EPC / Mina Loy – Songs to Joannes

Mina Loy
from Songs to Joannes (1917)

	Songs to Joannes ^v
	I Spawn of Fantasies Silting the appraisable Pig Cupid his rosy snout Rooting erotic garbage "Once upon a time" Pulls a weed white star-topped ^v Among wild oats sown in mucous-membrane ^v I would an eye in a Bengal light ^v Eternity in a sky-rocket Constellations in an ocean Whose rivers run no fresher Than a trickle of saliva These are suspect places I must live in my lantern Trimming subliminal flicker Virginal to the bellows Of Experience Coloured glass II The skin-sack In which a wanton duality Packed All the completion of my infructuous impulses Something the shape of a man To the casual vulgarity of the merely observant More of a clock-work mechanism Running down against time To which I am not paced My finger-tips are numb from fretting your hair A God's door-mat On the threshold of your mind III We might have coupled In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment Or broken flesh with one another At the profane communion table Where w'ine is spill'd on promiscuous lips ^v We might have given birth to a butterfly With the daily news ^v Printed in blood on its wings IV Once in a mezzanino The starry ceiling Vaulted an unimaginable family Bird-like abortions With human throats And Wisdom's eyes Who wore lamp-shade red dresses And woolen hair One bore a baby In a padded porte-enfant Tied with a sarsenet ribbon ^v To her goose's wings But for the abominable shadows I would have lived Among their fearful furniture To teach them to tell me their secrets Before I guessed —Sweeping the brood clean out V Midnight empties the street Of all but us Three I am undecided which way back To the left a boy —One wing has been washed in the rain The other will never be clean any more— Pulling door-bells to remind Those that are snug To the right a haloed ascetic Threading houses Probes wounds for souls —The poor can't wash in hot water— And I don't know which turning to take ^v Since you got home to yourself—first VI I know the Wire-Puller intimately And if it were not for the people On whom you keep one eye You could look straight at me And Time would be set back VII My pair of feet Smack the flag-stones That are something left over from your walking The wind stuffs the scum of the white street Into my lungs and my nostrils Exhilarated birds Prolonging flight into the night Never reaching— — — — — — — VIII I am the jealous store-house of the candle-ends That lit your adolescent learning — — — — — — — — — — — Behind God's eyes There might Be other lights IX When we lifted Our eye-lids on Love A cosmos Of coloured voices And laughing honey And spermatozoa ^v At the core of Nothing In the milk of the Moon X Shuttle-cock and battle-door ^v A little pink-love And feathers are strewn XI Dear one at your mercy Our Universe Is only A colorless onion You derobe Sheath by sheath Remaining A disheartening odour About your nervy hands XII 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 Is it true That I have set you apart Inviolate in an utter crystallization Of all the jolting of the crowd Taught me willingly to live to share Or are you Only the other half Of an ego's necessity Scourging pride with compassion To the shallow sound of dissonance And boom of escaping breath XIII Come to me There is something I have got to tell you and I can't tell Something taking shape Something that has a new name A new dimension A new use A new illusion It is ambient And it is in your eyes Something shiny Something only for you Something that I must not see It is in my ears Something very resonant Something that you must not hear Something only for me Let us be very jealous Very suspicious Very conservative Very cruel Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations Disorb inviolate egos Where two or three are welded together They shall become god — — — — — — — — Oh that's right Keep away from me Please give me a push Don't let me understand you Don't realise me Or we might tumble together Depersonalized Identical Into the terrific Nirvana Me you — you — me XIV Today Everlasting passing apparent imperceptible To you I bring the nascent virginity of —Myself for the moment No love or the other thing Only the impact of lighted bodies Knocking sparks off each other In chaos XV Seldom Trying for Love Fantasy dealt them out as gods Two or three men looked only human But you alone Superhuman apparently I had to be caught in the weak eddy Of your drivelling humanity To love you most XVI We might have lived together In the lights of the Arno Or gone apple stealing under the sea Or played Hide and seek in love and cob-webs And a lullaby on a tin-pan And talked till there were no more tongues