and Futurist thinking, it is important to note that Loy was not swept away by the Italian Futurists’ strident political rhetoric, even though it was seamlessly adapted by writers and artists alike. In her 1914 correspondence to her friend Mabel

Dodge, Loy declares, “I am so interested to find I am a sort of pseudo-Futurist,” but she later reveals, “I am in the throes of conversion to Futurism—but I shall never convince myself’ (Conover, LLB 180 n4). Her hesitancy to embrace the Futurist ideology might have stemmed from its inflamed, militaristic rhetoric; but ultimately, her outright rejection of it was founded in the movement’s (and Marinetti’s) inherent misogynism: in the 1909 manifesto, the ninth and tenth tenets claimed “contempt for women” and named women as an enemy of Futurism (Conover, LLB 180 n5). When it came to defining their collective aesthetic, moreover, the Futurists’ standpoint excluded Loy:

At the same time that they repudiated contemporary feminism as

hopelessly reformist and parliamentarian, the Futurists were also hard at

work refining the historical avant-garde aesthetic that equated art’s

“domesticated” decay with “the sentimental” and “the feminine.” Taken

11 Virginia Kouidis makes a similar (but more generalized) connection between the poem and external influences: “The collage fragmentations of futurist canvases and the literary revolution espoused by their Technical Manifesto o f Futurist Literature (1912) surely helped to shape this dynamic poem”(DLB 265). 24

together, these moves effectively evacuated any dynamic subject

positions (except, perhaps, as sex curios) for women artists within the

Futurist avant-garde. (Lyon 384)

Though she may have been deprived of such a position within the Futurist circles, her status within the Anglo-American avant-garde did not recede. On the contrary, as Loy began to detach herself from the Futurists in the course of 1914, she found her poetic voice and undercut it with an unprecedented sexual explicitness to exert her woman’s voice. Equally importantly, Loy began to reformulate the concept of flux in the creative process, as envisioned by Bergson and interpreted by Hulme, in her own terms.

The challenge to Loy, following her rejection of Futurism and rising on her feminist sensibilities, was to retain the dynamism and the openness to inner consciousness that stimulated her creative process and then write poems that reflected that process and distinguished themselves from those of Hulme’s “great painters” (or poets) whose masculinist vision was viewed as superior. Perhaps in reaction to

Futurism’s anarchistic principles and in search of a modem, democratic, non- misogynistic arena for expression, Loy came to see language as the pathway to that arena, but one she paved herself with overtly sexual and physical material. Suzanne

Churchill identifies this deviation using Maeera Shrieber’s analysis of the central section of Loy’s epic poem “Songs to Joannes”12 in which Loy graphically “stages an abortion

12 “Songs to Joannes” is an expanded version of the controversial “Love Songs” Kreymborg published in Others in 1915. He subsequently devoted the entire April 1917 issue o f Others to “Songs.” Conover reports that while drafting it in 1915, Loy was initially discouraged by her family’s disapproval (including that of her estranged husband Stephen Haweis) of her explicit subject matter: “I feel my family on top of me—they want to read some of my pretty poems!”(LLB 188 n l 5) 25 of the child that real intimacy should have produced in order to symbolize the self- destruction resulting from the failed love affair” (Shreiber, “Love is a Lyric” 143-64):

Red a warm colour on the battle-field Heavy on my knees as a counterpane Count counter I counted the fringe of the towel Till the two tassels clinging together Let the square room fall way From the round vacuum Dilating with my breath (LLB 60)

This section might equally be read as description of childbirth or sexual intercourse; read any way, it is one pulled from directly inside the woman’s consciousness while engaged in a primary, physical act The poem’s first-person voice alludes to the emotions found in lyric love poetry; but Loy’s speaker is emotionally detached and focuses on the physicality of her situation. Caught within this most visceral of experiences, the woman’s voice quantifies rather than qualifies the moment: “count” appears four times, the tassels are paired and the room is drawn as a square inside a circle.13 Interestingly, Loy specified that an entire blank page should follow this section of the poem to dramatize the ineffectiveness of the love lyric; Churchill interprets the poet’s instruction as evidence that “Loy refuses to find compensation for the failed romance in lyric poetry because she sees a fundamental incompatibility between language and intimacy” (Others 198), enforcing Shreiber’s claim that “Loy’s aims of

13 Ellen Keck Stauder reads this section of “Songs” as Loy’s nuanced rejection of the masculinist Futurists: “That the room falls away from, but also in sense into, the round vacuum (her mouth but also implied is the uterus [again]) suggests that Loy does not simply substitute a biological feminism for the virile futuristic approach. Rather, this poem, in exposing the gendered aspects of the metaphysics of space, refuses to privilege any core of self, however defined, as a center point for perception.” (“Irreducible Surplus” 375) 26 poetry, as constructed by her culture, are finally antiethical to those of love” (“Love Is a

Lyric” 159).

The Imagists encouraged the rejection of romantic impulses and Romantic precedents through the form of pared-down verse, while the Cubists did so by fracturing traditional and iconic representations of women. Shreiber’s key phrase—“as constructed by her culture”—points directly to how Loy steers her creative process as she emerges from the intensity of her years in Paris and Florence. Fully aware of the long-imposed restrictions that persistently called upon the woman, as muse, to remain as the silenced image, Loy slyly digs at the iconic manifestation of this cultural construct in the fractured third stanza of “The Costa San Giorgio” cited earlier— “And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see / ourselves” (LLB 11)—in an epigram that manages to slander the church, the implied masculinist poetic voice and Western painterly tradition in one fell swoop.

Aside from the potent cultural and gender implications of Loy’s poetic strategy to isolate intimacy, her request for the blank page insert in “Songs to Joannes” reveals her awareness that poetry’s physicality can equal that of an image’s. She envisions the visual juxtaposition of the text (language) against no text (the blank page) as creating tension between die two: a blank page can be read as missing words, or a missing illustration, but most importantly it positions the reader to realize that his or her reactions need not be directed by the language itself but by the concurrent experiences of reading and envisioning the poem. Loy is effectively inducing a type of aporia that refers to “the ‘gap’ or lacuna between what a text means to say and what it is constrained to mean” (Cuddon 50). When Loy manipulates the text of her poem and 27 inserts blank spaces within her lines and staggered stanzas, her pauses and spatial interventions seem to parallel what Vicky Mahaffey calls the “windows” of modernist texts:

Moments in which an image wordlessly “speaks” to the reader

produce a kind of aporia—a moment in which the reader is given pause,

rendered uncertain about meaning and intention. [...] In modernist

literature, this effect can be achieved by the various windows that

interpret the book, play, or poem with a “reminder” of some other work

of art. The idea is that for that other work to prompt the reader to reflect

upon - and perhaps alter - die interpretation he or she initially

formulated. Our “window” in the text is also therefore a mirror, making

the reader more aware of the unconscious ways our own desires and fears

shape our “rational” apprehension__ When these reader-directed textual

insights occur, they briefly allow us to see the reader as an unconscious

artist (125)

Loy understands the power of blank spaces to prompt reflection. This tactic seemingly reiterates Loy’s belief in the creative mental process formulated by Hulme and in the promise of the modem culture in which she is actively engaged; she intends to “re present” words and images from her perspective, but she recognizes the need to provoke this kind of impasse in the mental process of perceiving art and language. In 1915, Loy writes to her friend and de-facto literary agent, Carl Van Vechten:

All our reactions to the really tremendous phenomenon in life—are

unrealized—we feel something vaguely—never something conscious. 28

[...] Now I believe that life can only evolve something more ample for

us—if we help it by getting right into our emotions—& accept their

myriad phenomenality—we modems have hardly a prescribed psychic

area—it’s expanding. (Loy to Van Vechten, n.d. [c. 1915] Van Vechten

Papers, YCAL; qtd. in Churchill, Others 199)

Although the influence of Futurism resonates, Loy’s reference to “we modems” indicates her broader vision at a time when her reputation was growing in the United

States. Aside from Kreymborg, another avant-garde Alfred—photographer, publisher and gallery owner, Alfred Stieglitz—was responsible for featuring Loy’s work (actually before Kreymborg) in his quarterly magazine,Camera Work. Stieglitz featured her prose piece, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” in the January 1914 issue of his sophisticated publication, one in which the intellectual interests of the avant-garde extended beyond photography into the wider spectrum of literary and visual culture. First published in

1913, Camera Work included extensive treatises on modem art (rivaling those of New

Age and The Egoist, the leading little magazines in England), many of which were penned by Marius de Zayas.14 His lengthy essay from the March 1914 issue, “Modem

Art -Theories and Representations,” for example, probes the analytical nature of modem art and is certainly echoed in Loy’s 1915 correspondence with Van Vechten. De

Zayas writes:

14 Editor Francis Naumann, in his introduction to de Zayas’s book, How, When and Why Modem Art Came to New York, credits de Zayas and Stieglitz, his good friend and colleague, with the promotion of modem art in the United States through numerous exhibitions and publications. “While Stieglitz’s inspiring talks stimulated the many visitors to his gallery,” Naumann writes, “de Zayas’s writings were among the first publications in the United States to offer the bewildered American public an intellectual basis for understanding the new art” (vii). 29

Formerly art was the expression of a collective or individual belief; now

its principal motive is investigations. It proceeds toward the unknown

and that unknown is objectivity. It wants to know the essence of things;

and it analyses them in their phenomena of form, following the method

of experimentalism set by science, which consists in the determination of

the material conditions in which a phenomenon appears. It wants to know

that significance of plastic phenomena and accordingly, it has had to

enter into the morhphological organism of things. (15)

Loy’s prose contribution to Camera Work anticipates her letter to Van Vechten, but interestingly, as Roger Conover discovered, “a printed leaf of the Camera Work text

[held at the Beinecke Library at Yale University] bears Loy’s penciled substitution of the word ‘modem’ for ‘future’ and ‘Modernism’ for ‘Futurism’ throughout” {LLB 225 n51). No matter how they are affiliated, Loy’s enthusiastic “Aphorisms” epitomize the ethos of the day:

DIE in the Past Live in the Future.

THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.

IN pressing the material to derive its essence, matter becomes deformed.

AND form hurtling against itself is thrown beyond the synopsis of vision.

THE straight line and the circle are the parents of design, from die basis of art; there is no limit to their coherent variability.

LOVE the hideous in order to find the sublime core of it.

OPEN your arms to the dilapidated, to rehabilitate them. 30

YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened.

BUT the Future is only dark from outside. Leap into it—and it EXPLODES with Light. (LLB 149)

The manifesto-like form reflects the Futurists, as do the incentives; but, in these opening lines, Loy conflates them with the language of visual production—material, form, straight line and circle, dark and light—to invoke the three-way encounter between word/poet, image/artist and the reader/viewer: “YOU prefer to observe the past on which your eyes are already opened” addresses all three pairings, as does her iteration of

Hulme’s “stream of the inner life” found in the imperative, “LET the Universe flow into your consciousness, there is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not re-create”

(LLB 151). While I agree with the statement, that “[e]arlier than most of her contemporary modernists, Loy attempted to dismantle the Romantic rhetoric of sincerity, poetry narrowly defined as lyrical self-revelation, in order to open up truly radical explorations of the writer-reader’s relation to language” (Twitchell-Waas 112),

I believe she also intended to include the artist-viewer in the process.

The assertive tone and imperatives of Loy’s “Aphorisms” certainly recall

Futurist rhetoric, but her approach to dismantling tradition invokes the more tempered words of Georges Braque, whose impact as a painter equaled that of his contemporary

Picasso during the peak Cubist period around 1910. As Rudolf Amheim suggests, when

Braque “advises the artist to seek the common in the dissimilar” (435) and declares—

“Thus the poet can say: The swallow knifes die sky and thereby makes a knife out of a swallow”—he conflates the literary and visual techniques of representation. Amheim elaborates upon the Cubist’s theory and its cultural implications: 31

It is the function of the metaphor to make the reader penetrate the

concrete shell of the world of things by combinations of objects that have

little in common but die underlying pattern. Such a device, however,

would not work unless the reader of poetry was still alive, in his own

daily experience, to the symbolic or metaphoric connotation of all

appearance and activity. For example, hitting or breaking things normally

evokes, if ever so slightly, the overtone of attack and destruction. There

is a tinge of conquest and achievement to all rising—even the climbing of

a staircase. If the shades are pulled in the morning and the room is filled

with light, more is experienced than a simple change of illumination. One

aspect of the wisdom that belongs to a genuine culture is the constant

awareness of the symbolic meaning expressed in concrete happening, the

sensing of the universal in the particular. This gives significance and

dignity to all daily pursuits and prepares the ground on which the arts can

grow. (435-36)

This even-handed re-evaluation of the production and reception of visual and literary forms might seem out of sync with Loy’s ebullient “pseudo-Futurist” tone, but I contend that it informs her own more moderate, liberal interpretation of the modernist ethos.

When she ruminates, in her essay on Gertrude Stein—“Modernism says: Why not each one of us, scholar or bricklayer, pleasurably realize all that is impressing itself upon our subconscious?”—Loy democratizes the process of art production and reception since both were inextricably linked within her modernist framework. Her inclusive approach certainly contrasts that of her Anglo-American male counterparts, who “felt and 32 demonstrated an artistic necessity in their own work to re-establish a set of masculine values which would inform their modernist production” (Dennis 265).15 Loy, on the other hand, entrusts modernism to become the genuine culture through which boundaries of concrete and universal inform each other through “awareness” and

“sensing,” and in which those traditional notions of poetry as the temporal art and painting as the spatial art are banished along with notions of die feminine ideal.

Inside this fluid territory, then, an invigorating tension between word and image is facilitated and ekphrasis, as James Heffeman posits, becomes the worthy agent of that relationship. Heffeman re-defines ekphrasis in the 1990s to differentiate it from Murray

Krieger’s seminal re-definition offered in his 1967 essay—“Ekphrasis and the Still

Movement of Poetry; or, Laokodn Revisited”— which re-frames the “generic spatiality of literary form” (298). “To this end,” Heffeman summarizes,

Krieger elevates ekphrasis from a particular kind of literature to a literary

principle. The plastic, spatial object of poetic imitation, he says,

symbolizes “the frozen, stilled world of plastic relationships which must

be superimposed upon literature's turning world to ‘still’ it.” (Heffeman

298, Krieger, “Ekphrasis” 5)

Krieger’s framing addresses the inversion of Lessing’s postulation, but it is difficult to relate it directly to modernist works that are based on dynamism, fragmentation and the persistent notion of flux. Furthermore, as Heffeman comments, Krieger extends his

15 The most extreme example of this masculinist approach was Ezra Pound’s theory of sexuality. In 1926, Pound published a translation of Remy de Gourmont’s Physique de VAmour (1903) entitled Natural Philosophy o f Love. It included a “Postscript” in which Pound contends “that at the root of invention is the male brain” (Tryphonopoulos 284) which “is, in origin and development, only a sort of great clot of genital fluid held in suspense or reserve” (“Postscript” 203). 33 notion of ekphrasis to become a “general principle of poetics, asserted byevery poem in the assertion of its integrity” (“ Ekphrasis” 22; emphasis added). Heffeman prefers to frame ekphrasis as a mode—“ekphrasis is the verbal representation of graphic representation” (“Ekphrasis and Representation” 299)—which seems better tailored to the modernists’ ongoing theoretical debates and interconnected visual and literary movements:

Ekphrasis, then, is a literary mode that turns on the antagonism

[...] between verbal and visual representation [...] To represent a

painting or sculpted figure in words is to evoke its power—the power to

fix, excite, amaze, entrance, disturb, or intimidate the viewer—even as

language strives to keep that power under control. (Museum 7)

This antagonism between word and image actually works to Loy’s advantage, or more correctly, Loy works it to her advantage. Indeed, in her applications of the ekphrastic mode, Loy deploys her distinctive diction, consistently sharp but frequently allusive, to represent the unreliability and instability of images.

