I take Love Songs to be a single work, within which each song is at once a fragment and a whole. It attacks romanticized sexuality as one of the principal means of subjugating women. It explores the damaging myth which creates not love but powerless contempt, and through a variety of strategies, including unresolved ambiguity, approaches knowledge/knowing in an experiential (episodic) rather than a schematized (narrative or linear) way. It understands definition to be imprisonment. As Song 29 puts it, love does not bring "sexual equality," nor even "simple satisfactions"; instead, it brings "own-self distortion." Parodic, comic, angry, scornful, contemptuous, sharp-tongued, occasionally wistful, haughty, ironic, cultivating incohesion and unbalance, it interrogates formally and thematically the dominant male poetic tradition, and seeks to neutralize not only the myths by which women are disempowered, but also the social and psychological definitions of womanhood and the means by which that identity can be expressed. (77)
2.
"These fragments have I shored against my ruins," says Eliot in The Waste Land; "I store up nights against you," says Lay (Love Songs 21), dark and silent. Lacking Eliot's sense of cultural and poetic continuity, in terms of both the tradition and the poem itself, Loy feels the imperatives of poetic discontinuity, and deploys lexical and syntactic strategies in order to achieve it. Wit operates throughout.
Lexical. a) Lay's vocabulary is notable for its reference to body- fluids and to body-parts. There is "mucous-membrane" (1), saliva in "a trickle" (1) "spermatozoa / at the core of Nothing" (9) and "cymophanous sweat" (28), but arms, hearts, eyes and lips, conventional to love poetry, are not beautified. Lips, if they appear at all, are "promiscuous" (3); eyes are "blind" or "steely"; hands carry a "disheartening odor" (11); breath "booms" (12); all, taken together, adding up to a "pubescent consummation" (23); "human insufficiencies" (29) which, added together, sum only a "drivelling humanity" (15). Conventional love poetry, by metaphorizing the body, makes it impossible to be explicit about the body; obliged to metaphorize the world of feeling, it evades male and female sexuality. Love Songs sharply distinguishes the biological from the romantic, the physical from the metaphysical. With great skill,
b) Loy exploits the mixing of vocabulariesóespecially the clinical or laboratory (scientific) with the colloquial and the conventionally "poetic." This can also be described as a mix of the abstract with the concrete, of the polysyllabic with the monosyllabic, of the latinate with Anglo-Saxon. This affords irony without detachment, and at the same time (combined with Loy's interesting syntax and punctuation) distances the voice (which is hardly "unified"), while affording both judgment and a sense of the absurd. Such idiosyncrasy (what in another discipline might be called an idiolect) affords Love Songs, that is to say, a highly personal voice, and it is difficult to distinguish the voice of the poet from the voice of the poem.
Syntactic. Syntactic strategies operate at both the global and the local level. a) Global: Overall Love Songs displays a number of binaries. Speech breaks in, is loud, drivelling, hiccupping, braying brassily; yet it is also a silent harangue. Binaries include, then, speech/silence; and also body/mind; two-ness as conjoined/severed; dissonance/resonance; day/night, sun/moon, etc; production/destruction, birth/death. These binaries are not resolved, they do not cancel each other out, for two reasons. First, though the overall structure of the poem is episodic, one episode does not stand in contrast to its neighbouróthe progression is cumulative or agglutinative. Second, though many of the episodes are double-voiced, and can indeed be read in at least two ways (for example, number 13, number 22), the sheer comedy and bawdy hostility of the opening poems (especially 1 and 2) prevent those two voices from neutralizing each other. The poem, and indeed the whole sequenceódespite, or perhaps because of, its rageóis finally a-positional, and refuses to move toward the sort of conclusion binary oppositions customarily offer. It takes quite seriously Whitman's question, "to be in any form, what is that?", and resists the strictures of definition. This is perhaps most apparent at the local level.
b) Local: I've already mentioned syntax at the local level of the line-break, phrase-boundary, and sentence. The subversiveness of Loy's syntax is liberating, for it denies both linearity and hierarchies of the sort found in the conventional English sentence; frequently, what she writes does not "make sense" in ordinary terms, and her language, as Fanny Howe observes of what she calls poetic language,
transforms the state of being lost into that of being free, by making judgment on judgment itself. Poetry writes twice, and produces another sound from the ordinary. In this sense it is free out of its longing to escape the cell of syntax. (54)
When the sentences do "make sense," they frequently rely on the syntactic authority of aphoristic and gnomic utterance. As Carolyn Burke has commented, the use of aphoristic patterns enables Loy to play the radical enclosure of the epigram against and with the radical openness of her larger formal (global) strategies.
