[W]hat I am calling Loy's "parallax vision" is the shaping force behind her iconoclastic conceptual and visual sensibilities. . . . The notoriously difficult Love Songs puts this vision to a particular intellectual use: Loy trains it on the gaps in meaning produced by Futurism's gendered and polarized discursive field. Many of Love Songs' themes, if not its network of images, are developed through the heterogeneous vantage points of the poem's restless parallax vision. Significantly, the putative addressee of the poem, "Joannes" (modelled on Loy's onetime Futurist lover, Giovanni Papini), appears not to have access to the poem's multiple vantage points; his blinkered conceptual apparatus limits his field to just a narrow strip of the poem's physical and emotional territory. Irony in this sense is structural to the poem: Joannes sees little of what the reader sees, and what the reader sees is subject to parallax shifting. In a series of short irregular poems, we are shown the fragments of a discontinuous sexual and intellectual relationship; but we are also shown alternative fragments, equally discontinuous, of a relationship that might have been. In short, we are made to see, almost immediately, that "what is" is only one of several sets of charged fragments, the presence of which undermine any definitive claims to comprehensive representation. Furthermore, the "meaning" of all those fragments is shaped by a kind of negativity, and constructed through invocations of emptiness or void, or by suggested absences frequently indicated in the poem by blank or white space, or by verbal images of whiteness or blankness.
I offer poem #18 as an example of how negativity works in Love Songs. This short imagist poem foregrounds the meaning of "night" as something that is positively rendered only by its relation to the negative space of a landscape:
Out of the severing
Of hill from hill
The interim
Of star from star
The nascent
Static
Of night
Structural and constitutive meaning inheres between stars, between hills, and in the contradiction of "nascent / Static." The poem is generated by a powerful indeterminacy which equates "severing" with an act of creation: night (a matrix unto itself) is birthed out of the sluice of its own making, and in that act of self-creation, night produces the contours of its own context.
Although this kind of meaning holds little significance within any field of positivist discourse (such as Futurism's), here and throughout Love Songs it is the matrix that bears the weight of meaning. A textual matrix produces the poem's various concrete configurations; equally important, the foregrounding of the matrix in the poem relativizes the value of those various configurations. Put still another way, the dialectical movement of negativity, perhaps most familiar on the level of interpretation as a species of diffÈrance, is the focal point of the poem's parallax vision . . . (390-91)
[. . . .]
The speaker of Love Songs sees sex as an act of pleasure, for example, but also as an act of potential conception, potential dissolution of egos, potential procreation, potential entrapment. If Joannes seems to understand sex as "Only the impact of lighted bodies / Knocking sparks off each other / In chaos" (LLB 97) or as the perfunctory conjoining of the rigidly separate entities of "Desire Suspicion Man Woman" (LLB 95), the broader fabric of the poem, by contrast, offers multiple vantage points on sex. Seen from a certain perspective, the rich signifiers of sex may together compose, for example,
A cosmos
Of coloured voices
And laughing honey
And spermatozoa
At the core of Nothing
In the milk of the Moon (LLB 94-95)
The fattened language of fertilityómilk and honey and spermó suggests the endless products of the physical act of sex. Spermatozoa (the most obvious agent of reproduction) is just one ingredient in this cosmogony of fecundity whose center is Nothing, and whose circumference is marked by the products of what was once Nothing: feast, baby, orgasm, love, and any number of other manifestations of sex's potential. The improvisational language of the fertile cosmos signifies in a register sharply different from the oft-repeated Futurist insistence on "life freed from sentimentality and lust." In the latter view, men who "go through life almost without love" are to be emulated through "swift, casual [sexual] contacts with women." The scrotal "skin-sack" in Love Songs' poem #2 is an appropriately instrumental image for such a doctrine: the man to whom it is attached understands his own sex organ "More [as] a clock-work mechanism" (LLB 92) than as a repository of potential. Love Songs' method, by contrast, employs a kaleidoscopic field of vision to suggest the breadth of that potential.
In fact that field of vision in Love Songs includes more than the spatial and disjunctive aspects of the poem's canvas. It also includes a temporal component which calls upon us to "see time" cinemagraphically: to watch events unfold diachronically and synchronically and even retrochronically. This latter form of visionóseeing events backwardsóseems especially antithetical to the Futurist valorization of forward velocity, but it is integral to the images in the first two stanzas of poem #12. The poem develops the creative (because unstable) meaning that inheres between the landmarks of gender:
Voices break on the confines of passion
Desire Suspicion Man Woman
Solve in the humid carnage
Flesh from flesh
Draws the inseparable delight
Kissing at gasps to catch it (LLB 95)
In this scenario, the sound of intruding voices parses cosmic, undifferentiated passion into discrete identity. In the second line desire reverts incrementally through bourgeois possessiveness into gendered identity: ultimately man and woman "solve"ói.e. reverse the process of dis-solvingóand as they do, the barriers between monolithic, naturalized genders materialize in the midst of sex. The film continues to run backwards, and we see figures morphing out of the "humid carnage" created by sex and kisses; by the end of the second stanza we understand the wrenching force of the desire and suspicion that issue in "man" and "woman." The lovers' physical disentanglement from cosmic fusionókisses drawing apartósevers sexual delight as the "flesh from flesh" of their brief Holy Communion becomes the flesh of man and woman solving into bourgeois roles. When these stanzas are read alongside the speaker's sarcastic harangue in poem #13, it becomes clear that the speaker aims to accuse Joannes of cleaving to those bourgeois roles, and of doing so with precisely the same conservative suspicion that Futurists ascribe to women:
Don't let me understand you Don't realize me
Or we might tumble together
Depersonalized
Identical
Into the terrific Nirvana
Me youóyouóme (LLB 97)
At the same time that the image of sexual Nirvana threatens the carefully fortified subject position of Joannes, the poem's larger vision of negativityólike the Nothing of the Moon and "Clear carving / Breath-giving / Pollen smelling / Space" (#19)óasserts itself as the superior, not to say the more avant-garde vision.
Love Songs' approach to deferred meaning equips it to investigate the phenomena of conception, fertility, birthóthe topics ignored in all but a few works of Loy's contemporary avant-gardists. The allusions to abortion that my students always noticeóthe images of failed births and strewn feathers of fetuses, the round, dilating vacuum and the bloody knees, the "petering out" of a "procreative truth"ósuggest that in this poem sex is inseparable from a complex of social, political, and organic issues. The experience of maternity (in both its fruition and its "infructuous" disruption)óis shown to be coterminous with a vision of potential experience in this poem, which displays many possible outcomes at once, and offers the meaning of fetuses aborted or sperm gone astray as deferred meanings occupying the freighted spaces of "what might be" between "what is."
This reading of Love Songs does not aim to reduce Futurism to the figure of a straw man. To merely "decode" the poem as a covert polemic against a contemporary avant-garde movement is to simplify the breadth and nuance of its intellectual and lyric achievement, and, equally, to underread the irony embedded in Futurist misogyny. In the first place, the poem is after all a Modernist long poem, aggressively fragmented and non-narrative in structure, experimental in its spatialized lyricism. In the second place, while it is true that Loy's Florence writings are filled with blatant parodies of Futurist sex roles, it must also be said that Futurism was neither the source nor the predominant disseminator of the sexual conventions against which Loy struggled. Loy knew well, from her own parents' disastrous Victorian marriage, that sexual unhappiness was written into the codes of patriarchal matrimony.