In “‘The Starry Sky’ of WYNDHAM LEWIS,” Loy presents a poem to represent the Cubist drawing of a modernist impresario whom she had admired since their paths had crossed at early avant-garde gatherings in Paris. Her sly capitalization of Lewis’s name in the title refers to the typical bold typography of Futurist manifestoes and

Lewis’s little magazine Blast and to his prominence as a prolific painter, poet and critic of modem culture. When Loy elides the poem’s title, moreover, into its first line—

“....LEWIS / who raised / these rocks of human mist”—she immediately assigns him a god-like status. Effectively, then, by extending Heffeman’s explanation of ekphrasis, 34

“Lewis” the graphic artist becomes as much an object of representation for Loy as his pencil and gouache rendering. Although the composition date of the poem is unknown,16

“The Starry Sky” (see fig. 2) dates to 1912 when it was first exhibited at die landmark

Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London.17 Loy may well have seen the drawing there, or at its next showing at the Grafton Galleries in 1914, where she met and re acquainted herself with Lewis and reportedly effused to the painter: “Of all the new work which seems to be groping in super-consciousness—yours alone is creating there—masterfully aware” (qtd. in ConoverLLB 202 n27).18 Her use of “groping” is perhaps self-directed, for she was fully engaged in her exploration of flux at that time, emerging from Futurism with her own poetic voice. Lewis, on the other hand, having recently developed a distinctive Cubo-Futurist style of visual expression, had become the leading experimentalist in the English avant-garde.

By 1914 Lewis and the members of the “Rebel Art Centre” (which he had founded in 1912) had detached themselves from other English avant-garde artists who had recently steered away from Post-Impressionism and then fallen under the spell of

Italian Futurism. Lewis joined forces with Ezra Pound to create Vorticism, the short lived but high profile movement derived from the principles of Marinetti’s Futurism and

16 Conover records that it was published in the first collection of Loy’s poems, Lunar Baedeker (1923) in the section entitled “1921-1922”. 17 The drawing was also published in the November 1917 issue of The Little Review, alongside other (less abstract) line drawings by Max Weber, Jules Pascin and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. 18 Loy biographer Virginia Kouidis writes: “Loy’s heroes are the genuine artists among her contemporaries—Stein, James Joyce, Constantin Brancusi, Wyndham Lewis. They have achieved the divine tension, the giving of form to the unarrestable flux of life” (DLB 264). 35

Fig. 2. Wyndham Lewis, The Starry Sky, 1912. Pencil, pen and ink, wash, gouache, collage. Arts Council Collection, Hayward Gallery, London. Rpt. in Paul Edwards, Wyndham Lewis: Painter and Writer. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.68. 36 presented to the public in Blast. The most significant difference between the Futurists’ and the Vorticists’ theories was exemplified by their definitions of the movement required in the artists’ process to create a visual or textual image. (This quite likely appealed to Loy whose interest in the Bergson/Hulme mental processes appears repeatedly in her correspondence in 1914 and 1915.) Prudente summarizes this critical and defining component of Vorticist theory:

The idea itself of a vortex (defined by Pound as the “point of maximum

energy”) suggested a different conception of movement, where the forces

conveying to the focal point of the image and drawing the observer into

the picture, revealed a more abstract and logical approach to the theme.

Futurism’s sequential depiction of movement was felt, by the Vorticists,

to be a superficial form of experimentalism, focusing exclusively on the

surface of the phenomena and showing itself to be too heavily influenced

by French Impressionism. Instead, Vorticism combined the Futurist

attention to speed and movement with the Cubist use of geometry and

structure, thereby suggesting the intention to concentrate more on style

than on content In this respect, the theme of technology was interpreted

by Vorticism in a more detached way, showing a classical search for

control and rationality which contrasted with the Futurist exaltation of

modernity and desire for immersion in the flux of life. (par. 9)

While Prudente’s attribution of “control and rationality” may seem incongruous with the blatant sarcasm, dramatic rhetoric and manifesto-styled use of typography found in die two (and only) issues of Blast published in 1914 and 1915, her adjectives aptly reflect 37 the pedigree of its contributors. Lewis and Pound were showcasing a diverse group of artists and writers, who had all been bom into Victorian society, enlightened by

Impressionism, evolved as Post-Impressionists and expressed themselves as Cubists,

Imagists and Futurists. While the bombastic tone of Blast drew immediate attention to the artificiality of the Vorticist movement, it also deflected attention from the sequence of movements that preceded it; this motive, ironically, repeated the overriding mission of the shunned predecessors to ignore history. When Lewis commented on contemporary art inBlast in 1915, he observed: “The painters have cut away and cut away warily, till they have trapped some essential. European painting today is like the laboratory of an anatomist Things stand up stark and denuded everywhere as the result of endless visionary examination. But life, more life than ever before, is the objective”

(“A Review of Contemporary Art” 39).

Interestingly, Loy effectively traces this history inside her ekphrastic tribute to

Lewis, which means that the poem can be read in three ways: first, as a direct verbal representation of graphic representation (the drawing itself); second, as a tribute to

“Lewis” as the creator of a contemporary art movement; and third, as a history of modem art movements. These layered interpretations are sharpened by Loy’s confident style of the early 1920s, when “her poetry increasingly focused on the ravaging beauties of modernist art” (Miller, Cultures 166) and her poems were “distinguished by an even greater reliance on the image and a consistently short line [...] usually structured as a series of images, sometimes brilliantly concrete, sometimes wittily uniting the abstract and the concrete” (Kouidis, LLB 269-70). She addresses an art object that epitomizes a 38 specific style and creative process from the mid-1910s, one that she wholly understood and endorsed.

The opening lines o f‘“The Starry Sky”’ (which I consider to include the embedded title) demonstrate this unifying tactic remarkably well:

“The Starry Sky” of WYNDHAM LEWIS

who raised these rocks of human mist

pyramidical survivors in the cyclorama of space (LLB 91)

Loy immediately evokes the subjects of the drawing—the fractured human figures

(perhaps man and woman) whose bodies rise from the undefined shapes at the base of the pictorial space but Whose facial features appear more sharply before they disappear from the top of the space. “Rock” is paired with “mist,” “pyramidical” with “survivors” and “cyclorama” with “space”—three concrete images (including two distinctly geometric ones) are followed by three abstract ones. At the same time, she invokes the ancient shape of the pyramid but jettisons it into the mid-nineteenth-century cyclorama - the harbinger of modem spectatorship, just as Lewis pushes Victorian art away from its classical, privileged traditions and into the world of technology. Loy positions Lewis’s distorted human shapes within their historical context in response to his visual composition.

Although she forgoes all punctuation except extended dashes, Loy does rely on capital letters throughout the poem to distinguish her stanzas. This capitalization and the rhythm of the stanzas themselves, with their hesitant white spaces and somber tone, are 39 reminiscent of Biblical verses and so, in Loy’s interpretation, the painter’s figures and their “celibate shadows” become participants in the creation story of Lewis’s making:

In the austere theatre of the Infinite the ghosts of the stars perform the “Presence”

Their celibate shadows fall upon the aged radiance of suns and moons (LLB 91)

Loy again presents odd pairings of words that evoke the half-distorted, half-recognizable human figures of the drawing. These Cubist forms cutting through the “austere theatre df the Infinite” (which could be read as the canvas of the drawing itself) are active (as is implied by their movement across die canvas) and are meant to perform. As Cristianne

Miller comments, “Art performs ‘Presence,’ allied with the incarnation of the divine— brutal or temporary as it may be. The secular and impure give body to the divine”

(Cultures 166); in Cubist/Futurist/modemist philosophy, art supplants the traditional authority of the divine and that intervention is understandably disruptive. Lewis’s collaged canvas, washed with tones of grey, not only casts shadows on the “aged radiance” but actively invades the traditional space of the divine:

— The nerves of Heaven flinching from the antennae of the intellect — the rays that pierce the nocturnal heart The airy eyes of angels the sublime experiment in pointillism faded away (LLB 91) 40

Loy introduces the first concrete term referring to a late nineteenth-century art movement—pointillism19— but I suggest that she has already been alluding to its antecedents. The “rocks” and “pyramids” evoke ancient Egypt, the “austere theatre” recalls ancient Greece and the “celibate shadows” upon “the aged radiance / of suns and moons” suggest the medieval period. The “antennae / of the intellect” that cause the nerves of Heaven to flinch may be not only those of the modernist giants, but also those of the Renaissance impresarios whose impact rivals Lewis’s, Pound’s and Marinetti’s.

When Loy slips into the following stanza

The celestial conservatories blooming with light are all blown out {LLB 91) she pushes the reader from the Renaissance through the Enlightenment into

Impressionism into the 1920s; all three movements, having been characterized, respectively, by the spiritual, intellectual and physical properties of illumination, are extinguished by the rupture of modernism, by Lewis’s “ungainly creatures [that] are only partly separated from the inert material condition of their surroundings” (Edwards

68). Yet in spite of their ungainliness, these figures are moving upwards, as Loy implies, to forge the modem path; their forms grow more distinct as they move upwards and out of the picture frame:

Enviable immigrants Into the pure dimension

19 French painter Georges Seurat (1859-91) is credited with developing this technique, “building on impressionism and nineteenth-century scientific studies of optical phenomena [...] to which the various names ‘divisionism,’ ‘pointillism,’ and ‘neo impressionism’ have been given, in great measure resides in the creation of an ordered, geometric structure closely approximating the pure abstract art of the twentieth century” (Amason 44). 41

immune serene devourers of the morning stars of Job

Jehovah’s seven days err in your silent entrails of geometric Chimeras

The Nirvanic snows drift------to sky worn images (LLB 92)

In these final three stanzas, Loy’s verbal representation of Lewis’s “serene / devourers,” the “enviable immigrants” has itself drifted into the abstract realm. Having released them from the grey, faded field of their canvas, she has elevated the figures to their true purpose within Lewis’s ideological framework of 1912. Their displacement of Job, the

Genesis story of creation—so curiously depicted by Loy as catalyzed by the immigrants’

“silent entrails / of geometric Chimeras”—acknowledges their modernist form, but with implied mythological undertones. The closing stanza is ambivalent: are Lewis’s Cubist invaders the true metaphors for the modernists’ radical dismissal of mimetic and symbolic art because they push the “Nirvanic snows” to drift to “sky worn images” of the past, or, are they embarked on a hopeless pursuit? Perhaps their crisp geometric forms are destined to dissolve into “sky worn images” when they fall off the page of

Loy’s poem and Lewis’s canvas?

When Lewis produced “The Starry Sky” and a series of studies of paired, disjointed human figures in 1912, he was working under die influence of a stream of

Bergsonian philosophy, “at the basis [of which] is a dichotomy between matter and spirit. In his evolutionary system life forms are [...] the result of a vertical effort on the part of spirit, against the gravitational pull of matter, to reach the potential plenitude and 42 freedom that lie in spirit” (Edwards 63). This tension between spirit and matter is the same one that characterized the aesthetic quandaries of Lewis, Loy and their cohort.

Loy’s ambivalent rendering of Lewis’s 1912 art object evokes the anxiety between temporality and spatiality, between realism and abstraction, which underpinned poetic and visual production in the 1910s. Her curatorial assessment of die object extends far beyond its contemporary setting to comment on an eschewed history of visual culture.

She shapes that history in the concrete imagery of space (stars, heaven, cyclorama and conservatories), slices it with intangible qualities (austere, celibate, enviable and immune) and finally bathes the poem in the imagery of illumination (shadows, radiance, suns, moons and stars). When Loy’s complex tribute to a complex artist ends, she pits

“sky worn images” against Lewis’s “stark and denuded” forms, contemplating the problematic restrictiveness of an aesthetic that shuns its past

Interestingly, Lewis’s critical essay on the role of the modem artist, published in

1922 in the same year as Loy’s poem, also addresses the problematic past. While Loy embeds skepticism about the rejection of history in her ekphrastic commentary, Lewis evaluates merit based on that rejection. His essay appears in the second (and last) issue o f The Tyro, the short-lived successor to Blast:

If it is true that all the past is in us, that it is this past, in terms of the

present, that the artist shows you when he excites you most: -where, we

must ask, in all this, does the future come in? Tragedy drags to the

surface your wild monsters, gives them a few hours frolic and they are

then driven back quietly to their dens. There is another sort of artist (of

which the Italian Futurist, now deceased, is an excellent specimen) who 43

should really be called a Presentist He is closely related to the pure

Impressionist He pretends to live and really succeeds sometimes, a sort

of spiritual hand-to-mouth existence...There are, however, some men

who seem to contain the future as others contain the past. These are, in

the profoundest sense, also our men of action, if you admire that term:

for, as the hosts of the unlived thing, they are the impersonification of

action. I think that every poet, painter or philosopher worth the name has

in his composition a large proportion offuture as well as of past The

more he has, the more prophetic intuition and the more his energy

appears to arrive from another direction to that of the majority of men

(namely, the past), the better poet, painter or philosopher he will be. (35)

Lewis’s temporal classification of artists and, by default their art movements, is fax more constrained than Loy’s evaluation of the “enviable immigrants” of “The Starry

Sky.” Her layered ekphrastic rendering of the anxiety undermining modem art production is far more reflective, particularly in its allusions to the feminist and cultural contexts of the epoch. While Lewis exhorts the “men of action” as “hosts of the unlived thing,” Loy undercuts her own poetic allusions to the biblical creation story with potent

“geometric Chimeras.” Are these female mythological monsters cloaked in Cubist form, or are they merely illusory entities marginalized in the male domain of creation? That domain, moreover, in its modernist cultural setting, has become far more open to the public, which Loy acknowledges in her poem with the language of performance. She positions Lewis’s unstable “rocks of human mist” in the “cyclorama of space,” and the

“austere theatre of the Infinite,” not only to evoke temporality and spatiality, but also to 44 bring the audience—the third and increasingly powerful, member of the ekphrastic relationship— into the public arena of modernism. 45

Chapter Two: America, Abstraction and “Brancusi’s Golden Bird”

The trend of all this is to free and widen the power of art by abstracting—more or less, as the artist chooses—pure artistic expression from concrete imitation. The world is tired of seeing nothing but imitation of reality. Painters rush from the Poles to the Equator, from Polynesia to Siberia, to compete with the photographers and the illustrated weeklies. They satisfy, at best, the empty curiosities of a philistine public that has no use for or appreciation of real art. Nor ever will have so long as it forgets that beauty commences in die simple technical performances—as in ornament, for example and decoration—and that die higher emotional pleasures of beauty, —harmony between expression and idea—cannot be experienced without a certain effort and collaboration with the artist on the part of the spectator. When the public will take that attitude toward art and its new movements, it will appreciate the many new and varied harmonies the International Exhibition showed and that future ones will show. It will learn that the new vision of nature and the new synthesis of the pictorial elements are not a capricious, but a conscious movement for perfect freedom of artistic individuality and for expression of modem culture.

