Songs to Joannes by Mina Loy completely blew my mind. After I read it I was in complete awe of this innovative, sexuality explosive and daringly experimental woman. I felt that I had to try and mimic her style—mixing the abstract with the concrete and freeing myself from the restrictions of regular grammar, syntax, and punctuation opens poetic creation to infinite possibilities. Also, because I’m not an English major, I always feel some anxiety when it comes to writing assignments, so writing like Loy was like lifting a heavy burden—for once I could just write to write without boggling my mind about correct grammar.
Like Loy I am deliberately artificial with my language and all use of alliteration, internal rhyme, and repetition is insistent and direct. Being frank and honest with sexuality, freeing lines from punctuation and conventional poetic rules, mimicking this scandalous was more difficult than I thought it would be, but it was also incredibly fulfilling—it became a kind of obsession. What I have below is many versions deep—I kept writing these beautiful free verses down in notebooks and then, by the time I tried to get it on the computer, each line I wrote would go somewhere else, get lost, and tumble—what I learned from this imitation is that there is no limitation to free association, and this style of writing is definitely something I plan on exploring deeper. I’m no Mina Loy, but this is what I got…
Stunning imitation here — you capture many of the energies of Loy’s work as you mix the bodily (“piss sick”) with the religious (“covenant”) with the natural (“the seed-ridden / white water world”) with philosophical abstractions (“chaos theory”… “purveying the existential angst”). You also accomodate the absolute sharpness of diction that makes Loy’s poetry so aggressive in the ear, so sharp. I also appreciate the very direct echo of both Loy and Eliot in “I’ll roll you up … with my spine.”
We didn’t talk about the poem’s organization in class, but this serial structure where numbered sections function as fragments at once separate and part of a whole that never adds up is a key modernist innovation that we’ll see again in Williams’s Spring and All. You capture that broader form nicely here as well.
Im not going to endeavor a full fledged comment but i cannot help but say that i think this is really good.
R8erub As I have expected, the writer blurted out..!!