The subversiveness of Loy's syntax is most readily apparent in the combination of line-break, punctuation (and its lack) and vocabulary, and is part of Loy's recognition that conventional syntax is unavailable to womenólike Stein, and like Nicole Brossard some sixty years later, she felt the need to reinvent the language. Perhaps one reason why readers are only now beginning to pay close attention to Love Songs, almost three-quarters of a century after they were written, is our acute awareness of the central discontinuity of experienceóthere has been a shift in our model: "A central aspect of the writing process for women [now]," remarks Fred Wah, "is . . . dissonance and fracture" (376).
3.
This is clearly visible in Song 13. In earlier Love Songs, phrasal boundaries blurred. Here, the speaker blurs too; we cannot be sure how many voices there are, and the poem moves, in its multiplicity of voice, to exploit ironic doubleness as a major strategy, playing the sheer destructiveness of the romantic myth's definition of woman against the speaker's perhaps helpless rejection of all definition as ye' another illusion. The poem plays with a series of oppositions, setting them against visible silences, gaps on the page which may on one hand indicate a change of speaker, or on the other, enact what cannot be spoken. Line two plays the illusoriness of words and of speech against the silent reality of the gap:
I have got to tell you and I can't tell.
The non-verbal, the physical, tells what cannot be told. But the struggle between having to tell and being unable to tell is complicated by the pun in "can't tell," which can mean "don't know." Hovering between speech and silence, between knowledge and ignorance, between the nameable and the nameless "something" (which appears nine times in the first 13 lines), and (possibly) between reason and intuition, the tensions between "I" and "you" are amplified rather than resolved. In the central stanza (line 16), when "I" and "you" (hitherto kept spatially at a distance) apparently resolve into "us," the transformation is intolerable, for the opening stanza's list of what is new (name, dimension, use, illusion) becomes a list of very (jealous, suspicious, conservative, cruel), and the "we" of the following lines (18, 25) separates into the poem's final list, "me youóyouóme."
Subject to the male gaze the speaker is caught in a series of contraries and conflicting imperatives which seem actively to seek the dissolution of her identity. Whatever love is, it does not remain inviolate. The tension between desire and the experience of fragmentation which is its companion is reflected in the poem's violent oppositions: push/pull; tell/not tell; shiny/resonant; I must not see/you must not hear; come to me/keep away; only for you/ only for me; ambient [surrounding]/in your eyes [containment]; please give/Don't. The tension is released, though it does not wholly disappear, by the intrusive exclamation, possibly sardonic, "Oh that's right," which draws back from this multivoiced scene into a single voice. It is very difficult, though, to know quite how to speak that lineóalmost as though, subject to the male gaze, the voice has lost its own hearing. However we say or hear it, though, it is emphatically and unequivocally a solitary voice. It offers a somewhat confused critique of what has gone before, for through its imperatives and its requests it seeks to hand over control to "you," the irony ("Don't let me understand you Don't realize me") ambiguated and double-tongued. All of this adds up to a vision of love in which "together" means annihilation of the self, yet is illusory, a melding in which, the final line suggests, "me" is absorbed into "you," but "you" remains distinct from "me." But that remains suggestion only; in suggesting the possibility of merging identities, this line severely undercuts whatever position the poem might seem to be taking. . . .
Love Songs is deliberately graceless, and it enacts its own meanings. Rejecting forward linear movement by circling, regressing (the binaries are dropped, picked up, dropped); rejecting utterly the notion of the well-made poem, it seeks to undermine the notion of privileged content. It refuses to privilege any of the poem's given vocabularies and syntactic patterns, it works to neutralize the sense of a unifying central voice. And it rejects the sort of cultural resonance that immediate contemporaries like Eliot cultivate: in contrast to The Waste Land or even Prufrock this is a sparsely populated poem which seeks severely to control connotation and disempower the aesthetic. The overall effect, then, is of a dismissal of conventional literary discourse and of the customary hierarchies of poetic genres, and it questions (albeit tentatively) the conventional relations between author, world, and text. It rejects, that is to say, that literary discourse whose voice "break[s] on the confines of passion," which rejects the explicitly physical and sexual.