"Love Songs" opens with one of its two most frequently cited sections, in which "Pig Cupid" presides over the writing and instigates the erotic and its critique. "Pig" makes a greedy, lurid, Id-filled muse, rooting "erotic garbage" rather than shooting arrows, a drastically anti-conventional figure with neither the whimsy of echt Cupids nor the possible transcendences of Amor. Pig Cupid is the "Spawn of Fantasies"óthe ova from which fantasy arises, or the offspring of reproductive encounters. He is as well a phallic or lusty disturber of the peace, sticking his snout into "erotic garbage"óthose nice narratives of "'Once upon a time.'" Pig is, in short, a fusion of male-female-child, an erotic-satyric holy family in which there is a female writer. Loy calls attention to the fictive or scripted nature of the love plot in an arch, ironic, and bitter way. . . .
"Love Songs" is not a narrative poem in the normal discursive sense of that word, but it does "make a progression of realizations," and hence sequence is vital to it (Kouidis 1980, 62, citing Loy). Loy traces the course of a love affair, involving open sexual desire, and her active, somewhat shamed pursuit of an apparently flagging partner, the complex of satisfactions and dissatisfactions centering on a split between sexual urge and suspicious analysis, an apparent break from her lover about which she is both cynical and wounded, and finally a passionate consideration of sexuality and reproduction. The early part of the poem shows the "Loy" figure enthralled and pursuing her lover, travelling to him, even stalking him through city streets at night, at once exhilarated by her passion and debased by it. In one of these sections, the female figure is a marionette of passion who "knows the Wire-Puller intimately" (LLB 94). . . .The poem negotiates the separate pulls toward sexual pleasure and emotional danger. (50-51)
["Love Songs" is] filled with sex-radical evocations of pleasures both sexual and intellectual, and the equal meeting of the partners on a sexual terrain. The poet enters into her consideration of the "wild oats / Sown in mucous-membrane" with the clear admonition "These are suspect places" (LLB 91). "Sowing wild oats" comes from a proverbial expression; "mucous-membrane" is a medical term. The mixture of dictions in this logopoeic style has its origins, as I have argued elsewhere, in the feminist critique of a foundational cluster of materials about romance in poems. . . . The main character assumes various postures for this investigation, among them a "wise virgin" pose, holding an investigatory lantern aloft so it will not be blown out by "the bellows / Of experience." For this lantern show (like a slide show, the sections of the poem offer individual moments of quasi-narrative montage), the poet takes her own cool, analytic "eye" as the source of light, but that analytic "lantern" is involved with inflammatory orgasmic imagery: "An eye in a Bengal light / Eternity in a skyrocket" (LLB 91). Negotiating sexual and analytic passions, the poem often presents impacted and intellectualized languages of wit graphically describing sexual moments and apparatuses. The gaze of power (narrator's eye as illuminating lens) rests on the man. And even--in the first view we have of him--on his genitalia as a metaphor for him: "The skin sack / In which a wanton duality / Packed / All the completions of my infructuous impulses / Something in the shape of a man . . ." (LLB 91-92). Despite this lucid female gaze, her completions are inside his testicles: the sperm to make her fruitful. But the "wanton duality" is not simply an abstract portrait of his genitalia, but of her double impulse toward licentious, rebellious sex and desire for male fertilization. (54)
[. . . .]