Oscar Bluemner, “Audiator et Altera Pars: Some Plain Sense on the Modem Art Movement” Camera Work, Special Number (June 1913): 37.

The years that stretched taudy between art critic Bluemner’s lengthy but energetic essay in Camera Work in 1913 and the publication of Loy’s most famous ekphrasdc poem inDial in 1922 nurtured the nascent American avant-garde movement as it matured alongside its more politically troubled older European sibling. While

Virginia W oolfs famous declaration from 1924 - “On or about December 1910, human character changed”—stands more correctly as the literary dating (albeit a debated one) of the modernist era in Europe, it reflects nevertheless the same decade of cultural turbulence that rumbled through America. Most importantly, for this study’s evaluation

AA Jane Goldman presents several challenges to the nebulous 1910 date, including one that “suggests the inception of the modem experience to be in the 1880s. In considering a period when chronology, linear development and Time itself wore under severe scrutiny and question,” Goldman comments, “it is no wonder that coming up with a reliable date for the single moment of revolutionary cultural change proves rather tricky” (39). 46 of the ekphrastic mode within modernist contexts, the “starting dates” in England and

America are inextricably linked by two major art exhibitions -each of which excited and enraged the producers, patrons and proponents of what has come to be termed “Anglo-

American” literary and visual culture. In November 1910, in London, Roger Fry’s exhibition, Manet and the Post-Impressionists, notably omitted works from the most radical of Cubist painters who had been shocking the French public since 1907 and instead featured Gauguin, Van Gogh and Clzanne:

Fry’s exhibition, nevertheless, marks 1910 as a defining moment in

avant-garde aesthetics. It is the moment of European modem art’s

revolutionary impact on the practices of British artists, but it is also the

moment when British formalist theories first emerge and shape the

critical apparatus for modernism. (Goldman 44)

The exhibition was considered as an assault upon the public’s taste (Goldman 43) but it rallied radical English painters and writers (including Wyndham Lewis, who came to challenge Fry and Post-Impressionism not long after with Blast in 1914) to abandon realism and naturalism.

In New York, in February 1913 the Exhibition of International Art named in

Bluemner’s essay—known most famously as the Armory Show—was the first major art exhibit to rally the American avant-garde, incite art criticism in popular journals and attract major public attention, just as Fry’s exhibit had done in London. While Loy was living in Italy, entangled in the European avant-garde triangle of Cubism, Imagism and

Futurism, astute American entrepreneurs and patrons of modem art were visiting

European salons and galleries (including Fry’s second Post-Impressionist exhibit in 47

London in 1912 featuring Lewis’s The Starry Sky) in preparation for the Armory Show, for what was to become, in Maurice de Zayas’s estimation, an “overwhelming, colossal, stupendous success” (How, When 41). “Exhibiting 1,300 works of art to a bewildered

American public” (Rabat£ 40), many of which were from Fry’s famed nineteenth- century triumvirate of Van Gogh, Cezanne and Gauguin, it was the work of American and European “modernists” which garnered the most attention (de Zayas, How, When

42). The Cubist painting by Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a Staircase, No. (see2 fig. 3), although already considered to be stylistically “pass6” by Duchamp and his fellow Paris practitioners, not only generated the most controversy in the conservative press, but also incited the New York literary avant-gardists to embrace the fractured styles of the European Cubists and indulge in extensive theorizations about modem art.

Camera Work, in particular, championed the “New Art” in 1913 and 1914. Many of its contributors were European, closely connected to Alfred Stieglitz’s circle and much of their rhetoric resonates with the concepts of the “new” creative process that had precipitated Imagism, Cubism and Futurism. A seminal essay by Gabrielle Buffet,21 which precedes Bluemner’s piece in Camera Work’s Special Number of June 1913, recalls Bergson, Hulme and Loy’s own ruminations on the Zeitgeist of the 1910s:

Out of the ever deepening consciousness of life which we derive from

every new scientific discovery there arises a new and complex state of

21 Buffet was an avid supporter of Picasso and the early Cubists in Paris, including her husband, painter Francis Picabia, whose mechanical style was prominent amongst die more controversial artworks exhibited at the Armory Show. Picabia was featured frequently in the pages ofCamera Work and was also promoted vigorously in New York by Stieglitz and de Zayas in their art galleries (de Zayas, passim). Fig. 3. Marcel Duchamp,Nude Descending a Staircase, No.1912. 2 , Oil on canvas. Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection. The Philadelphia Museum of Art. Rpt. in H. H. Amason,History of Modern Art. New York: Abrams, 1978. 212. 49

mind to which the external world appears more clearly in the abstract

form of the qualities and properties of its elements than under the

concrete form of our sense perceptions. Or more broadly speaking, we

can say that at the same time that we have our perception of the external,

we have the consciousness of all that exists above and beyond it

In order that art that should express the complexity of this new state of

mind, it has to create new elements. The old language of the artist is no

longer appropriate for the last new needs of our being. (11)

Converted artists and poets of the American avant-garde who had already been

responding to the need for a new language still looked attentively to Europeans like

Buffet for aesthetic theories. Duchamp’s Nude became a visual and theoretical starting-

gun for their own race towards “making it new,” and they began to fracture their own

canvases and texts in response to his Nude. Buffet’s pointed pairing of “abstract form” and “concrete form” underlies the technical response of fragmentation but more importantly underscores the avant-garde’s paradoxical construction of a movement meant to emerge from Hulme’s and Bergson’s unstructured states of consciousness.

This direction towards abstraction had inspired Hulme and the Imagists, but despite being ‘Immediately associated with the visual art avant-garde” (Beasley,

EPVCM 79), Imagism was limited in its focus on visual arts and its association with art movements, a fact that was subsumed by the conflation of Imagism with popular art movements. As Rebecca Beasley reiterates, citing modernist critic Lawrence Rainey,

Imagism did not have “a commonality with contemporary avant-gardes in the visual arts like Italian Futurism” (EPVCM 78). Pound himself, Beasley continues, declared exactly 50 this in his 1913 essay “Imagisme” (co-authored with F.S. Flint): “The imagistes admitted that they were contemporaries of the Post Impressionists and the Futurists; but they had nothing in common with these schools. They had not published a manifesto.

They were not a revolutionary school; their only endeavour was to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time” (Flint 199).

By 1913 Hulme’s attention to Imagism and Bergson was already diverted and his interest in German philosopher Wilhelm Worringer’s 1908 treatise, Abstraction and

Empathy, was on the rise, largely due to its connection to the visual arts:

Worringer’s philosophy, unlike Bergson’s, began expressly as a theory

for the history of art, but Hulme would incorporate it into his wider

vision of a modem frame of mind. For Hulme.. .forms of art were

expressive of profound philosophical beliefs; this was true of his poetry

and now, as he absorbed Worringer’s theory for the visual arts, his

attention was drawn to painting and, most powerfully, to sculpture.

(Mead, par. 28)

Worringer’s aesthetic theory was built upon a framework that resonated with Hulme and his avant-garde audience in England22 and Europe and that responded to Buffet’s call for

22 In his succinct summary, “The Evolution of T.E. Hulme’s Thought,” Henry Mead reports: “The dates of Hulme’s first acquaintance with Worringer are unclear, but what is certain is that he attended the Kongress fur Aesthetick und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft held in Berlin from 7th to 9* October, 1913 and heard Worringer lecture on the history and origins of ornament in art. On Hulme’s return to England, he delivered a lecture that made clear Worringer’s influence. His talk, delivered on 22nd January, 1914 to G.R.S. Mead’s Quest Society, was another important moment in modernist history. In attendance were Wyndham Lewis and Ezra Pound. Here Hulme announced his new aesthetic. Although he was largely paraphrasing Worringer, the purposes to which he then put the ideas were original: he would lead the way in theorizing the new art emerging from the proto-Vorticist group around Lewis.” (par.29) 51 new language to suit the world’s “new needs of being.” Worringer contended that the

“contrary impulses” (Roston 57) of abstraction and empathy would affect the production of art in direct relation to the degree of cultural upheaval or peace: “together with a proclivity to identify with nature or physical reality, he argued, there always coexists a desire to remove the tactile object from its fortuitous setting and to relate it to the absolute” (Roston 57). Settled times, Worringer posited, induced a naturalist art, “an expression of empathy produced by artists expressing their delight in the world”

(Beasley, Theorists 72) characterized by mimetic images, organic shapes and lines “in order to elicit from the viewer the sense of gazing upon a familiar world from which the imperfections of reality have been removed” (Roston 57). In contrast (and in direct appeal to the unsettled avant-garde of the 1910s), Worringer argued that unsettled times induced a rejection of mimesis:

[Art] seeks after pure abstraction as the only possibility of repose within

the confusion and obscurity of the world-picture and creates out of itself,

with instinctive necessity, geometric abstraction. Art under such

conditions is the consummate expression and the only expression of

which man can conceive, of emancipation from all the contingency and

temporality of the world picture. (Worringer 44; qtd. in Roston, 58)

Roston makes an immediate connection between this statement from Worringer and the philosopher’s interest in the significance of the “object,” one that was attuned to

Hulme’s and his contemporaries’ growing preoccupation. “The result in periods tending towards the abstract,” Roston explains, “is a desire to redeem the individual object 52 within the mundane world by tearing it away from the accidents of its existence, producing stylized totem poles and artificial images” (58).

The European avant-garde’s sense of unease within its own world in the 1900s and early 1910s had been well exemplified by its production of stylized and “artificial images”; by 1913, however, the political upheaval of pre-war Europe began to undermine the cohesiveness of the avant-garde’s output. When Hulme was shifting his focus away from Imagism to the nature of abstraction, in search of a philosophy with a broader cultural perspective, Marcel Duchamp was equally restless and disenchanted with the “futuro-cubist” painterly experiment and with the European artistic environment (Rabatd 42), so he looked towards America, where his Nude was shocking the Armory Show audiences in New York. The tightly-knit Parisian avant-garde began to dissolve, as “scores of artists worked in small suburban studios vying to emulate the great Cubist painters” (PerlofF, The Avant-garde Phase 195) instead of perpetuating the vibrant salons of the early 1910s. When de Zayas writes to Stieglitz immediately after his return from Paris in September 1914, he despairs of his findings there:

I left France and specially Paris in a very bad condition. Since the war

started it seemed that all intellectuality had been wiped out. I believe that

this war will kill many modem artists and unquestionably modem art It

was time otherwise modem art would have killed humanity. But what

satisfies me is that at least we will be able to say the last word. ( How,

When 185) 53

De Zayas’s letter of lament also reveals the altered situation for the many artists of the avant-garde whose lives wore uprooted: “I left the Picabias in a very bad fix, he, serving in the army as automotivist and she in the red cross” {How, When 186).

Meanwhile, in Italy, Loy was “caught up in die futurists’ war fever and worked as a nurse in a surgical hospital” (Kouidis, DLB 264), but she was prolific in her artistic output in die midst of the turmoil. There she continued her experimentation with Cubist techniques primarily through her poetry, not her painting. Although both her writing and painting were deeply informed by her struggle with entrenched misogyny and resulted in frank representations of women’s sexuality, she is far more strident in her poetic style, in which, I suggest, she exhibits greater evidence of responding to Worringer’s

“instinctive necessity [for] geometric abstraction.” Her 1913 oil painting, L ‘Amour dorloti par les belles dames (see fig. 4) is radical in its subject matter—an ambiguously presented crucifixion scene—but is decidedlynot an indecipherable Cubist rendering. In contrast, her 1914 poem “Parturition,” “the putative first poem ever written about the physical experience of childbirth.. .and the first to use collage as a texturing device”

(Conover, LLBY11 n2), is as radical in execution as Duchamp’s Nude. Loy effectively positions the childbearing woman as the splintered figure exploding off the limits of the page,

I am the centre Of a circle of pain Exceeding its boundaries in every direction {LLB 4) Fig. 4. Mina Loy,L 'amour dorlotepar les belles dames, 1913. Oil on canvas. Collection of Roger J. Conover. Rpt. in Donald Friedman,The Writer's Brush. Minneapolis: Mid-List, 2007. 249. 55 and soon thereafter, tracks her fragmented movement through labour pains (and the poem) with unsettling spatial and temporal imagery:

Something in the delirium of night-hours Confuses while intensifying sensibility Blurring spatial contours So aiding elusion of the circumscribed That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast Comes from so far away And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth Is no part of myself(LLB 5)

Loy effectively employs Cubist tactics by “blurring the spatial contours” of her own poem to simulate childbirth: she removes punctuation, ignores meter and presents a geometric enclosure—“the circumscribed”—in which she confidently centers the first- person voice. Loy’s poetic voice, like her speaker’s, is tightly controlled under siege.

Trapped in the intellectually stalled years of the war, poets and painters came to envision America—in particular New York City—as the new frontier for modernism

(Perloff, The Avant-garde Phase 195). When Duchamp arrived in New York in the spring of 1915, one year before Loy, he purposefully re-directed the American avant- garde’s attention away from Europe towards its own shores. In a September interview from that same year, he proclaimed:

If only America would realize that the art of Europe is finished - dead -

and that America is the country of the art of the future ...Look at the

skyscrapers! Has Europe anything to show more beautiful than these?

New York is a work of art, a complete work of a rt... And I believe that

the idea of demolishing old buildings, old souvenirs, is fine.. .The dead

should not be permitted to be so much stronger than the living. We must 56

learn to forget the past, to live our own lives in our own time. (Tomkins

152)

The artist’s plea to “Look at the skyscrapers!” is more than a celebration of America’s technological achievement —it alludes to the cross-Atlantic cultural shift of power from the European avant-garde to the American. As Michael North explains, “by World

War I, a certain kind of urban modernism had come to be considered so quintessentially

American that many Europeans debated their own future in terms of capitulation or resistance to the ‘American age’” (“Visual Culture” 180). The streamlined skyscraper and its vertical charge into the city scape were larger-than-life realizations of the Cubist canvases of the art exhibitions: while Europe was being devastated by mass weaponry,

America was being distinguished by new constructions of technological advancement

Duchamp’s rallying cry, significantly shouted from the pages of a popular newspaper,23 not from a little magazine with limited readership, was intended for his avant-garde cohort and the general public as part of the strategy that “helped to establish America’s mass culture as a global style by breaking down elite resistance to it” (North, “Visual

Culture” 180).

