Mina Loy’s“Love Songs” and the Limits of Imagism By Carolyn Burke

Thesis Statement "In these little known 'Love Songs,' Loy's Futurist-inspired version of collage poetics embodies both her speaker's awareness that the forms of the past no longer obtain and her unavoidable nostalgia for more traditional codes of male-female relations" (38).

Ezra Pound’s Imagism and Vorticism 1. Imagism: "as the sort of poetry where painting or sculpture seems as if it were 'just coming over into speech' Its images sought to approximate the wordless condition of the visual arts, their concentrated signifying ability and presentational immediacy. Such images would 'present an intellectual and emotional complex in an instance of time'" (38). 2. Vorticism: "as a static sculptural arrangement of images in juxtapositions that might posit equations for complex mental mental states but that could not enact movement through emotional tension to any change or resolution" (38).

Ezra Pound’s Imagism and Vorticism 3. Limitation: The subject matter is limited to the projection of emotional state onto selected images. "Because of its limited focus, Imagism could not take cognizance of the need for a more conceptual language to convey the poet's reflection upon the emotional states conveyed through the images" (39).

Mina Loy’s Futurist Inspired Aesthetics 1. Pound's forceful mental imprint upon matter and Loy's concern of the physical properties of language 2. the modern linguistic liberating energy and and the feminist changing consciousness.

Mina Loy’s Futurist Inspired Aesthetics 3. Loy’s vision of psychological and syntactic connection “The broken syntax of Loy's 'Love Poems' embodies a disillusioned vision of psychosexual relations that reflects their period of composition, during the first years of the Great War. Loy's syntactic strategy takes into account Marinetti's parole in liberate, words set free from the constraints of formal and grammatical conventions, without, however, espousing his voluntarist and misogynistic ideology. Where Marinetti rejects romantic love as a 'passatista' idealization of sexual relations, Loy writes instead of the psychic and social disconnectedness that result from a love affair come apart at the seams" (40).

“Love Songs” 1. The image pattern and the syntax: "Words and phrases float on the white space of the page is a loosely connected patter, like a free-floating collage in which the elements stick onto the surface with relative and changing degrees of adhesiveness" (41).

“Love Songs” 2. The syntax, images, and the theme of incompletion a. The uncertainties of perception and the reliable images b. The images in flux and the experience of sexuality- "the momentary loss of fixed identities- a blending or exchange of 'images' which then fall back into their old oppositions"(42). c. The theme of incompletion: “No whole or complete statement is possible given this vision of sexual non-connectedness until the speaker steps back form the experience in the final section of the first poem. […] Non-union is reflected on the page in the poem's incomplete statements and non-closure (43).

“Love Songs” 3. Pound's theories of the poet's intellectual power at this time, Loy's scepticism

Conclusion “Loy's Futurist inspired aesthetic allows her to depict stages in the mind's shifting attempts to understand both the emotional riddles posed by intimate relationships and the cultural conventions that shape our response to them. [...] Loy drew […] on the tempt and imagery of the urban metropolis, combining a receptivity to its jagged rhythms with a heightened awareness of its unstable intensity. This way of bringing painting ‘over speech’ not only favored the use of urban images; it also recognized the poet’s need for sustained reflection upon their significance in the larger context of modern life” (45).