With "laughing honey / And spermatozoa / At the core of Nothing / In the milk of the Moon," and continuing for six sections, Loy composes precisely on or alluding to (hetero)sexual intercourse with a striking frankness of diction, and in a great variety of registers, including terror, danger, pleasure, resistance, lust, controlling wit (LLB 94-97). These are not, it appears from their tonal differences, narratives of one erotic encounter, but rather six separate, distinct, and precisely noted representations of activities and attitudes that go with sex, with special attention to the similarities between the partners at the moment of pleasure when (according to Loy) male-female distinctions dissolve, yet a moment whose social and psychological context is precisely the dangers of that difference: "seismic orgasm" (LLB 105). For instance, the obliteration of gender distinctions seems especially keen in "humid carnage / / Flesh from flesh / Draws the inseparable delight / Kissing at gasps to catch it," and then to "welded together" and "knocking sparks off each other" (LLB 95-97). "Welded" with its sparks puns on and rejects the more familiar phrase "wedded together" with an industrial metaphor. But even Loy's most distinctive phrasesó"humid carnage" or "seismic orgasm"ócombine pleasurable words and dangerous words. "Carnage" reaches etymologically for "flesh" and connotatively for "carnal," with a historical pun, "dying," but denotatively for "mass slaughter." In "seismic," also, pleasure and danger contend; the technical term for earthquake is far fiercer than the sentimental notion that in orgasm "the earth moved."
Charming and alarming is this haiku, allusively complete in just three lines:
Shuttle-cock and battle-door
A little pink love
And feathers are strewn
(LLB 95)
The shuttlecock of badminton bears irresistible double overtones, and the battledore, a flat wooden paddle (and the old word for badminton itself), is provocatively re-spelled "battle-door," to suggest site of penetration. This first line emphasizes the physical difference between the sexes, yet the sport that can be made of these differences. "Pink love" smacks of a fond eros of knowing possession, rather than unconsummated yearning. The "feathers" signal a comic devastation of the "birdie" or cock, a triumph perhaps of the woman, or perhaps mutual release in plucking. Sex becomes. a game, a sport, a cartoon.
Mina Loyís "Love Songs," then, contains a unique representation of sexual intercourse, and many also imaginatively graphic descriptions of specifically sexual apparatuses. Of thirty-four sections, fourteen (comprising about forty percent of the poem) are arguably centered on different occasions of/acts of sexual intercourse, or may be said prominently to mention sex. And this representation is drastically a-conventional, a challenge to prudes, and, more interestingly, to the hegemonic romance narratives of the lyric genre, but equally well a challenge to modernist libertarian thinking. For there are aspects of this urgencyóthe turn to reproductive sexuality at the endówhich could be seen as radically conservative.
[ . . . ]
As she represents sexual intercourse, the loss of individual gender binaries was an advantage and a pleasure, the place where disparate gender interests merge. But there is danger: a lust for orgasm necessarily overrides a sense of ego or boundaries. So the "Nirvana" is terrible / terrifying and terrific / exhilarating, as they "tumble together / Depersonalized / Identical / Into the terrific Nirvana / Me youóyouóme" (LLB 97). A woman could fear that "depersonalized" erosion of identity. These metaphors of chaos or annihilation in sexual bliss show the dangerous loss of identity, perhaps reversion to a "femininity" of dissolution and passivity, defined by stereotypical gender ideas which Loy has staked herself upon resisting. The pleasures and dangers of merging boundaries are in unresolvable circulation in the poem.
In the end "seismic orgasm" has yet another function. It is necessary to the utopian building of a new female gender identityóone in which "mistress and mother" are not distinct (LLB 269, 270). For Lay, autonomous sexuality and her "freewoman" brand of autonomous feminism still involved a deeply felt claim to maternity. The argument toward the end of the poem ("Evolution fall foul of / Sexual equality / Prettily miscalculate / Similitude") strongly suggests that "sexual equality" and species meliorism are at odds (LLB 104). When one factors in Loy's rejection of a feminism of equal rights and equal access, the phrase suggests that mainstream feminism is going to fall foul of natural forces, but that her eugenicist feminism, proudly set forth in the "Feminist Manifesto," will not. To build better species, the sexes should remain, in certain of their aspects, strongly differentiatedó(intelligent) womanly women meeting (intelligent) manly men. And yet, at the same time, the linking of sexual activity with reproduction was a potentially conservative position, when the whole history of modem struggles for the acceptance of sexual practices (whether contraception, abortion, homosexual expression, or masturbation) has been to valorize non-reproductive sex, what Richard Brown wittily dubs "copulation without population" (Brown 1985, 63).