With these poems, Loy in effect diagnoses an end to love poetry in the light of historical circumstance, anticipating that poststructuralist line of inquiry which urges a rereading of "lyric" as a culturally responsive construct. Instead, her poetry constitutes a critique of the very demand that lyric expression be viewed apart from the social world. (87)

Loy rarely uses terminal punctuation to mark endstops or line breaks. Nor does she enjamb lines to modify semantic or syntactic significance. Unlike Gertrude Stein, Loy does not seem preoccupied with unlocking words from their conventional meaning. Appearances to the contrary, most of her lines are recognizable syntactic units. But it is the voice and not the eye that makes this discovery. By doing away with most punctuation, and using dashes to give the poem the look of broken or truncated speech, Loy suggests how the written word signifies and perpetuates separation. But in the performing voice, an aural manifestation or metonymic representation of human presence, there is contiguity. Loy's form makes manifest what is worked out thematically: writing both signifies and enacts separation--a condition remedied in the "presence" of human speech.

The kind of tension between the ear and the eye that I have been describing is evident in the first stanza of the opening poem:

Love Songs to Joannes

 

Spawn of Fantasies

Silting the appraisable

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

 

Typographically, the series seems to open with an incomplete utterance, a fragmented noun phrase--"Spawn of Fantasies." But if one starts from the beginning, with the title, "Spawn of Fantasies" becomes the second line and we understand it as an appositive of "Love Songs to Joannes." Referring self-consciously to the artificial nature of her own composition, the speaker gives an ironic twist to the conventional metaphoric linking between children and texts. With this image the speaker alludes to this traumatic loss of a child through abortion--a crisis which . . .is the epicenter of this romance gone wrong. The relationship has failed to realize its reproductive potential, and the speaker refuses to represent the texts "born" out of this loss as adequate compensation or substitution. Instead she speaks derisively of that which is bred out of illusions--the off-spring of what exists only in imagination. (90-91)