Loy’s ready embrace of America (and eagerness to be known there, according to her personal correspondence24) certainly reflects her canny awareness of the rising relevance of the public aspect of modernist culture that underlie Bluemner’s dry demand

23 Michael North attributes the quotation to the interview entitled “The Nude- Descending-a-Staircase Man Surveys Us” from the New York Tribune, September 12, 1915. 24 Conover contends that Loy “had her own idea of how to package beauty and talent and in letters to friends she often seemed hungry for recognition, even as she courted obscurity” ‘Can’t you write about me as a hidden wrinkle—the only woman who has been decided enough to forego easy success—etc etc—uninterrupted by the potency of beauty?’ she appealed to Carl Van Vechten in 1915” (LLB xii). 57

for “collaboration with the artist on the part of the spectator” as well as Duchamp’s

more energized imperatives. Loy became the instant darling of the American avant-

garde when she moved to New York in 1916 and, although she stayed there for less than two years (returning again later in 1920 for only several months), it was her

controversial verse and stylishness that secured her fame and attracted public and critical attention. Having demonstrated her poetic deployment of the fragmentation personified by the controversial Cubist canvases displayed at the Armory Show, Loy’s literary credentials were quickly aligned with the experimental styles of her American counterparts, particularly William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore (Kouidis, ML

137). She herself was quick to re-brand herself: interviewed just three months after her arrival in the New York newspaper,The Evening Sun, Loy declared that she was

“particularly proud of the fact that like Columbus she was discovered by America” (qtd. in Januzzi “The Criticism” 542).

It is helpful to align Loy’s primary output as a poet, bracketed by the publications of “Aphorisms on Futurism” in 1914 and “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” in

1922, with the prime period of modernist literary and visual culture stretching from

1913’s Armory Show to the oft-cited “annus miralibis” of 1922 (Bomstein 37), for it was then that her chief influence as a modernist poet (briefly but famously acknowledged) was evident. Loy’s residence in America followed her intense, productive period of poetry writing in 1914 and 1915, one that was driven primarily by her struggles—both personal and ideological—with the Futurists in Italy. By 1915, her poetry had been featured alongside the sophisticated, but often ponderous, editorial content of Camera Work (aptly epitomized by Bruemner’s rhetoric) and in the pages of 58 the equally radical little magazines, Rogue and The Trend, but had never been featured in British journals. Consequently, her poetic persona in the 1910s had already become, by association, distinctly “American” in character. Although Loy evidently produced very little poetry during her sojourn in the United States, interest in her work was at its zenith. The Trend had printed “Parturition” and “Italian Pictures” in 1914; Rogue featured “Three Moments in Paris,” “Sketch of a Man on a Platform,” “Virgins Plus

Curtains Minus Dots,” (accompanied by Loy’s line drawing) in 1915, followed by

“Giovanni Franchi” in 1916. Loy had been concentrating on extending “Love Songs” into “Songs to Joannes” and completed the full sequence by early 1917 (Conover,

LLBl 88); Alfred Kreymborg devoted the entire April issue ofOthers to the poem in that same year, continuing not only his support of her career, but also his astute understanding of her resilient risqud reputation.

A significant factor in Loy’s standing as a radical poetic stylist was her integration of cutting-edge visual techniques. By 1914 she had already manipulated typography to echo the political manifesto’s format, with bossy capital letters invoking imperatives in “Aphorisms on Futurism,” and (even more loudly) in “Feminist

Manifesto”25 with its multiple bold, oversized and underlined words shouting from the page. Lewis deployed the same technique withBlast a few months before; both he and

Loy were echoing the style of the Futurists’ manifestoes (but not necessarily the content)26 and the German Expressionists’ periodicals from the early 1910s. Their

25 The graphically striking manifesto was not published until its inclusion in The Last Lunar Baedeker in 1982 and even then, as Roger Conover reports, it was inaccurate. 26 Loy’s manifesto was “partly the result of [her] quarrels with the Italian Futurists, with whom she was closely associated despite the movement’s misogyny. In the essay, Loy 59 experimentation with typographic format in the early 1910s, “drawn from the world of advertising posters and newspapers” (Perloff,TFM92), was distinctly attuned to the advances in printing technology and to the graphic materiality of the page itself—“a situation that, when applied to lyric poetry, was to call into question the integrity of the verse line itself’ (Perloff, TFM9Z)—but it also underscored the revolt against mimetic representation that preoccupied visual artists, especially the Cubist painters. Loy was evidently drawn to this “situation” wherein the interconnectivity between visual and verbal means of expression suited her own dual talents, but more importantly, she recognized that the poet’s and the painter’s deployment of line and space were converging on the same path towards abstraction in the mid-1910s. Ironically, the poet’s control of space and lineation, however unconventional, became as much a means for verbal expression as for visual and paradoxically, came to classify “modem poetry” in the same terms as “modem art” with die common denominator being the process of abstracting and producing non-representative images.

The impact of abstraction upon poetry is partially exemplified by the typographic and spatial experiments that Marianne Moore and William Carlos Williams were beginningto explore in their free verse when Loy first came to America, following

Loy’s lead:

A painter herself, Loy began to show the poets (i.e. especially in

Arensberg’s circle), through her irregular verse and unusual spacing, that

they could create visual transcriptions of modem life just as the painters

tries to harness for feminism the radicalism and individualism of the avant-garde, calling for a complete revolution of gender relations” (Ramazani et al 921). 60

were creating the equivalents of the sounds, sights and smells of public

life. Her technique was, among other things, typographic. (Marling 39)

In his close examination of what he calls Williams’s “visual prosody,” Stephen

Cushman turns to Jan Tschichold’s Asymmetric Typography to determine die effects of visual and textual lineation. “The basic material of typography is a line of language,”

Cushman begins aid “[i]n this respect typography is like painting. If an arrangement produces a mimetic representation, that is one thing. If it does not, it still produces lines which are shapes that exist on the page in relation to each other and the space around them. This relation is the focus of ‘abstract’ typography” (74) as Tschichold elaborates:

All abstract paintings, especially “quite simple” ones, contain artistic or

graphic elements which beside being clearly defined themselves also

have a clear relationship to each other. From here the step to typography

is a short one. The works of “abstract” art are subtle creations of order

out of simple contrasting elements. Because this is exactly what

typography is trying to do, it can derive stimulus and instruction from a

study of such paintings, which communicate the visual forms of the

modem world and are the best teachers of visual order. (74)

Cushman posits that this notion of “visual order” presented by Tschichold in 1967 would have appealed to Williams (and by extension, I suggest, to Loy as well).

Williams, who was also a painter, was an enthusiastic convert to the “New Art” he had seen in the Armory Show. Already swept up by the “tributary stream of futurism”

(Marling 108) when he was writing poetry in America in 1913, following the lead of

Walt Whitman’s free verse and Ezra Pound’s definition of the image, Williams also understood that the composition of modem verse was challenged by its own rejection of structure. Instead of attempting to formalize poetry, he applied painterly principles of visual composition to verse while following Hulme’s overriding principle of the creative process: ‘“Get into the fluid state,’ Williams advises again and again, ‘for unless you do, all you say will be valueless.’” (Marling 109). The process must flow from the visual experience; hence “the hand writes down, in the measure that practice and the impression of the subject dictate, what the eye sees, when, how and in the fidelity of the poet to his vision” (Marling 110).

Fittingly, much of Williams’ admiration for Loy’s work was based on his unabashed enthusiasm for the visual qualities of her writing. In this excerpt from an unpublished manuscript, Williams writes:

When she puts a word down on paper it is clean.. .the essence of her style

is her directness in which she is exceeded by no one. Her metaphors,

when they can be detected, are of the quality of sunlight, they sparkle.

There is no dimming of the light What she sees and she sees everything

that goes on about her, directly [sic]. Her lines are short. There is no

inversion of the phrase for effect or to keep an imposed order. You

cannot find a single instance of a measure retained to complete a

conventional stanza or indeed a set pattern of any sort. The light, as in the

impressionists of her period, is reflected from all surfaces.

(“Mina Loy” Unpublished manuscript 65-66, Beinecke Library, Yale

University; qtd. in Marling, 44) 62

Williams’s mention of the “impressionists” is slightly incongruous, considering that their visual techniques were diametrically opposed to Loy’s Futurist and Cubist affiliations, but his comment does foreshadow her ekphrastic poems of the 1920s, particularly “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” in which die reflection of light figures prominently.

Apart from the sparkling visual prosody that Williams so admired, Loy also deployed an unconventional and influential diction that complemented her visual tactics, leading Cristanne Miller to suggest that “Loy’s rejection of punctuation, use of white space to structure lines, satirical distance from her material and ostentatiously artifice- ridden wordplay may well have pushed other writers toward more radical experimentation with language” (Cultures 180). It is worthwhile noting that Miller’s list of Loy’s four defining poetical traits converge into language, for it was indeed the particular language of Loy’s poems that precipitated more critical discussion (then and to some extent, even now) than her scandalous subject matter, meter-less verse or distinctly visual prosody. When three of her poems w oe included in Kreymborg’s second Others anthology in 1917,27 subsequent reviews of the collection generated what remains as the most enduring of all critiques of Loy. In the March 1918 issue o f The

Little Review, Ezra Pound presents his definition of “logopoeia” framed within his review of Loy’s and Moore’s contributions to the anthology, which he proposes, “gives the first adequate presentation of Mina Loy and Marianne Moore, who have, without

27 “At the Door of the House,” “The Effectual Marriage,” and “Human Cylinders,” which were all written around 1915, according to Roger Conover (LLB 184-85), appeared in the 1917Others An Anthology o f New Verse. Suzanne Churchill notes that this anthology “proved pivotal” (206) to Loy’s career, presenting her work alongside that of Eliot, Stevens and Williams, thus “positioning her as part of a coterie of clear minds emerging from [the] chaos of the new poetry explosion” (207). 63

exaggerated 'nationalism,’ without waving of banners and general phrases about

Columbia gem of the ocean, succeeded in, or fallen into, producing something distinctly

American in quality” (“Others” 57). While it is mildly ironic that Loy’s three poems were all written before her arrival in the United States, Pound’s designation of her

American quality may well reflect (or perhaps indirectly refer to) the significant impact of her style upon the American avant-garde.

Pound goes on to compare the women poets with their Symbolist predecessors, omitting all mention of Cubist and Futurist influences, to emphasize their distinct preference of language over image and enforce his contention that both “write logopoeia”:

In the verse of Marianne Moore I detect traces of emotion; in that of

Mina Loy I detect no emotion whatever. Both of these women are,

possibly in unconsciousness, among the followers of Jules Laforgue

(whose work shows a great deal of emotion). It is possible, as I have

written, or intended to write elsewhere, to divide poetry into three sorts:

(1.) melopoeia, to wit, poetry which moves by its music, whether it be a

music in the words or an aptitude for, or suggestion of, accompanying

music; (2.) imagism, or poetry wherein the feelings of painting and

sculpture are predominant (certain men move in phantasmagoria; the

images of their gods, whole countrysides, stretches of hill and forest,

travel with them); and there is, thirdly, logopoeia or poetry that is akin to

nothing but language, which is a dance of the intelligence among words

and ideas and modification of ideas and characters. (“Others” 57) 64

Pound’s critique of Loy, which conveniently expounds on his own theorization,

pointedly ignores her visual manipulation of text. By 1918, Pound was consciously

moving away from “the vocabulary of the visual arts that generated his prewar theories”

(Burke, “Getting Spliced” 99) to purposefully redefine modernism. Pound’s implied

approval for the absence of emotion in Loy and Moore might be read as a tribute to their

rightful place among his designated “new” modem intellectuals, since he prefaces his

own commentary with the proviso that “we need not condemn poems merely because they do not fit some stock phrase of rhetorical criticism” (57) and concludes with “the point of my praise, for I intend this as praise.. .is that these girls have written a distinctly national product, they have written something which would not have come out of any other country” (58). Pound purposefully identifies their poems as an American

“product,” it seems, to enforce the cultural currency America held over Europe; but at the same time, he links their “arid clarity” with the symbolist Laforgue.

Marjorie Perloff expands upon Pound’s presentation of Loy’s “American” idiom in her analysis of Loy’s later poem “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose”—in which Perloff posits that Loy, “like her friend Gertrude Stein,” invents “an intricately polyglot language—a language that challenges the conventional national idiom of her British (as well as her French or Italian, or paradoxically, even her American) contemporaries”

(“English” 133). Loy herself, in her recently uncovered essay, “Modem Poetry,”28 declares that it “was inevitable that the renaissance of poetry should proceed out of

America, where latterly a thousand languages have been bom” since “this composite

28 The composition date of the essay is unknown; it was published in 1925 in Charm, a popular women’s magazine published in the 1920s and represents, according to Conover (writing in 1996), “the only published text that I know of in which she discusses her own diction and what it means to write in the American-immigrant idiom” (217). 65 language is a very living language, it grows as you speak. For the true American appears to be ashamed to say anything in the way it has been said before” ( LLB 158-9). But both these discussions effectively ignore (as Pound does in his discussion of logopoeia) the underlying tension between “nothing but language”—whether it be idiomatic or composite—and the absence of emotion. The removal of emotion from their discourse confirms the intellectual modernists’ persistent unease with their surroundings and enforces their motivations to “abstract” and repress empathy.

Finally, when Pound praises the “girls’” emotional detachment, he ignores the

“unmistakable note of psychic and emotional discord—that underlies the intellectual critique” (Churchill, Others 208), which late-twentieth century critics have no trouble identifying as the feminist subtext to Loy’s poems and which Burke succinctly summarizes as follows:

In the midst of his praise for their distinctly modem poetic intelligence,

Pound nevertheless failed to notice other features of their poetry: their

different uses of what he called “melopoeia” and “phanopoeia,” and their

differently inflected awareness of how sexual difference can matter as

both the “what” and the “how” in modernist poetry. (“Getting Spliced”

100)

Pound’s critique of Loy’s logopoeia effectively classifies (albeit ambiguously) a type of emotion, which these women lack, but which characterizes the male poet, Laforgue and designates him to be their leader. Alex Goody contends that Pound assimilates Loy and

Moore within “a masculinist tradition of irony” (Modernist Articulations 188), but I argue that Pound also slyly subverts the relevance of the “fluid state” by dissociating the 66 poets from imagism (or phanopoeia) and implying that the women follow Laforgue “in unconsciousness.” Pound’s mission to assert a new model—“intellectual activity as the mind’s forceful imprinting upon matter” (Burke, “Getting Spliced” 108)—purposefully excluded the process Loy described as “mental spatiality” (in “Aphorisms on

Futurism”), “a model more like a painterly version of the Freudian unconscious, in which images and meanings lie dormant yet accessible to the artist through a creative process that is a kind of self-analysis” (Burke 108). Perhaps Loy’s move to America was precipitated not only by her need to escape the intellectually stalled Europe, but also to escape from the intense burden of the self-analysis that had imbued her poetry during her Futurist affiliations.