To talk with And never have known any better XVII I don't care Where the legs of the legs of the furniture are walking to Or what is hidden in the shadows they stride Or what would look at me If the shutters were not shut Red a warm colour on the battle-field Heavy on my knees as a counterpane Count counter I counted the fringe of the towel Till two tassels clinging together Let the square room fall away From a round vacuum Dilating with my breath XVIII Out of the severing Of hill from hill The interim Of star from star The nascent Static Of night XIX Nothing so conserving As cool cleaving Note of the Q H U ^v Clear carving Breath-giving Pollen smelling Space White telling Of slaking Drinkable Through fingers Running water Grass haulms Grow to Leading astray Of fireflies Aerial quadrille Bouncing Off one another Again conjoining In recaptured pulses Of light You too Had something At that time Of a green-lit glow-worm — — — — — — — — Yet slowly drenched To raylessness In rain XX Let Joy go solace-winged To flutter whom she may concern XXI I store up nights against you Heavy with shut-flower's nightmares — — — — — — — — — — — Stack noons Curled to the solitaire Core of the Sun XXII Green things grow Salads For the cerebral Forager's revival Upon bossed bellies Of mountains Rolling in the sun And flowered flummery Breaks To my silly shoes In ways without you I go Gracelessly As things go XXIII Laughter in solution Stars in a stare Irredeemable pledges Of pubescent consummations Rot To the recurrent moon Bleach To the pure white Wickedness of pain XXIV The procreative truth of Me Petered out In pestilent Tear drops Little lusts and lucidities And prayerful lies Muddled with the heinous acerbity Of your street-corner smile XXV Licking the Arno The little rosy Tongue of Dawn Interferes with our eyelashes — — — — — — — — — We twiddle to it Round and round Faster And turn into machines Till the sun Subsides in shining Melts some of us Into abysmal pigeon-holes Passion has bored In warmth Some few of us Grow to the level of cool plains Cutting our foot-hold With steel eyes XXVI Shedding our petty pruderies From slit eyes We sidle up To Nature — — — that irate pornographist XXVII Nucleus Nothing Inconceivable concept Insentient repose The hands of races Drop off from lmmodifiable plastic The contents Of our ephemeral conjunction In aloofness from Much Flowed to approachment of — — — — NOTHING There was a man and a woman In the way While the lnesolvable Rubbed with our daily deaths Impossible eyes XXVIII The steps go up for ever And they are white And the first step is the last white Forever Coloured conclusions Smelt to synthetic Whiteness Of my Emergence And I am burnt quite white In the climacteric Withdrawal of your sun And wills and words all white Suffuse Illimitable monotone White where there is nothing to see But a white towel Wipes the cymophanous sweat ^v ... —Mist rise of living— From your Etiolate body And the white dawn Of your New Day Shuts down on me Unthinkable that white over there — — — Is smoke from your house XXIX Evolulion fall foul of Sexual equality Prettily miscalculate Similitude Unnatural selection Breed such sons and daughters As shall jibber at each other Uninterpretable cryptonyms Under the moon Give them some way of braying brassily For caressive calling ^v Or to homophonous hiccoughs Transpose the laugh Let them suppose that tears Are snowdrops or molasses Or anything Than human insufficiencies Begging dorsal vertebrae Let meeting be the turning To the antipodean And Form a blurr Anything Than seduce them To the one As simple satisfaction For the other Let them clash together From their incognitoes ^v In seismic orgasm For far further Differentiation Rather than watch Own-self distortion Wince in the alien ego XXX In some Prenatal plagiarism Fœtal buffoons Caught tricks — — — — — From archetypal pantomime ^v Stringing emotions Looped aloft — — — — For the blind eyes That Nature knows us with And the most of Nature is green — — — — — — — — — — What guaranty For the proto-form We fumble Our souvenir ethics to — — — — — — — — XXXI Crucifixion Of a busy-body Longing to interfere so With the intimacies Of your insolent isolation Crucifixion Of an illegal ego's Eclosion On your equilibrium Caryatid of an idea Crucifixion Wracked arms Index extremities In vacuum To the unbroken fall XXXII The moon is cold Joannes Where the Mediterranean — — — — — XXXIII The prig of passion — — — — To your professorial paucity Proto-plasm was raving mad Evolving us — — — XXXIV Love — — — the preeminent litterateur ^v

from "The Lost Lunar Baedeker, Poems" selected and edited by Roger Conover, 1996, New York, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux


