[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.

Invariably attention focuses in the first stanza on "Pig Cupid," usually taken to be an ominous phallic figure who threatens the "I" of the second and following stanzas. It is further noted that the first two stanzas both peter out in images of "mucous-membrane" and "a trickle of saliva," so that in the latter part of the poem the speaker retreats into a self-protective "virginity" to strengthen her sense of selfhood. Such a reading is plausible enough, yet is troubling in that it relies on a rather conventional aesthetic and moral framework.

[The "Love Songs"] are haunting not only for their exploration of sexual dissonance but because they are drenched in the atmosphere of World War I. They are a peculiar kind of war poetry. Their range of attitudes--the tonal shifts from hopefulness and anticipation through wariness and suspicion to vexation and bitterness--may all be understood as those of the outsider, the nonparticipant, the woman whose life is put on hold yet deeply affected by the collapse of civilization around her.

[Note: Januzzi provides an exhaustive annotated bibliography of Loy's published works, "in order of appearance, including artworks in reproduction and significant posthumous publications," as well as a magnificently comprehensive bibliography of critical writings on Loy. It is from the latter that we have drawn the following three excerpts, beginning in 1980 with Kouidis's book-length study of Loy. Note, however, that Januzzi's critical bibliography goes back as far as 1914.]

The cycle comprises a powerful critique of heterosexual love and romance as a textual creation of the phallocentric-centric discourse, even as this discourse was being subjected to modernist revisions. In the first poem, Loy inverts the usual conception of romance as the great elevator of base feeling into an ennobling transcendence. In Loy's view, romance in itself is debasing, and belief in it keeps one bound to a narrow and constrictive consciousness:

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In the attempt to show what a "poetics of absence" might look like in practice, I turn now to some specific poems by Zukofsky. My principal exhibit is the well-known "To My Wash-stand" (All, pp. 59-60). This poem, written in 1932, antedates the writing of Bottom by at least twenty years. Yet as early as this poem we can already see Zukofsky passing through a poetics of presence, into something quite different.

The question that matters for reading "Mantis" and Zukofsky's own twisting interpretation of the poem is: what form should that take? "That" being five or six thoughts' reflection (pulse's witness) of what was happening without transitions, the actual twisting of many and diverse thoughts (the coincidence of the mantis lost in the subway, the growing oppression of the poor), the contents of "the simultaneous,/ The diaphanous, historical/ In one head." That is, what shape best fits or suits them, what shape do they in themselves define?

"Mantis," like so much of Zukofsky’s work, both reflects his tuition in the "school of Pound" and demonstrates the extent to which he brings a self-consciousness beyond Pound's to that tradition. Like Pound's "Sestina: Altaforte," "Mantis" is a sestina, a seven-stanza poem in a form invented by Dante's "miglior fabbro," the Troubadour Arnaut Daniel. The requirements of the form are clearly specified and rigorously bind the poet.

The sestina "'Mantis'" and the "Interpretation" that accompanies it illustrate a critical stage in the transition beyond Imagism. The poem superficially echoes the style of an early Pound or Williams lyric whose central image captures--and sublimates--a vignette of urban squalor. Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" is a concise example:

The apparition of these faces in a crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

 

Perhaps the most graphic example of formalism in dialogue with modern materialism is Zukofsky's sestina "Mantis," which not only addresses the alienation of life under modern capitalism but does so by debating the "implications of a too regular form."