If Loy was seeking relief from this intense interiority, she certainly found it in the social avant-garde community in America—in Kreymborg’s artists’ colony in

Grantwood, New Jersey, the Arensbergs’ salon in Greenwich Village and in the company of Stieglitz, Duchamp et al. She immersed herself in theatrical productions, magazine editing and public appearances,29 embracing the new America that had been so flagrantly symbolized by the Armory Show and heralded by Duchamp. During Loy’s two-year stint in America, in which she apparently suspended poetic production in favour of spectatorship and performance, she effectively staged an encounter with

American visual culture. In some respects, Loy seemed to be repeating what Pound had

29 “Within a few weeks she was drawn into the Provincetown Players, in December of 1916 playing the lead in Kreymborg’s experimental playLima Beans, which the players put on a double bill with Eugene O’Neill’s Before Breakfast. Lima Beans was a one-act piece with two characters, a husband and a wife. Kreymborg chose William Carlos Williams, who had a crush on Mina, to play the other role; and to eveiyone’s surprise, the play was a wild success, bringing Mina comparative fame, at least within bohemian circles” (Hanscombe and Smyers 119). 67

sought before her in London in 1908, when he crossed the Atlantic in the opposite

direction:

What attracted Pound to the visual arts was their social and public nature,

particularly in contrast to the far more private and interior world of

poetry. Painting and sculpture were made to be seen, seen primarily in

public spaces and Pound was always very interested in the public-ity of

art and sculpture. From the moment of Pound’s arrival in London in

1908, he was anxious to make his mark on the London scene.

(Dasenbrock 226).

This notion of “being seen” can be applied both to the poets and the artworks that attracted them and shared their space in the public avant-garde community. Loy’s inferiority, her ability to access to her “fluid state,” becomes, paradoxically, her ticket to her overtly public encounter with American culture.

This central paradox of modernism is personified by the contrast between the private encounter—the pursuit of the abstract through inner consciousness so firmly embedded in the credos of modem poets as acts of inferiority—and the public encounter with the new, non-mimetic art object. While the intention to “demolish the old” and rupture cultural concepts was essential to the modernist renderings of these two encounters, the elapsed time between them, the state during which the object is created, remained inaccessible to all but the artist This state is immutable; it contains the inherent mystery of artistic production that separates artist and viewer, poet and reader and is unaffected by cultural or historical context Loy’s behaviour, I contend, is analogous: she seems to have effectively removed herself from this privileged state 68

during her time in America to become more of an observer and participant in modem

culture, rather than a producer of modem poetic or art objects. Having grasped the intellectual concepts of fluidity and abstraction, she concentrated on becoming a cultural

spectator of visual culture—she focused her attention, as she would have on an art object itself, appraising it from an educated but emotionally distanced perspective, focusing on the experience itself—in exactly the same manner in which a poet prepares an ekphrastic poem. When Loy writes about Lewis’s painting and Brancusi’s sculpture, only five years after leaving America in 1917, ekphrasis facilitates her articulate editorial viewpoint In writing about the abstract art object, Loy not only represents the object (and by implication, the process by which it was formed), but also comments on the object’s placement within modem culture. She explores the tension between

Worringer’s idea that the object must be isolated and “redeemed from the mundane world” (Roston 58) and the more positive notion that the pure form of an abstracted object held truths, made known to the audience through the artist and made accessible through the object itself. Loy is responding to what Murray Roston claims Worringer overlooked, namely that

[t]he twentieth-century preference for abstraction in art was not only the

reflection of a fundamental spatial and temporal dislocation in the world

view of time, with Cubism expressing the fragmentation of the tactile

world. It also represented a more positive response, the search for ‘pure’

and eternal forms not merely as a place of ‘repose’ or emancipation, an

escape from the dissatisfactions of actuality, but out of a genuine belief in 69

the truths existent there and a conviction that the artist’s task was now to

represent an authenticity existing beyond the corporeal and visible. (58)

The modem ekphrastic poem, abstract in its form but accessible in its language, delivers the object and facilitates the public encounter with its undisclosed but inherent truths.

Underscored by the absence of empathy, that might well in truth be at hand during die actual production of the object or at work in the artist’s mind, the audience is held suspended in the appropriate state of aporia needed to sustain connection to the abstract

Loy’s ekphrastic treatment of Brancusi’s Golden Bird addresses an art object that emblemized “abstraction” to her modernist cohort and the American public. The poem is as paradoxically simple and complex as the term, the times and the sculpture itself: she juxtaposes intellectual and informal language, abstract and concrete adjectives and references to classical and common culture. She contains these contradictions, moreover, within an uneven pattern of lineation, punctuated mostly by white space, creating a textual shape that is elegant and distinctly vertical in character:

The toy become the aesthetic archetype

As if some patient peasant God had rubbed and rubbed the Alpha and Omega o f Form into a lump of metal

A naked orientation unwinged unplumbed —the ultimate rhythm has lopped the extremities of crest and claw from the nucleus of flight 70

The absolute act o f art conformed to continent sculpture —bare as the brow of Osiris— this breast of revelation

an incandescent curve licked by chromatic flames in labyrinths of reflections

This gong of polished hyperaesthesia shrills with brass as the aggressive light strikes its significance

The immaculate conception of the inaudible bird occurs in gorgeous reticence. . .

As an object itself, Loy’s poem, in its manipulation of text and space, is seen as a successful rendition of the tenets of its abstract style, just as Brancusi’s sculpture can be viewed. By juxtaposing Loy’s poem next to the image of the sculpture issued by the Art

Institute of Chicago (see fig. 5), the commonalities between visual and textual objects become clearer. The sculpture itself deserves further elaboration:

Even a brief description of Golden Bird begins to suggest the

considerable complexity underlying the sculpture’s apparent simplicity.

A remarkable variety of materials—wood, stone, bronze—and forms—

from the geometry of the base to the fluid curves of the bird—have been

brought here into exquisite balance. As Brancusi himself put it, 71

Fig. 5. Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird, 1919/1920. Bronze, stone, and wood. Art Institute of Chicago. Rpt. in Richard N. Masteller, “Using Brancusi.” American Art 11.1,1997.48. 72

“Simplicity is complexity itself. ...Beauty is absolute balance,” and

Golden Bird seems indeed to embody both of these concepts.

(Andreotti 135)

The pairing of poem and photo was presented to (partially) the same advantage to the

American audience in November 1922, when a black-and-white photo of the “bird” appeared as the frontispiece inThe Dial, placed before Loy’s poem, but not directly beside it. The pairing, nonetheless, was deliberate.

The sophisticated sculpture came directly to America in 1920 from Brancusi’s studio in Paris, to the collection of John Quinn, New York lawyer, art collector and patron of modem artists and poets;30 it now belongs to the Art Institute of Chicago.31

The elegant, organically shaped bronze bird sits on a composite base of limestone and wood, both carved in sharper, geometric and pyramid forms. The poem perches on the peak of the glorious year of 1922, published in the same issue of The Dial which printed

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” Loy’s final contribution to that magazine (Conover, LLB 198), was printed with Brancusi’s studio photograph of the sculpture (see fig. 6). Editor Scofield Thayer reportedly held off publication of Loy’s poem, which he had received in April 1921, until he received the anticipated photograph

30 As Richard Masteller suggests, Quinn was the most influential of several wealthy American collectors, since he “had lent the most works to—and had bought die most works from—the Armory Show. Quinn, defender of the Little Review during the obscenity trials surrounding James Joyce’s Ulysses and financial supporter of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot...collected twenty-seven of Brancusi’s sculptures over the decade following the Armory Show” (47). 31 One of a series of close to thirty bird sculptures executed by Brancusi, the most famous of his abstracted bronze bird figures still sits on a composite and limestone and wood base installed under the bird by the artist in 1927. “From the bottom of its wooden base to the tip of the bird’s open beak, Golden Bird rises in an accelerating rhythm of stacked elements to a height of about seven feet” (Andreotti 135). Fig. 6. Constantin Brancusi, Golden Bird, 1919/1920. Bronze, stone, and wood. Artist’s Photograph. Rpt. in The Little Review 8, Autumn 1921.17. 74

of the sculpture (Masteller 59), so he effectively held out for the ideal presentation of an ekphrastic work, image near poem. Interestingly, the juxtaposition of the poem and that particular image aroused a subsequent internal debate in The Dial. I*) Although several little magazines of the same ilk, especiallyCamera Work and The Little Review, had long been including photographs of modem art objects alongside modem poems, the reaction to the pairing of the Loy poem and Brancusi photo was problematic for the more conservative journal:

The magazine quickly sold out its sixteen thousand copies and prompted

a vituperative exchange between [editor] Scofield Thayer and his

managing editor, Gilbert Seldes. Thayer objected to the reproduction of

CB’s photograph on the grounds that it had “no aesthetic value whatever”

and was “commercially suicidal.” Seldes shot back that it was ML’s

poem, not CB’s photograph, that caused “the only row.. .in that

connection.” (Conover, LLB 198)

Certainly, the photograph does not do as much justice to the sculpture as the one issued by the current owners of the sculpture, the Art Institute of Chicago, but it is ripe with cultural significance. The same photograph had been featured in The Little Review's

“Brancusi Number” one year before, a special issue led by Pound’s (now seminal) essay on the sculptor. It was one of twenty-four images of the artist’s work (Beasley, EPVCM

177) and one of several taken in Brancusi’s studio and provided by the artist (Masteller

32 Masteller offers the following insight: “Editorially, the Dial was never as radical as the Little Review, particularly after Scofield Thayer and James Sibley Watson became owners and editors in November 1919. Although certain writers appeared in both journals, [Little Review contributor] Jane Heap’s acerbic comment about the D ial seems apt: ’It is especially fitting, now that we have prohibition, to have a de-alcoholized version of the Little Review’” (59). 75

50). Thayer likely objected to this blurry photo’s grainy quality, but this represented the

exact quality of Brancusi’s work that Pound exalted and—“perhaps the most significant reason he celebrated Brancusi’s cleaner, simpler, purer world,” as Masteller suggests, because “Brancusi’s Parisian studio and the art he created there constituted a refuge from the meretricious mediocrity of daily life” (50).

Pound’s essay on the Romanian sculptor follows and constitutes an indirect response to the censorship of The Little Review’s publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses, according to Rebecca Beasley, but it also represents Pound’s return to a serious critical engagement with modem art and aesthetics that he had not expressed since his 1916 writings on the French sculptor Gaudier-Brzeska (Beasley, EPVCM 177). Pound links die two sculptors directly in his essay, effectively bridging his own absence from discourse:

Where Gaudier had developed a sort of form-fugue or form-sonata by a

combination of forms, Brancusi has set out on the maddeningly more

difficult exploration toward getting all the forms into one form; this is as

long as any Buddhist’s contemplation of the universe or any medieval

saint’s contemplation of the divine love,—as long and even as

paradoxical as the final remarks in the Divina Commedia. It is a search

easily begun and wholly unending and the vestiges are let us say

Brancusi’s “Bird,” and there is perhaps six months’ work and twenty 76

years’ knowledge between one model of the erect bird and another,33

though they appear identical in photography. (“Brancusi” 5)

Pound refers to Brancusi’s “twenty years’ knowledge” to emphasize the sculptor’s

extended presence within the European avant-garde, but he also intimates that the visual

artist’s “wholly unending” search represents the antithesis of what an art movement had

become within modem culture. The tendency to impose great importance upon certain

art exhibitions, art movements and affiliated artists imposed a definitive temporal

framework upon “modernism.” Although Pound’s fascination with the visual arts meant that he intermittently gave them notice in his criticism, his tendency to impose

significance was more often assigned to literary works.

The intense artistic and public attention focused on modernism in 1921 and 1922 was bracketed by the scandal of Joyce’s profane prose and the publication of Eliot’s innovative poetry. As Michael North writes in his introduction to Reading 1922: A

Return to the Scene o f the Modem, “By helping to bring both Ulysses and The Waste

Land into print, Pound had introduced to the public the two works that would constitute, in the words of Gilbert Seldes, ‘a complete expression of the spirit which will be

’modem’ for the next generation’”(3). Seldes’s declaration is misleading in that it infers fulfillment of the early modernist promise to “make it new,” when in fact many of the avant-garde theories of aesthetics from the 1910s were far from definitive and far from being displaced from discourse by the intervention of Joyce and Eliot. The discussions of abstracted forms (either literary or visual) and the role of the artist “versus” the public

33 Brancusi produced two “Golden Bird” sculptures between 1919 and 1920, the most famous being the one purchased by Quinn, which is most likely the subject of Loy’s poem (Conover, 198; Andreotti, 136). 77

in the perception of these forms were far from resolved. More importantly, the ever present lacuna between the artist, the object and the audience remained undefined. Was the modem artist pursuing abstraction simply to negate mimesis and modernize representation? Or was the artist in pursuit of new spiritual enlightenment through engagement with form over meaning? And, if this engagement was restricted to those privileged to possess artistic skills and philosophy, what responsibility did the artists have to bring this enlightenment into the modem popular culture?

Brancusi’s abstract sculptures, first introduced at the Armory Show and later exhibited in de Zayas’s Modem Gallery in 1916, came to symbolize the mysterious state of abstraction that stimulated the theorists and challenged the public. Brancusi himself - the simple “peasant” Romanian sculptor—became “branded” as (in current terms of marketing strategy) the quintessential modem artist, despite the inaccessibility of his highly abstract sculptures. In the November 1916 review of his Modem Gallery show that appeared in the popular magazine, Vanity Fair, the reviewer proclaims:

He is hard to understand. But when the light comes on, it comes in a

flood. He is certainly one of the most forceful influences in the art of our

time. An austere influence, it is true, but one which helps those who

realize die true beauty of line and form to escape convention, prettiness

and all sorts of compromise, (qtd. in de Zayas,How, When 51)

The New York Times reviewed the same show in its October 29,1916 edition, expressing a double-sided appreciation of his work that addresses readers both privileged and perplexed: 78

Compare his carved wood, his work in marble and his work in bronze

and whatever you make of his unfamiliar conventions you find an

extraordinary and exquisite sensitiveness to the properties of the

substance under his hand. [...] The lines of his abstract forms flow out

sinuously or break into sharp angles and sudden changes of direction.

The public still enamored of representation—and this is all but the most

minute portion of the general public—will regret Brancusi’s following of

die modem gods. (qtd. in de Zayas,How, When 50)

How ironic (and perhaps not entirely naive) that the reviewer refers to “modem gods” when presenting Brancusi. The issue of Brancusi’s trademark “abstract forms” dominated the popular and intellectual published appreciations of his work, while the issue of abstraction—or die representation of “essence”—dominated his own artistic creed. In both cases, the underlying conflict was whether “abstract” was a completely modem form of representation meant to eschew any cultural or religious reference, or whether it was indeed closer to the truth that “abstraction is an attempt to represent spiritual realities” (Longenbach 180). This fact seems to have been obscured, as James

Longenbach contends, by the mid-to late twentieth-century misconception of abstraction derived from contemporary painting, in which abstraction “has been most commonly understood as the effort to reach a pure sensuousness untainted by meaning; the artist, by giving up values of external representation, renders paintings that represent nothing”

(179).

Brancusi reportedly disliked the term “abstract” for exactly this reason, since it implied that “his works were removed from reality and without meaning” (Andreotti 141); he was much more comfortable with the terms “form” and “essence.” According to Roston, whose interest in modernist patterns includes Brancusi’s work, the sculptor

“believed deeply in the existence of an insubstantial reality not visible to the human eye and strove to express the relevance of objects to that further truth” (65). His

“formulation of his art as intended to capture the ‘essentially real’,” Roston concludes,

“is thus diametrically opposed to the non-referentiality.. .that [is seen] as constituting the central element in Modernist and especially Abstract art” (66). For Pound, the rising interest in Brancusi and the issues surrounding his aesthetic facilitated his own mission

“to set out a far fuller statement of aesthetics than he had allowed himself since his 1916 memoir of Gaudier [by presenting] Brancusi’s sculpture as expressing a coherent aesthetics, an ‘approach to the infinite by form ’” (Beasley,EPVCM 177). Brancusi’s confident credo and dramatic sculptures embodied the central debate that was engaging

Pound and Loy in the early 1920s—does the abstract art object present nothing but its essence, shaped by the artist to be encountered without cultural or spiritual imprint, or does it indeed represent the product of the artist’s buried quest for spiritual meaning in a time defined by its rejection of mimetic images and forms?