	SONGS TO JOANNES notes by Roger Conover. ^ By early 1917 Loy had completed this sequence. She had drafted most of it by August 1915, and made frequent references to the work-in-progress in letters she wrote to Carl Van Vechten that year. Initially, she expressed hesitation about the work (" ... no interest to the public ... for your eyes only") and concern about circulating it at all: "I feel my family on top of me—they want to read some of my pretty poems!. ... one friend ... has dubbed my work pure pornography—". When SH warned her that she was ruining her reputation by writing as she did, she was annoyed and discouraged. But as the year and sequence matured, it was clear that the poem had introjected itself deeply within her psyche: "If this book of mine is no good it settles me—l am the book and /have that esoteric sensation of creating!" By the time she had completed the project, she could hardly contain her eagerness to make it public: "I send herewith—the second part of Songs to Joannes—the best since Sappho—they are interesting .... If you wanted me to be a happy woman for five minutes or more, you would get [them) published .... My book is wonderful—it frightens me."

	In July 1915, the first four sections of what was eventually to become a thirty-four-song cycle appeared under the title "Love Songs" in the inaugural issue of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (1:1, July 1915, pp. 6-8). The scandal created by the debut of Others quickly earned the magazine "a reputation bordering on infamy," Alfred Kreymborg recalled two decades later in Troubadour: An Autobiography (New York: Liveright, 1925). He proudly described the "smallsized riot" that broke out when Others first hit the stands. Loy's "Love Songs" were the favorite victim of the attacks: "Detractors shuddered at Mina Loy's subject-matter and derided her elimination of punctuation marks and the audacious spacing of her lines," not to mention her explicit examination of intercourse, orgasm, bodily function, and sexual desire. Although she was yet to make her first trip to America, Loy had already secured her reputation in the New York avant-garde literary community. In his famous survey of American poetry, Our Singing Strength (New York: Coward-McCann, 1929), Kreymborg again described the "violent sensation" that Loy's "Love Songs" created: her "clinical frankness [and) sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax and punctuation . . . drove our critics into furious despair. . .. The utter nonchalance in revealing the secrets of sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd. It took a strong digestive apparatus to read Mina Loy .... To reduce eroticism to the sty was an outrage, and to do so without verbs, sentence structure .. . [was] even more offensive." Kreymborg was referring to the sty of the limicolous "Pig Cupid" in Loy's all-business opening stanza to "Love Songs," the most famous of all her lines.

	In recalling the outrage of "the average critic . .. here in enlightened Manhattan" toward "Love Songs" in general and its first stanza in particular, Kreymborg also made reference to lineal qualities of another nature. He described the poet as the "exotic and beautiful .. . English Jewess, Mina Loy, an artist as well as a poet," then described her avant-garde credentials: "She imbibed the precepts of Apollinaire and Marinetti and became a Futurist with all the earnestness and irony of a woman possessed and obsessed with the sense of human experience and disillusion." Kreymborg was the first writer to explicitly acknowledge Loy's debt to Filippo Tommaso Marinetti's Futurist manifestos, or to comment directly on her syntax and subject matter in terms of Futurist technique. Her replacement of "the foolish pauses made by commas and periods" with the more intuitional blank spaces and dashes, her mixing of upper- and lower-case letters, her early use of collage and disjunction, and the charged sexual energy of her poems reflect the influence of Marinetti and are consistent with the principles he advocated in his manifesto "The Destruction of Syntax" (1913). That Loy used these techniques in service of aims directly anathematical to Marinetti's makes the cultural impact of her appropriation all the more significant. When her lover became the "other," she turned his tools into her weapons.

