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Lunar Baedeker (changes)

Loy

• B. 1882
• Lived in Florence during Italian Futurism
• Staple of NYC poet scene
• Late life, isolated, Aspen, Col.
• Rediscovered 1980

There is no Life or Death

• “Only activity” “propensity” “intensity”
  • notice how those latter two are qualities rather than nouns
  • it’s a way away from nouns, very Steinian in a way
• No life, no death, no hierarchy (no First or Last), no Love, no Lust
• Futurist in its love of movement, but she doesn’t make the mistake of trying to reify it into technological dimensions of modernity
• “Who would possess / Is a nonentity”
  • Possession for Loy is just another illusion and injurious fallacy of reification, like Love, Lust, First, Last
  • Notice how possession and commodities have been associated with all of the things she says doesn’t exist – life death love lust first last: survival, hierarchy, and desire
• NOT an example of a modernist supposedly afraid of chaos
• Even the form of the poem, with its rhymes that all kind of end the same (ity ity ity), and its lines that are longer in the first and shorter in the second, constant reversals of meter and stresses are like a teetering, like a winding in and out
  • Form also uses the feminine rhyme, the “dying fall”
  • Perfect rhymes destroy any sense of individuality of words: they are all on the same plane; the mathemetical purity of the poem doesn’t allow you go rest on any particular word
    • The only disruption is the periodic reversal of stresses that acts like a wave going back and forth, back and forth
• Confidence of a manifesto
• Like Futurism concerned w/speed, but she’s not interested in the machismo, the extremity, but its existence as a rule in life.
• The “Tame things” that “have no immensity” are reifications
  • Critique of nominalization: she replaces capitalized words, usually nouns, usually associated with some kind of morality (you’d see them in a medieval morality play), with adjectives that end in GENERIC suffixes, “the quality of having,” thus grammatically showing that it’s this SPIRIT that invades things, not the things themselves
• Very Bergsonian! Don’t care about individual objects but see them within time, time which is only movement and creation, not reified “Time” that she rejects
• Mathematical Beauty:
  • four sets of four lines
  • first line begins “there is no” and then has a coupled group (Life or Death, Love of Lust, First or Last, Space or Time)
  • second line begins “only” and then has a quality that ends with -ity: activity, propensity, equality, intensity
  • third line begins “and” (except for number two which says “who would possess” rather than “And…”)
  • four line begins with a verb (is, is, joins, have) and ends with -ity
  • What doesn’t rhyme: the big Words, Life death love lust first last space time: you can tell they are being quietly shoved out of her universe!
  • first line of each part: six syllables: trochee, iamb, iamb
    • pretty reversal! the unexpected trochee means that you have two unstressed syllables in a row, which is super quiet and unsteady and thus ENACTS the “there is no” meaning through sound
  • second line of each part: same as the first line of each part: six syllables: trochee, iamb, iamb
  • third line of each part: different
    • first: six syllables of iambs, thus iambic trimeter; we start out very fast
      • it’s good for her b/c she says there’s an “absolute,” which you see she doesn’t capitalize so you don’t see that she might superficially sound like she’s falling into the trap of reification. that’s why you want to hurry over it too.
    • second, third, and forth: all are spondees (where all are emphasized); second and third are four syllables, while fourth is only three syllables
  • it’s a gradual slowing down, you see, gaining emphasis
    • the elephant like spondee slows you down and reinforces the stupidity of those people: who would possess; and who would rule; and tame things (she’s safer to emphasize her enemies here!)
  • fourth line of each part: the first two of them are one way, and the second two are another way
    • first two: perfect iambic trimeter
    • second two: six syllables; trochee, iamb, iamb
    • why do this? well the first two are reversals of each set’s second line, which makes the lilt; while the second two echo each set’s second line, which makes it slow down and get more meaningful
      • that way once you get to “only intensity” and understand that tame things “have no immensity” you realize that THIS POEM is what’s intense and immense