Although the most frequently cited intersection of Pound and Loy is his praise of her logopoeia and “arid clarity” in his 1918 review, I would suggest that the more cogent confluence between the two poets comes with their overlapping tributes to

Brancusi, a case study, as it were, for the tension underlying modernist literary and art production post-avant-garde and post-war. This contention is upheld by one of the few studies that addresses this confluence, Ellen Keck Stauder’s “Beyond the Synopsis of

Vision: The Conception of Art in Ezra Pound and Mina Loy.” Stauder zeroes in directly 80 on their mutual attraction to Brancusi, part of which she attributes to the sculptor being

“unassimilable to any one school or ‘ism’” as well as “a sublime abstracter of transcendent forms”(197). Hence, it was Brancusi himself (die artist) and his sculpture

(the objects) that became the ideal catalysts for their broader examination of modernist aesthetics in the early 1920s, as Stauder so succincdy summarizes:

Both poets’ interactions with Brancusi are integral to their attempt to re

define poetic activity in terms of what I will call, following Charles

Altieri, an expressionist aesthetic, which responds to the crisis of

representation and the function of art precipitated by futurism by

asserting the power of form for the process of individuation. In other

words, Pound, Loy and Brancusi share a commitment to form

characterized above all by the energy of making. In this view, art should

possess form rather than referring to a form outside itself. The energy of

making involves each of these artists not in the production of sacrosanct

art works set apart from commerce with the world but works whose

energy challenges the dichotomies used to define and separate art from

its context. (197)

Stauder goes on to examine how “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” reveals Loy’s commitment to these concepts of form and creative process: she ably tracks Loy’s presentation of the artist—“some patient peasant God”— whose energy in making the “continent sculpture” involves the decidedly non-sacrosanct act of lopping die extremities from a “lump of metal” as the bird devolves from being the esoteric “Alpha and Omega / of Form” into die “incandescent curve.” Loy’s shifting presentation of the bird through the poem, first 81 as the incongruous “toy,” then the formal “aesthetic archetype,” then back to its irreducible state—“This gong / of polished hyperaesthesia”— proves that, for Loy the

‘nucleus,’ the essence of abstraction, is no mere essential ized, static form” (Stauder

“Beyond” 211).

Curiously, however, in this 1995 analysis and her subsequent examination of the poem in 1998 (“The Irreducible Surplus of Abstraction: Mina Loy on Brancusi and the

Futurists”), Stauder never specifically addresses Loy’s deployment of the ekphrastic mode. Indeed, while the critical commentaries on the poem examined for this study

(Stauder, Kouidis, Masteller, Churchill) analyze Loy’s language, her use of visual space, her subject matter and how all these are framed within modernist and cultural contexts, they do not bring ekphrasis into their discussion.34 Suzanne Churchill, moreover, who offers an otherwise enthusiastic reading of Loy’s poetry, dismisses Loy’s voice in

“Brancusi’s Golden Bird” as being “detached, impersonal and coolly ironic” {Others

213). What Churchill et al are missing in their evaluations is Loy’s confident but undeclared use of the mode itself, which, as I have already suggested, facilitates her curatorial viewpoint on modernist aesthetics, art objects and visual culture.

What Stauder misses (or perhaps intentionally avoids) is the opportunity to explore Loy’s poem as a potent example of what Murray Krieger would classify as an

“ekphrastic emblem.” Krieger argues in Ekphrasis: The Illusion o f the Natural Sign, in

34 Richard Masteller comes close in his assessment of Loy’s choice of poetry over other forms of expression in his essay, which compares her poem, Pound’s essay and a May 1922 Vanity Fair article on Brancusi, in a discussion framed within the cultural contexts of modernism: “Loy acknowledged both Brancusi’s quest for perfection and his paganism, but she particularly tried to convey a series of highly subjective responses. The form she chose—poetry, rather than a philosophical essay or personality profile— enabled her to present a condensed sequence of radical juxtapositions, conflicts and potential fusions” (59). 82

1992, that critics and theorists of modernist poetry have favoured turning “poems into spatial entities whose form triumphs over sequence, changing befores and afters into the simultaneity ofjuxtaposition” (225), just as this study has done so far when contemplating Loy’s work. But this approach to appreciating modernist poetry might be partially prejudiced by persistent misconceptions of modernism as a completely new

“ism” in twentieth-century culture that rejected its traditional and formalist precedents, including the ekphrastic mode. Loy’s appreciation of modem poetry as an art form, albeit liberated from Lessing’s notions about the separation of poetry and painting, evolved during her own transition from painter to poet, from Victorian upbringing to

Futurist radicalism to the wide-open American avant-garde and was capped by her public role as a contributor to “modem” visual culture. When she came to evaluate

Lewis and Brancusi’s artwork in the early 1920s, she used ekphrasis unselfconsciously, integrating its intent to represent objects in poems whose “spatial entities” fought against representation.

Krieger (whose theories, resurfacing in W. J. T. Mitchell’s Picture Theory, will be discussed further in the third chapter) takes a close look at the relevance of the ekphrastic form to the “modernist moment,” for within that movement, he argues,

there returns to the poetic word the renewed attempt to earn for it the

status of verbal emblem, of the letter as substantive. Unlike the

formulation of the verbal emblem in the Renaissance, however, the

modernist formulation relies on an appeal not (at least not ostensibly) to

the mysteries of Christian Neo-Platonism, but to the craft of the poet,

who struggles with a medium—at once aural, graphic and both referential 83

and self-referential—to allow it to achieve dimensions that will persuade

us to set the poem and its complex workings apart from other discourse.

(.Illusion 225-26)

Loy’s choice of ekphrastic subject matter in the 1920s—the Cubist painting by a

Futurist- tumed-Vorticist theorist and the minimalist sculpture by an artist who defined, but rejected, abstraction—aligns with the tightly crafted poems that describe them.

Lewis’s geometric and distorted figures are pushed upwards by the painter’s energized lines while Loy’s allusive text clips through the progression of art movements shattered by Cubism; Brancusi’s “incandescent curve” emerges from “the absolute act of art” to become a shrill and polished expression of excessive sensitivity, while Loy’s poem hangs the bird’s transformation from a dangling and ambiguous “As if.” For as much as

Loy is engaging with the art objects she describes, exulting in their form and formulation, she is also exposing them through a poetic object that bears equal weight within the new modernist canon. Here the verbal emblem becomes, for Krieger, “the ultimate ekphrasis”:

What is rather to be imitated is the status of the sculpture or painting as a

physical art object. That status is achieved for the poem by its making a

claim to an integrity like that of an object created by the plastic arts, an

integrity marked by the wholeness of that spatial character which results

from the exploitation of a sensuous (or an illusionarily sensuous)

medium. The poem, then, would, if it could, imitate the spatial object by

being one too. (Illusion 226) 84

“Brancusi’s Golden Bird” claims its place in modernist literary history by virtue of its timely publication and its affiliation with a highly influential artist. Loy’s adept ekphrastic rendering of the sculpture, with its compressed, self-contradicting language and its abstracted, visual irregularity claims its place in modernist visual culture by becoming an object worth exalting alongside its twin “aesthetic archetype.”

The danger here, however, is to lose what I perceive to be Loy’s embedded dubiousness about abstraction. Her viewpoint is ironically concealed by the ekphrastic poem and the sculpture it represents, both of which have become “abstracted objects” representing modernist ideology. The final three stanzas, beginning with “an incandescent curve” comprise the final fourteen lines—a sly sonnet, perhaps—that turns at “this gong / of polished hyperaesthesia / shrills with brass.” Is the bird so reduced to its essence that its representation has reached the point of “excessive sensitivity” implied by “hyperaesthesia”? Does the “aggressive light” that “strikes / its significance” refer directly to Brancusi’s controversial studio photograph and the sculpture’s instant iconic stature in modernist visual culture? And why, despite its shrillness as an abstracted gong, is the bird so quickly rendered inaudible? Loy further emphasizes the ambiguity of the bird’s “immaculate conception” by ending the poem, uncharacteristically, with an ellipsis that trails the “gorgeous reticence” in which the bird is conceived. Within Loy’s layered framing, Brancusi, the artist who shuns abstraction but epitomizes it, becomes the pseudo-Christian creator within the secularized modernist movement; the bird, reduced to an archetype, loses its voice and the audience, pleased but puzzled by its conception of the bird, is reduced to “gorgeous” reserve. Hence, the three key players in die “ekphrastic situation—the poet engaging the work of art and representing it to an 85

audience” (Loizeaux 5)— are all left hanging at the end the poem, dangling on the

introductory “As if 5 that separates them from the poet’s opening cryptic two-line

description of the “toy.”

Apart from being a textual hooking device, set distinctly apart from the extended

vertical stretch of the poem, Loy’s “As if’ evokes both poetic metaphor and artistic

mimesis. These traditional methods of representation sit isolated atop the process of

abstraction tracked below as the bird is transformed from lump to curve; here Loy offers

“as if’ as another hook—this time a safety hook—for the audience stymied by extreme

aestheticism. Within the triangular ekphrastic situation, the audience’s encounter is

weighted equally with object and artist. Interestingly, Loy’s approach here seems

prescient of the debates over modem art and cultural criticism that continue well into

current discourse. The prominent “as if” from “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” I suggest, may be considered to echo theorist Charles Altieri’s ruminations about modernist aesthetics, published in 2009:

For art’s thinking is not bound to the aboutness of empirical or even

generalizing propositions. Art’s thinking begins in hypotheticals: what

would thinking and feeling be like if the artist makes these assumptions

or acts in this manner? Then it quickly leaps to offering a hypothetical

about this hypothetical, an “as if” about an “as if.” Having constructed

the hypothetical and pushed it toward realization in several dimensions,

art invites the audience to grapple with provisional processes of

identification, or to refuse to modify identification. Art does not offer

argumentative paths for thinking so much as affective engagements with 86

a concrete embodiment of particular states the artist deems worth

investing in. Audiences are invited to use these as exemplars for directing

their attention, caring for what they encounter, or determining what is

worthy of emotional investment (202-03)

Loy underscores her poem with a skepticism about the finite potential of “the absolute act / of art / conformed / to continent sculpture.” She addresses Worringer and Hulme’s notions that the pursuit of abstraction, which had come to define modernism, is not as much a rejection of excessiveness as it is an apprehension of what remains after the

“lopping of extremities” results in a silenced, immobilized object. However, like Altieri,

Loy urges the audience to recognize that external influences—the “chromatic flames” and “aggressive light” are what render the object meaningful and bring its sensory qualities to the audience. Certainly the artist may have planned for these qualities to be affective, but in “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” Loy redirects the audience from the trailing reticence at the poem’s end back to the potent “as if,” not to reinforce anxiety, but to revive empathy within its experience of the art object 87

Chapter Three: New York Dada, Duchamp and “Marble”

The Public knows better than this, knowing such values as the under- inner curve of women’s footgear, one factor of the art of our epoch. . . it is unconcerned with curved Faun’s legs and maline twirled antique scarves of artistic imagining; or with allegories of Life with thom-skewered eyes... it knew before the Futurists that Life is a jolly noise and a rush and sequence of ample reactions.

Mina Loy, “In... Formation” The Blind Man 1 (April 10,1917): 7.

A point that I want very much to establish is that the choice of these ’readymades’ was never dictated by aesthetic selection. The choice was based on a reaction o f visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste ... in fact a complete anaesthesia.

Marcel Duchamp, The Essential Writings o fMarcel Duchamp, 141.

Loy’s contribution to The Blind Man, Marcel Duchamp’s short-lived little magazine published only twice in 1917, now sounds surprisingly prescient in the context

of a twenty-first century visual culture that appears to be increasingly ahistorical in its formation. Despite its sardonic undertone, however, Loy’s commentary does not vilify the audience’s role but rather positions it within the avant-garde’s construction of the encounter with the radicalized art object exemplified by Duchamp’s notorious

“readymade.” His recalled choice of “anaesthesia,” moreover, is a telling counterpoint to

Loy’s choice of “hyperaesthesia” to describe Brancusi’s bird, since die juxtaposition of these two conditions of conceptualization and abstraction underscore her ekphrastic poetics. Most importantly, these paired quotations from Duchamp and Loy represent the notion of neutrality, a notion that came to be misinterpreted as nihilism for Duchamp and his fellow New York Dadaists, a group which certainly included Loy, die “girl” who wrote without a trace of emotion. 88

The relationship between Loy and Duchamp originated in their common

attraction to America, but extended far beyond their contributions to The Blind Man and

was to become the most enduring of Loy’s friendships from the heady days of the

191 Os. According to Roger Conover, who contends that Loy “might yet prove to be the

poet of her century, as Duchamp proved to be the artist of his” [LLB xx), Loy’s career

was distinctly Duchampian, marked by “self-erasing” comments that “belie[d] their

nonchalance” (LLB xiii). As an artist, poet and public character, “Loy camouflaged

demonstrative and theatrical first persons behind inscrutable aliases. [...] Whether this

was part of a conscious design to elude critical framing or an involuntary strategy for

survival is difficult to say; indeed there may be no distinction” (Conover, LLB xiii).

Although Loy did not address a poem to Duchamp—as she did to Lewis, Brancusi,

Joyce and Stein—his influence resonates throughout her life. In the 1940s and early

1950s, when she again lived in New York, Loy produced “constructions (mystical collages)” (Kouidis, “Mina Loy” 271) using street debris and found-material, including one entitled Marcel Duchamp, Tinman (see fig. 7), which was included in the exhibition of Loy’s artwork held in 1959 at New York’s Bodley Gallery. Curated by Marcel

Duchamp, the show was held six years after Loy had moved to Colorado to live with her daughter, leaving the city’s Bowery district where she had lived among derelicts and had

“existed in the margins of the formal economy and outside the notice of official culture”

(Conover, LLB 208). During this period, apparently, Loy “was involved with surrealist expatriates from World Warn, but she did not join in their antics as she had in those of the Dadaist expatriates from World War I” (Kouidis, DLB 271). Fig. 7. Mina Loy,Marcel Duchamp, Tinman, 1953. Mixed mediums, tin cans and found materials. Collection of Roger J. Conover. Rpt. in Donald Friedman, The Writer's Brush. Minneapolis: Mid-List, 2007.249. 90

The circle enclosing those earlier expatriates, led by poet Walter Arensberg and

his wife Louise, was a highly eclectic group in 1916. It included artist Charles Demuth,

photographer Man Ray, poets William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens and Loy’s

future husband, the flamboyant Arthur Cravan,35 and it embraced Loy as warmly as it

had Duchamp one year earlier. Loy and Duchamp soon became cultural celebrities:

Their arrival conferred status on [Greenwich] Village as the new center

of the art world in 1917. Within months of landing, they were being

interviewed by reporters, profiled in newspapers, caricatured in cartoons

and studied by admiring Villagers as figures whose gestures, attitudes

and wardrobes stood for the new generation and the new values.