	"Had a man written these poems," Kreymborg recalled of "Love Songs," they might have been tolerated. "But a woman wrote them, a woman who dressed like a lady and painted charming lamp-shades." Her title promised romance. But her songs delivered unmelodic sex. Chansons sans chanson.

	Kreymborg's comment was the first to acknowledge a deeply gendered, largely unspoken bias on the part of the critical establishment's initial reaction to these transgressive lyrics. Kreymborg recalled that the early reviews of "Love Songs" puzzled Loy as much as they injured her. This was also true of the early rejections, which Loy referred to in a letter addressed to Carl Van Vechten (n.d., 1915). Carl Van Vechten had been encouraging her to write "something without a sexual undercurrent." Her response: "I know nothing but life—and that is generally reducible to sex ....

	Apro-po of Joannes Songs—why won't the pubs publish [?]. This is very sad. And why did Amy Lowell hate my things? ... Dear Carlo, I'm trying to think of a subject that's not sexy to write about ... & I can't in life."

	By 1920, free love was the toast of free verse; E. E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay were considered the ultra-sexual poets of the hour. Loy's experiments had helped clear a path for both, but she was already being trimmed out of modern poetry's body as if she was a premature growth.

	If critics reacted quickly to the publication of "Love Songs," Loy did, too. Within weeks, she wrote to Carl Van Vechten that she liked "the tendency of 'Others' and the way it look[ed but was] rather sorry that some words were misprinted such as . .. 'Sitting the appraisable' [1. 1.2] instead of silting the appraisable—and 'there are' instead of 'these are suspect places' [1. 1.13]." Comparing the 1915 Others text to the only known MS of this poem (a signed and dated [1915] holograph of I–IV), it is evident that the errors she referred to were not present in the handwritten text (Carl Van Vechten Papers). But it is also possible to see how the words in question could be misread by less than astute surveyors of her casual cursive script. Fragmentary drafts of other "Love Songs" exist in the yale Collection, but not in sufficiently whole or finished states to serve as copy-texts.

	Two years later the complete sequence appeared, taking up an entire issue of Others (3:6, April 1917, pp. 3-20). The above-mentioned errors had been corrected, but certain other changes inconsistent with the holograph and the 1915 printing were introduced. Some of them clearly bore Loy's signature. For example, the last four lines of IV in 1915:

	For I had guessed mine That if I should find YOU And bring you with me The brood would be swept clean out

	became two in 1917:

	Before I guessed —Sweeping the brood clean out

	Other changes were more questionable (e.g., "white and star-topped" replaced "white star-topped" in I. 1.6; "sewn" replaced "sown" in I. I. 7; "spill't" replaced "spilled" in I. III.5). Loy had not indicated that these lines contained errors in her 1915 complaint. More important, she reverted to the original holograph of lines 1.6 and I.7 when she reformulated the sequence in 1923 (Lunar Baedeker), seemingly confirming her original textual intent.

	But Lunar Baedeker preserved other changes made in 1917, such as the ending of IV. At this remove, in the absence of proofs bearing her corrections, it is impossible to distinguish printer's errors from editorial changes from Loy's own alterations or to know what "repairs" she might have made in 1917, then reconsidered in 1923. My assumption, finally, is that the 1917 rendering of I. I. 6–7 is either non-authorial or an authorial revision that was later recanted; that it does not stand. The only evidence that I have ever found indicating that proofs of Lunar Baedeker existed is Robert McAlmon's casual statement quoted in Robert E. Knoll, ed., McAlmon and the Lest Generation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962, p. 226), where he mentions checking proofs of Lunar Baedeker in Rapallo, Italy, en route from Spain to France.

