Tuesday, April 24, 2018

Paschal moon: easily reducible adolescences


It’s true that when we hear the words “Poets of World War I”, we typically don’t think of women. Partly, of course, because women were for the most part kept away from the front, so whatever they wrote about was de facto about their life waiting at home. But because that’s how they experienced the war, that perspective is still valid.

In past years I’ve given you examples from Eleanor Farjeon and Anna Akhmatova. Today I’ve got a little something from the poet-painter Mina Loy, born in 1882 in London, resident of most of the artistic centers of Europe before moving to the United States in 1916. Modernism, futurism, Dada, feminism, surrealism, post-modernism, conceptualism—Loy threw herself into all the major movements of the times.

Loy considered herself more a visual artist than a poet, but she knew her way around a page. “The Dead” was written in 1920, and for someone who didn’t have first-hand experience of the war, she certainly captured its aftermath, using all the modernist imagery then available.

“The Dead”

We have flowed out of ourselves  
Beginning on the outside 
That shrivable skin          
Where you leave off        

Of infinite elastic        
Walking the ceiling          
Our eyelashes polish stars            

Curled close in the youngest corpuscle             
Of a descendant
We spit up our passions in our grand-dams            

Fixing the extension of your reactions             
Our shadow lengthens    
In your fear        

You are so old   
Born in our immortality            
Stuck fast as Life             
In one impalpable            
Omniprevalent Dimension             

We are turned inside out 
Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs                     
Street lights footle in our ocular darkness            

Having swallowed your irate hungers             
Satisfied before bread-breaking    
To your dissolution          
We splinter into Wholes          
Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow             
Among the refuse of your unborn centuries            
In our busy ashbins         
Stink the melodies           
Of your         
So easily reducible          
Adolescences    

Our tissue is of that which escapes you             
Birth-Breaths and orgasms           
The shattering tremor of the static        
The far-shore of an instant            
The unsurpassable openness of the circle    
Legerdemain of God       

Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums
Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves             
Break on our edgeless contours   

The mouthed echoes of what        
has exuded to our companionship
Is horrible to the ear        
Of the half that is left inside them.








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