(Conover, (Re)Introducing Mina Loy 257)

In a characteristically flippant interview printed in theNew York Tribute in October

1915, entitled “French Artists Spur on American Art,” Duchamp declared, “I came over here not because I couldn’t paint at home, but because I hadn’t anyone to talk with”

(qtd. in Voyce, 636)—a deceptively simple but wiy reiteration of his earlier comment on

European art being “finished.” Duchamp alludes to the enlivened conversations of the

American avant-garde that were facilitated by the salons of New York during the First

35 Bom in Switzerland as Fabian Lloyd, Cravan was a boxer and a writer, who had published “five issues of Maintenant, an amusing, provocatively abusive review, in Paris between 1912 and 1915. In one of these issues he described himself: Confidence- man - sailor in the Pacific - muleteer - orange-picker in California - snake charmer - hotel thief - nephew of Oscar Wilde - lumberjack - ex-boxing champion of France - Grandson of the Queen’s Chancellor (of England) - chauffeur in Berlin - etc” (Young 10). Cravan arrived in New York in 1917 and was introduced by Picabia to Arensberg’s group; soon after, he and Loy began an intense love affair. “Cravan and Loy were married in Mexico in January 1918. Loy then returned to Europe and Cravan was to follow. Instead he disappeared with no explanation and was rumored to have died at sea. Cravan’s putative death and Loy’s lifelong search for him became central elements of the dada myth” (Scott and Rutkoff 66). 91

World War, particularly that of the Arensbergs, which “came to denote a network of

artists, patrons, publications and events that together created the conditions for

unparalleled interdisciplinary exchange” (Voyce 628). Duchamp certainly came to this

network with a strong reputation affirmed by his controversial Armory Show Nude, but

he was far from dictatorial; rather, “the charismatic French artist is best described as

omnipresent [...] Representations of him depict a figure who keeps others in flux rather than fix them in check” (Voyce 636). That Duchamp’s influence upon the salons has

since been interpreted in scholarly records as his “leadership” of die “New York Dada movement” is a point that deserves clarification, since it relates directly to Loy’s own affiliation with that most boisterous branch of the avant-garde.

As Maijorie Perloff points out, the notion of attributing leadership within the

“avant-garde” is contradictory, given that “the avant-garde being by accepted definition a congeries of group manifestations, of agnostic movements that set themselves against die status quo” (“Dada” par.l) should not claim to be led. Nevertheless, accounts of the artistic community in 1910s New York insist on defining it as “a movement” and assigning leadership:

The Arensbergs convened New York dada. They provided the ambience

and the refreshments and they determined its membership, assuring its

private, naughty rather than riotous, apolitical character. But as Mina Loy

asserted, Marcel Duchamp was “King Dada.” The Arensberg group

derived much of its prestige from Duchamp’s reputation. His radical

artistic ideas gave New York dada its significance. (Scott and Rutkoff 66) 92

Loy’s tongue-in-cheek designation should not be dismissed; she might well have been

teasing Duchamp in light of his own resistance to wearing any crown. Nor would he

have likely accepted “dada” since, as Perloff points out, “the New York avant-garde of

the World War I years, whose center was the Walter Arensberg circle.. .was only

retrospectively designated as ‘New York Dada’” (“Dada” par. 10). The term “dada”

itself, as Perloff contends, was not used to define the aesthetics of the New York groups

of artists between 1915 and 1917, although the radical practices of aleatory writing and

randomly composed music were underway in Europe by that time and were well-known

to the American avant-garde. Indeed, no issue of The Blind Man or Picabia’s little

magazine, 391,36 used the word “dada,” although both are designated as dada journals because they present and extol “non-art’ as a mode of expression. As Perloff suggests, the enduring definition of Dada’s “non-art” offered by Hans Richter,37 as the “emptying

[of] life as well as art of all its spiritual content” (91) seems to have settled on

Duchamp’s experiments with The Blind Man and its successor Rongwrong, also published, as a single issue, in 1917.

The more strident and nihilistic conceptualization of “dada” as “anti-art” originated in 1916 in Zurich, which had become a refuge for many European artists during the war, “for those who for some combination of political, artistic, or ethical

36 During his time in New York after the Armory Show, Picabia co-edited a witty little magazine, 291, with Alfred Stieglitz. Later, in 1916 in Barcelona, the painter “produced the first of four monthly issues of 391 (January to March 1917) in which the intensity of Picabia’s anti-art attitudes, as revealed in his strange ‘machine-drawings’ had developed considerably” (Young 10). “By the time Picabia took 391 to New York at the end of 1917, the magazine had assumed a decidedly assertive and irreverent tone” (Hofmann par. 6). A German painter and film-maker, Richter escaped persecution in World War II, joined a group of expatriate artists in Zurich in 1916 and was to become a renowned historian of the dada movement founded there (Young 14). 93 reasons (or for the satisfaction of the instinct of self-preservation) found their native countries intolerable” (Young 11). German poet Hugo Ball and his wife, singer Emmy

Hennings, founded the Cabaret Voltaire for this disparate group—an equivalent to

Arensberg salon—of painters, poets and performers. From within this group, the term

“dada”38 emerged as the defining “mocking symbol of [their] attack on established movements, whether traditional or experimental, that characterized early twentieth- century art” (Amason 307). Most importantly, as art historian H.H. Amason summarizes, the “Zurich Dadaists were violently opposed to any organized program in the arts, or any movement that might express the common stylistic denominator of a coherent group” (307). Ravaged by the world war, the Dadaists' radical nihilism was rooted in passivism, rather than the militarism of the Futurists, but it did launch a purposeful attack:

Art, the embodiment of all the culture of Western man, was pronounced

dead and through their smashing up of traditional forms and attitudes

towards art, the Dadaists could most effectively express their disgust and

start what most of them considered to be their principal task—to sweep

away all the European past. (Young 17)

In this respect, the New York “dada” of the Arensberg circle were not nearly as strongly invested in “smashing up” of forms, perhaps because they were removed and less enraged than their war-ravaged Zurich counterparts. Even though Picabia traveled back

38 The origins of the selection of the term are disputed, but the most commonly held one is that the word, meaning “a child’s rocking horse,” was randomly selected from a French-German dictionary. (Arnason 307) 94

and forth to Europe, like Duchamp, he was far more intensely connected to the displaced

European avant-garde, first in Barcelona and then in Zurich.

Duchamp held himself apart from movements and “isms” in America, where he

played with ideas of neutralizing (hence “a complete anaesthesia”) the production and

reception of art to facilitate new ways of thinking about art objects. As Duchamp biographer Thierry de Duve has written,

Duchamp did not entertain the fantasy of a tabula rasa... .Artists started

assuming the ideology of the tabula rasa attributed to them only from the

moment of Futurism and Dadaism on. We well know Duchamp’s disdain

for Futurism and his reluctance to see himself assimilated into Dada. He

never wanted to bum down the museums as did Marinetti or to break

completely with art as did the Cabaret Voltaire. His “Dadaism” was

never made up of social condemnations of art, but only of personal

secessions. He never wanted to engage in a tabula rasa of tradition, nor

did he believe that it was possible to do so; he never wanted to break with

art in order to efface the memory of it. (SO)

Indeed, much of Duchamp’s activism in the American art world was underscored by a sense of communality regarding the re-thinking of art and literary production. The New

York group was not driven by the negative force of social condemnation that de Duve pinpoints, but rather by a spirit of collaboration and exploration, which Stephen Voyce describes:

What distinguishes the modernist salons in New York and the Arensberg

circle in particular, is the attempt made by a community of artists and 95

poets to conflate art and life by integrating the social dynamic of the

salon, its communal practices, into the process of artistic construction.

(634)

Loy’s reflections upon this communal spirit are reflected in her essay “Psycho-

Democracy,” which she wrote after leaving America, while she was waiting for Arthur

Cravan in Buenos Aires, in 1918. This pacifist manifesto, composed at the end of the war and later published in The Little Review's “Brancusi Number” in Autumn 1921, was

subtitled “A Movement to Focus Human Reason on the Conscious Direction of

Evolution.” It echoes Loy’s engagement with the Bergsonian notion of flux and her time spent with Duchamp and company in America:

The Psycho-Democratic Policy is Habeas Animum. “To illuminate the earth with her peoples eyes.”

The organization o fPsycho-Democracy is based on the laws of psychic evolution, our principles spring fiom Intuition and are presented to man’s intellect for maturation. We make the experiment of a “collectivity” moved by the same intellectual logic as are the tactics of the successful individ ual reckoning with “actual” values and following die rules of the game of life, influencing our era by right of the merits of our (collective) personality. Most movements have a fixed concept towards which they advance, we move away fiom all fixed concepts in order to advance. (15)

This extract from Loy’s impassioned six-page essay not only epitomizes her belief in the

“merits” of collective personality, but also, despite assigning the name “Psycho-

Democracy,” presents a fluid movement framed by the concepts of illumination and motion—the very tenets that had come to define modem art and poetry. Given this framework and her promotion of collectivity, her inclination towards ekphrasis after her 96 time in the New York community seems inevitable and entirely appropriate. As

Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux argues in her study of self-described “culturally situated readings” of twentieth-century ekphrastic poems, ekphrasis should be interpreted as

“dynamic, as driven by its negotiation with others of various kinds and as socially engaged and contingent” (24). While Loy’s ekphrastic bent did not emerge during her tenure with Duchamp, it is certainly prefaced by her immersion into his American coterie and by the impact of that group’s 1917 art show, “The Independents Exhibition,” in which Duchamp staged a scandal that surpassed his impact at the Armory Show four years earlier.

The first (of only two) issues of The Blind Man published in 1917, co-edited by

Duchamp, actress Beatrice Wood and Parisian art dealer Henri Pierre Roch6, was intended to introduce the public to the “role of the Independents in an American artistic revolution” (Goody 101). Loy’s contributions to both issues count among the few works she apparently wrote while in America and these are not poems but fragmentary prose presentations.39 In the first issue, her short manifesto-like “In.. .Formation” (cited in this chapter’s epigraph) considers the preparedness of the American public for the

Independents’ work. Ironically, as it turned out, many of Duchamp’s fellow

Independents were unprepared for his anonymous last-minute submission to the exhibition—the infamous readymade Fountain, an inverted porcelain urinal signed by

39 In the second issue, published after the exhibition opened, Loy offers a short and now obscure, untitled piece which begins—“Free Verse, why I wrote free verse twenty years ago”—?” and is presented as an “interview” with a minor artist, Louis Eilshemius (whose work Duchamp admired and later championed) and a much better known, risqud “word collage of bohemian New York chatter” (Goody 102) entitled “O Marcel— otherwise I Also Have Been to Louise’s” which bears the by-line “Compiled by Mina Loy.” 97 the unknown “R.Mutt” The selection committee refused the “sculpture” and great debate over the object and its artist ensued in the second issue of The Blind Man, while

Duchamp kept his part in the submission secret Alfred Stieglitz’s photo of Fountain appeared in the issue (see fig. 8) along with a supportive article, “Buddha of the

Bathroom” written by Duchamp’s friend, Louise Norton. William A. Camfield’s detailed and thoughtful essay on the sculpture and its cultural context includes this

(partial) analysis of Norton’s assessment

Early in the article she dealt with the “vulgarity” argument, noting those

jurors who “fairly rushed to remove the bit of sculpture called the

Fountain.. .because the object was irrevocably associated in their

atavistic minds with a certain natural function of a secretive sort... Yet,”

she added “to any ‘innocent’ eye how pleasant is its chaste simplicity of

line and color! Someone said, ‘Like a lovely Buddha’; someone said,

‘Like the legs of the ladies by Cdzanne’; but have they not, those ladies,

in their long, round nudity always recalled to your mind the calm curves

of decadent plumbers’ porcelains?” Louise Norton’s comments represent

the first published witness to the “pleasant” formal properties of the

object itself—not a vulgar object but a form of “chaste simplicity.. .like a

lovely Buddha!” For over fifty years such perceptions ofFountain have

almost disappeared from the literature on Duchamp, but among

Duchamp’s close friends in 1917 that aesthetic response was the rule, not

the exception. (79) 98

lo u n u in by R. Matt IJbotoptmpli by Alfred Stiv^llii

THE EXHIBIT REFUSED BY THE INDEPENDENTS

Fig. 8. Marcel Duchamp, Fountain, 1917. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz. Bienecke Library. Rpt. in Alex Goody,Modernist Articulations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.100. 99

This is the same aesthetic response, surely, that Loy slyly attributes, in a backhanded compliment, to the “uneducated” public in advance of the exhibition. Whether or not she was aware of Duchamp’s Fountain submission is undocumented, but her astute comment addressed to a public “knowing such values as the under-inner curve of women’s footgear, one factor of the art of our epoch” demonstrates the same motives as

Duchamp’s—“the ironic negotiation of the ‘aura’ of the art object, the sanctification of the artist and the forces of mass-production” (Goody 100).

Loy’s fragmentary collection of work composed during and immediately after her affiliation with Duchamp in 1917 comes fiom a period of intense assimilation with the avant-garde collective. It was a group with whom she was comfortably aligned ideologically, yet she produced no direct ekphrastic poem in its honour. Her interaction with Marinetti had stimulated her, but his militarism and misogyny had alienated her; her respect for Lewis stemmed fiom her admiration for his painting and aesthetic theories, but she never engaged directly with his following; her incisive depiction of

Brancusi’s work offered a nuanced viewpoint on the glories of abstraction, but the sculptor resisted collective activities. Loy’s ekphrastic compositions for these latter two artists, originating fiom the near-hindsight of die early 1920s, have offered identifiable grounds for uncovering her curatorial position on their artwork, but which poem from this sharp 1920s perspective offers a commentary on Duchamp? A tenuous connecting thread presents itself in an action recorded as Walter Arensberg’s “triumphant display” o f Fountain “as though it were a marble Aphrodite” (Schwarz 466); but the stronger link between Loy’s obscure “Marble” and Duchamp’s infamous sculpture comes indirectly fiom Wallace Stevens. 100

In his essay “Why It Must Be Abstract,” James Longenbach debunks the concept of abstraction as having always been defined, most often by modem painters, as the

“effort to reach a pure sensuousness untainted by meaning [which] renders paintings that represent nothing” (179). Longenbach contends that the visual and literary “pioneers of abstract art,” including Duchamp and Stevens, were “quite comfortable with the idea that abstraction is an attempt to represent spiritual realities” (180). He returns to

Woiringer’s Abstraction and Empathy. “For Worringer, abstraction was neither a movement toward meaninglessness nor die destruction of the representable object; it was a movement toward the ethereal, the embodiment of an absent object”(l 81); then turns to Pound, for whom, Longenbach claims, “Brancusi’s abstract forms were incarnations of the infinite world—not representations of the finite or forms that represented nothing at all” (182). Longenbach quotes an oft-cited passage from Pound’s essay on Brancusi that I suggest upholds Loy’s evaluation of the “Golden Bird” as “The absolute act / of art / conformed / to continent sculpture”:

.. .the contemplation of form or formal-beauty leading into the infinite

must be dissociated from the dazzle of crystal.. .with the crystal it is a

hypnosis, or a contemplative fixation of thought.. .and with the ideal

form in marble it is an approach to the infinite by form, by precisely the

highest possible degree of consciousness of formal perfection.