	For the 1917 publication, Loy made sure to correct the errors that bothered her most in 1915, substituting "silting" for "sitting" (I. 1.2) and "These" for "There" (1. 1.13) in the opening section. Beyond that, she made a few new revisions (e.g., the ending of IV) before publishing the sequence in Others. The surprising appearance of "sifting" (1. 1.2) in Lunar Baedeker in place of what had been wrongly printed as "sitting" (1915) and corrected to "silting" (holograph, 1917) is a possible late revision, but more likely a printer's error. Or, as Januzzi has suggested, this could reflect Loy's attempt to rectify what she knew had been a problematic line in 1915—having forgotten her earlier solution.

	I do not view the Lunar Baedeker rendition of "Love Songs" as an attempt to put the 1917 cycle into final order but rather as a separate narrative involving many of the same strategies. The result is an altogether different—and arguably less successful—effort. Therefore I present the Lunar Baedeker version in Appendix D of The Lost Lunar Baedecker (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996, p. 225)

	The text of "Songs to Joannes" presented here necessarily relies on the 1917 Others version as its copy-text, and varies from it in relatively few instances. The 1917 text, after all, is the source for thirty of the thirty-four original parts. I rely on Loy's letters, and variants in the earlier (holograph) and later (Lunar Baedeker) versions, only to mediate discrepancies in I–IV, as mentioned above. In most instances, first and final intentions converge. Where they do not, the copy-text or editorial judgment prevails.

	In the present edition, I have not prefaced this sequence with the dedicatory poem, "To You" (Others [July 1916, pp. 27-28]), as I did in Lost Lunar Baedeker(1982). Januzzi has persuaded me that despite Loy's plea to Carl Van Vechten [(n.d., 1915) to "get Songs for Joannes published for me—all together-printed on one side of each page only—& a large round in the middle of each page—& one whole entirely blank page with nothing g on it between the first and second parts-(pause in between moods)—the dedication—TO YOU' ")], I may have taken this request too literally in Lost Lunar Baedeker (1982). I believe her caution is correct. I now find it difficult to read "To You" as a prelude to "Songs to Joannes," either thematically or structurally. It has therefore been left out of the present edition altogether.

	I explain these issues in detail for several reasons. This is among the most frequently discussed, excerpted, and anthologized of Loy's poems; "Love Songs" and it’s often forgotten predecessor, "Songs to Joannes," have a particularly complicated textual and editorial history; certain lines, especially in the opening section which I have just been discussing, have been the subject of more speculation and uncertainty than any other lines she produced. My decisions should be subject to question, but my reasons should not.

	I have made the following emendations to the 1917 text, and refrained from making others, as explained below. Dashes here (----) correspond to dashes in Loy's 1917 text, and are counted as lines of type when they occupy a complete line, for example XXX.5. This is important only for the purpose of cross-referencing lines with emendations below. The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996) version is to the left of the ]. The 1917 Others version is to the right:

	I.6: white star-topped (following holograph, Lunar Baedeker)] white and star-topped) (Editor's Note: The holograph version reads "white star-topped," as does the first appearance in 1915 Others and later printings, including Lunar Baedeker.) ^

	I.7: sown (following holograph, Lunar Baedeker)] sewn (Editor's Note: The holograph reads "sown," as does 1915 Others and later printings, including Lunar Baedeker.) ^

	I.8: Bengal (following holograph and OED)] bengal (Editor's Note: A Bengal light, in nineteenth-century usage, was a firework or flare used for signals, producing a steady and vivid blue light.) ^

	III.5: spill'd (following holograph and OED)] spill'! (Editor's Note: In 1993, Angela Coon adapted this section (III) for performance by the spoken-word band Bloodfest [San Francisco].) ^

	lll.7: daily news (following holograph)] daily-news ^

	IV.11: sarsenet] sarsanet ^

	V.14: don't] doni ^

	IX.6: spermatozoa] spermatazoa ^

	X.1: (Editor's Note: "shuttlecock and battledore" would be the correct OED spellings, but I assume that Loy is deliberately punning here. Her spelling stands.) ^