(“Brancusi” 6-7)

This attention to form and “consciousness of formal perfection” reveal themselves in

Loy’s own contemplation of Brancusi; but how do ideal form and abstraction factor into

“Marble,” a poem that is presented here in direct reference to the poet’s affiliation with 101 the “anaesthesia” of Duchamp’s readymade? Longenbach explores Wallace Stevens’s idea that “the way to get at the abstraction would be through earthy anecdotes: precisely concrete puzzles mirroring the puzzle beyond” (188) and then makes this critical connection, citing Stevens’s renowned ekphrastic poem from 1919:

A good parallel to Stevens’s use of abstraction is provided by Duchamp’s

“readymade,” an everyday object that suddenly begins to glow with an

aura of meaning when placed on a pedestal—but at the same time never

stops being itself. This is the lesson of the “Anecdote of the Jar” (though

it “was gray and bare” it “took dominion eveiywhere”) ... (189)

What Loy offers in “Marble,” then, is a true concrete puzzle, with one key named player, Apollo, whose position on a pedestal is explored figuratively and literally. The lack of critical discourse and documentation on this poem open up a wide scope for speculation on Loy’s intent and invite an ekphrastic extrapolation. By pairing “Marble” with an historically-specific art object, the marble statue of Apollo from the Temple at

Olympia (see fig. 9) and keeping the ambiguous readymadeFountain close at hand on its own dadaesque pedestal, the poem offers what may well be Loy’s most poignant statement about modem art and poetry:

Marble

Greece has thrown white shadows sown their eyeballs with oblivion

A flock of stone Gods perched upon pedestals

a populace of athelete lilies 102

of the galleries

scoop the facades of space with spiral curves of idol substance in the silence

A colonnade Apollo haunts Apollo with the shade o f a lost hand

This is a speculative pairing, to be sure, but Loy’s manipulation of text, visually, aurally and semantically, is so simple, yet so ambiguously suggestive, that it facilitates an ekphrastic encounter designed to invoke simultaneously the formality of history and to promote modem poetics. The juxtaposition of “Marble” with an ancient sculpture may not have been Loy’s intention, but she does offer a poem that segues to a history marked by mimesis and muted by modernism.

The historical context of the statue should preface the analysis of the poem since it reveals some interesting parallels to the modem ethos of World War I. This depiction of Apollo, god of music and poetry, found on the west pediment of the Temple of Zeus at Olympia, comes from the “Transitional Period” of classical Greek art in the fifth- century BC, “the heroic age of the Athenians and of all the Hellenes who joined forces against the invasions of Greece by the Persians” producing “in the Hellenes a kind of austere grandeur that manifested itself in the art of that period” (de la Croix and Tansey

147). Apollo stands calmly in the center of the pediment, thrusting out his arm over the scene of a tumultuous wedding feast disrupted by uninvited centaurs:

This distinction between the calm of noble men and die frenzy of the

creature abandoned to impulse prevails for centuries in Greek art. The Fig. 9. Unkown, Apollo, 468-460 BCE Detail from West Pediment, Temple of Zeus at Olympia. Marble, over-life size. Museum, Olympia Rpt. in Horst de la Croix and Richard G. Tansey,Gardner’s Art. New York: Harcourt, 1975.150. 104

Greeks were convinced that overwhelming disaster awaited the man who

yielded to the spell cast by the dark god of intoxication and madness,

Dionysos; this conviction is reflected in their drama and in their

persistent appeal to reason and order, both in art and life. Against

Dionysos they attempted to raise the shining figure of Apollo, god of

light, beauty and wisdom. Thus it was with the pediments of Olympia

that the visual arts moved into the realm of philosophy and drama and it

was in the presence of these sculptures that the Greek athletes took their

oaths at the alter of Zeus before the Olympic games, (de la Croix and

Tansey 150)

Loy’s “populace / of athelete lilies / of the galleries” seems to conflate the marble gods with their ancient audience, which in turn tailors them to a modem agnostic audience. Is

Loy suggesting that the visual artists of her time, ruptured by war and thus driven to abstraction, are poised to abandon the “austere grandeur” of their depicted gods? Or is she implying that the visual culture of her time has adapted an austere and formal grandeur of its own? Have the avant-garde practitioners and modernist theoreticians of visual arts already moved into their own new “realm of philosophy and drama”?

“Apollo haunts Apollo” Loy’s text asserts, but the title and die subtext, refer to Apollo’s

“idol substance” as the art object and undermine his position as ideological symbol or spiritual leader. This conflict between the material representation of morality and the intellectual banishment of spirituality in favour of mere materiality, underscores the modernist dilemmathat Loy evaluates so subtly. “Marble,” as marble, is thus a dualistic 105

ekphrastic rendering of the “ideal form” praised by modernism and the “stone God” worshipped by Greek Classic culture.

Loy presents a simple poetic design—devoid of dashes and indents, with only

“Greece,” “Gods,” and “Apollo” capitalized—that is at once both visually and

acoustically elegant Like many of her poems, “Marble” has a distinctly vertical character and, like “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” the shape of the poem alludes to the art object it represents. In “Marble” the compressed closing stanza acts as a base for the four stanzas above, all of which align to the straight left edge of the poem and then extend from this rigid margin into open territory on the right. Here the extension of the

“pedestals,” “space,” and particularly “white shadows” of the poem can be seen to mirror the upright figure of Apollo and his outstretched arm. To further emphasize the extended arm, Loy breaks her lineation with one white space in the opening of the poem, which acts a “white shadow” itself, sitting apart from the poem below, recalling the “As if’ in “Brancusi’s Golden Bird.” But in “Marble” the ostracized words are integrated within the opening line’s action—without them, what would Greece have thrown?— and they interrupt the “thrown/sown” rhyme. Loy also manipulates her diction to great visual effect, pairing letters in “scoop” and “colonnade,” and in

“eyeballs,” “galleries,” and “Apollo” where the double “U” invokes the columns that would line a colonnade, or perhaps the upright stature of Apollo himself.

Acoustically, Loy streams sibilants through every line but one (“A colonnade”) so that the reading of the poem slips down through the poem, reaching the third stanza, where the sounds crescendo into the metamorphosis of the stone Gods into a flock who

“scoop the facades of space / with spiral curves.” The scooping implies swooping and 106

the movement downwards through the poem is slowed down at the grounding stanza,

where the harder dental sounds that end “colonnade,” “shade,” and “hand” halt the

poem’s acoustic slide. Similarly, Loy weaves liquid “l’s” throughout the poem,

beginning with the title and ending with “lost” This clever manipulation of assonance,

combined with the striking visual design of the poem, combine to move the flock of

gods from their pedestals to scoop the facades of space, first within the poem and then

across their pediment; but their movement, so purposefully contained within the tight

confines of the poem’s structure, is similarly restricted to geometric spiral curves imprinted on the flat spaces of their silent architectural enclosure.

Finally, Loy uses wordplay to underscore the solemnity of the Greek temple with modem irony, using “idol” to describe “substance” to intimate that the idle Greek Gods have been reduced to mere material “substance.” It is telling that Loy offers no allusions to the sensory aspect of marble, to its texture or reflection of light, as she did with

Brancusi’s shrill brass and “incandescent curves.” The material is simply announced in die tide, anaesthetized perhaps, into its “readymade” state and then ignored, inverted like the famous urinal and perched atop the poem. Here her wordplay simultaneously diminishes the art objects’ mythological symbolism, alludes to the idleness of those idols within modem cultural context and demystifies the properties of the material itself.

Just as she did with “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” Loy uses the textual and visual qualities of the poem to transform it into a self-referential art object and, just as Duchamp prescribed, she removes the aesthetic qualities fiom consideration.

There is, however, an undertone of lament in “Marble” and its neglected gods that distinguishes this poem from Loy’s ekphrastic commentaries on Lewis’s fractured 107 figures and Brancusi’s aesthetic archetype. The deliberate white space, the chosen phrases “white shadows” and “shade / of a lost hand” invoke neutrality and suspension of time, enabling that critical moment of aporia. The ambiguity of the unnamed art object—if indeed Loy intended her audience to envision a specific artwork—induces that moment of impasse between text, audience and meaning that the ekphrastic experience accommodates. Loy provokes a reflection of a past transitional age that shifts forward seamlessly into modernity by delivering implied images of ruins—the lost hand of Apollo in the pediment sculpture, or the temples whose spaces have been silenced by time—delivered in pared-down modem form. Is “Marble” Loy’s most cogent curatorial statement about modem art, modem poetry, or modernity itself? Is this her equivalent to

Eliot’s tragic “fragments shored against my ruins” in The Waste Land} Or is it her response to Pound’s cynical cry fromHugh Selwyn Mauberley that “The ‘age demanded’ chiefly a mould in plaster, / Made with no loss of time, / A prose kinema, not, not assuredly alabaster / Or the ‘sculpture’ of rhyme.”? This analysis barely skims the depth that the under-acknowledged “Marble” offers as a critique of modernism, but, nonetheless, brings the poem to the surface of current critical discourse for new consideration. 108

Afterword

Loy’s discerning use of ekphrasis to “curate” die production and reception of art

objects in the 1910s and the rupturing movements that pushed them through that decade,

can finally be best justified by her invocation of the anxious moment of aporia to

represent the epoch and its ethos. Loy’s appreciation of the inherent instability of ekphrasis and its use as signifier of modem anxiety is enforced, I contend, when it is aligned with W. J. Mitchell’s analysis of ekphrasis as three moments of realization:

What is it in ekphrasis that makes it an object of utopian speculation,

anxious aversion and studied indifference? How can ekphrasis be the

name of a minor poetic genre and a universal principle of poetics? The

answer lies in the network of ideological associations embedded in the

semiotic, sensory and metaphysical conditions that ekphrasis is supposed

to overcome. In order to see the force of these oppositions and

associations, we need to examine the utopian claims of ekphrastic hope

and the anxieties of ekphrastic fear in the light of the relatively neutral

viewpoint of ekphrastic indifference, the assumption that ekphrasis is,

strictly speaking, impossible.(.Picture Theory 156)

In the broadest retrospective terms, certainly, much of the avant-garde’s preoccupation with “making it new” in the 1910s does seem founded in utopian speculation and their impetus to advance was indeed propelled by an anxious aversion of the past. Duchamp’s readymade object and Brancusi’s hyperaesthetic brass curve both betray a studied indifference to their audiences’ emotional response and intellectual evaluation of the objects placed before them. The inverted urinal is, potentially, either highly offensive or 109 highly amusing; the bronze bird is easily admired for its tangible qualities, but a spiritual

“essence” is less easily detected. The question of accessibility underpins these oppositions, as does the embedded network of ideological associations cited by

Mitchell.

Loy re-purposes ekphrasis—fully aware of its inherent “impossible” nature—as a form of modem poetic expressionbecause of its analogous relationship to die much- debated forms of modem art The task of verbally rendering an object so that “it” can be seen, without actually describing “it,” is certainly comparable to the one faced by the visual artist seeking abstraction. The modernist methods of fracturing images and ignoring conventions to obscure “known” subjects, whether they be visual or literary, enhance the uncertainty that the undecipherable painting or poem incites.

Loy’s curatorial selection of art objects for her ekphrastic work anticipates this condition and also parallels the artists’ attempts to eschew categorization. Lewis founded his own brash art movement to reject another and Brancusi and Duchamp consistently refused to be aligned with any “ism.” Despite their obtuse motives, however, their works are still defined by their acts of selection itself, whether it was to choose Vorticism over Cubism, bronze over marble, or one “readymade” over another. After selecting specific artworks herself and representing them within the verbal emblems of her ekphrastic poems, Loy exhibits her work in an appropriately paradoxical “gallery”: she effectively contains the art objects within the texts of the poems, re-creating the original tensions between words and images and re-activating the inverted notions of temporality and spatiality that precipitated the modernist rupture. Although her poetic techniques are visually and linguistically radical, Loy’s self-referential use of a conventional form challenges the 110

“modernity” of an art object framed in a poem, the artist’s aesthetic choices and the cultural ethos that encloses them.

Exploring Loy’s embedded assessments of art objects and art movements reveals her evaluation of this ethos as one undermined by its own speculative nature, despite its

ideological bravado. In “‘The Starry Sky’ of Wyndham Lewis,” the thrust towards the future is propelled by the past, but Loy conflates the painter’s human figures with unidentified “sky worn images.” In “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” the ultimate abstraction of an object stretches to such a degree of sophistication that its meaning hangs in an “as if’ that is potentially inaccessible. In “Marble,” the shadows of the past are silenced by the modernists’ determination to ignore their precedents, while the shade of Apollo’s lost hand hovers over his own ghost—a powerful metaphor for the banished god who once inspired the painting of temple walls, the carving of marble pedestals and the inscription of ideas. Each interpretation alludes to the moment of anxious aporia—suspended time, knowledge and empathy—in which the artist, the art object and the audience hover in liminal space. The lost hand of Apollo cannot help but be metaphoric when it is read against the marble sculpture; but when it is evoked simply as a vacated space in the poem, its meaning hovers between the poet’s verbal and visual allusions.

Loy’s poetic oeuvre deserves to be interpreted in light of her canny evocation of this liminal space. She wields the latent power within ekphrasis to invoke anxiety; she emblematizes, through her pointed selection of art objects, the gap between the eclectic avant-garde aesthetic sensibilities of the 1910s and the encroaching, commercialized impetus of the 1920s to “define” modernism. Her placement within modernist history privileges her viewpoint and should provoke further investigations of the embedded I ll

assessments of her contemporaries’ work. She also deserves to be read more closely as a

poet deeply engaged with the complicated relationship between the production and

reception of art objects: she evokes die simultaneous exhilaration and perplexity that

invade the aporia of the personal encounter with an art object, one that she knows must

be respected if the production and reception of images—and the words that describe

them—are to have meaning in a modem world. Mina Loy’s sophisticated poems, so

inherently modem in their simplicity and so ingeniously self-referential as visual and

textual manifestations of ekphrasis, invite recollections strategically suspended in time.

These recollections might be prompted by the curve of an etched line, by the lustre of a polished stone, or by the hush of a sound—but they must be provoked if the audience is to negotiate that critical impasse of speculative anxiety before rushing forward into the meaningful encounters that Loy has so masterfully staged. 112

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Candidate’s full name: Sara Jane Dunton

Universities attended: University of New Brunswick 2005-2009, BA 1st Class Honours with Distinction

Publications: “The ‘Mainstream’ Muddies Marxism in David Fennario’s Balconville.” UNB Department o f English: The Journal o f Student Writing. 30 (November 2009): 9-25.

Conference Presentations:University of British Columbia Graduate Research Conference: Print Modernities. Vancouver, BC, May 2-3,2011. “Mina Loy’s Modernist Icon: ‘Brancusi’s Golden Bird.’”