	XIX.3: (Editor's Note: "QHU" remains the most successful poser in Loy's entire lexicon. Its meaning, if any, has so far resisted extraction. I once suspected it was an acronym, or a pun disguised as one, along the lines of Marcel Duchamp's L. H.O.O.Q. (1920). But no appositive word or translation has yet occurred that convincingly deconstructs the anagram, homograph, or rune that stands behind the upper-case construction. "QHU" may allude to an enchoric name or retronym that was once familiar but has since passed from currency. If so, perhaps some future reader will one day open the lettre de cachet and report its contents. Until then, it remains pure vocable or sonant, a precarious precursor of Lettrisme. We can also imagine it as an unbroken cryptogram or enciphered message to Joannes or one of his representatives. In this case, we can only hope that Giovanni Papini grasped its esoteric meaning. It is also possible, more prosaically, that QHU was a printer's error, the first half of an uncorrected etaoin shrdlu [sic], or an ersatz euphemism designed to escape the censor's scythe. This pre-digital encryption recently attained electronic status. In 1995 "QHU" was posted as a query to the poetry cafe of the Internet community. As of now, QHU remains simply an unsolved metaplasm. The virtual cafe remains open to any latecomers bearing solutions: conover@mit.edu.) ^

	XXVIII 18: cymophanous] cymophonous ^

	XXIX 11: caressive] carressive ^

	XXIX 28: (Editor's Note: The correct spelling would be "incognitos," but I have chosen not to emend in favor of Januzzi's enchanting suggestion that this may echo the "philosophers toes" passage in another poem featuring Giovanni Papini [see n. 8 j. It is also possible that a pun is intended here; i.e., a low-down, toe-to-toe orgasm.) ^

	XXX 6: archetypal] archilypal ^

	XXXIV 1: litterateur (following OED] literateur ^

	Page breaks in 1917 Others occur at these lines, sometimes making stanza breaks ambiguous. Based on sense, holograph, and Lunar Baedeker, I have decided that 1917 page breaks do not always coincide with stanza breaks, but do in these instances (marked by ), and have lineated the present text accordingly: II:5 / 6 (man / To) IV:8 / 9 (hair / One) XIII: 25 / 26: (me / Or) XVIII: 2 / 3: (hill / The) XIX 22 / 23 (light / You) XXII 4 / 5 (revival / Upon) XXIV 6 / 7 (lies / Muddled) XXVI 2 / 3 (eyes / We) XXVIII 4 / 5 (Forever / Coloured) XXIX 4 / 5:(Similitude / Unnatural) *XXIX: 29 / 30: (orgasm / For) XXXI 2 / 3: (busy-body / Longing)

	In imaginative terms "Joannes" is probably a figure collaged out of Loy's failed relationships with several male lovers. In biographical terms he is most closely patterned after one—Giovanni Papini. ("Joannes" translates to "Giovanni" in Italian). Following her fallout with Papini. (see n. 8) after an enthrallment that lasted over a year, Loy confessed to Carl Van Vechten (n.d., 1915] that "love has calmed down to the thing that exists—'Joannes' is the most astounding creature that ever lived in the light of my imagination .... I believe he's really tried to forgive me ... & I think he's a little jealous of Songs to Joannes—an unexpected effect—".

	The last page of the holograph (1915) contains a note to Carl Van Vechten indicating that "Love Songs" (I–IV) may also have been written with an earlier lover in mind: "My dear Carlo these .. . are subconscious impressions of 8 years ago ... associated with my weeping willow man." This speculation is supported by her indication elsewhere (Carl Van Vechten Papers) that "Love Songs" (I–IV) were begun in a state of dysthemia ("the first were written in red-hot agony").

	In 1907, eight years before Loy wrote this letter to Carl Van Vechten, she gave birth to her second child. Carolyn Burke's biography (Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina. Loy [New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996]) contains important information on Stephen Haweis and the filiation of this child. Its patrilineage may explain Loy's agony and disillusion with Giovanni Papini.

	Recent Loy scholarship has greatly enhanced both the textual and contextual reading of this poem. See especially the work of Carolyn Burke, Linda Kennahan, Virginia M. Kouidis, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis cited in Marissa Januzzi's bibliography of Loy in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Maeera Schreiber and Keith Tuma, eds. [Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996]).