simonfeatherstone
Futurism all right, but the concomitant nationalism and militarism that were
inevitablein the Italian’s work are absent. ‘Feminist Manifesto’ (1914) went further.
Despite gratuitous Marinetti-like gestures such as the recommendation for ‘the
unconditionalsurgicaldestruction of virginitythrough-out the female population at
puberty’,^9 the text lays the ground for her wartime poetry’s main preoccupation: the
search for a means of expressing a distinctively female consciousness of modernity
that does not entail the revocation of female heterosexual desire. ‘Leave off looking
tomentofindoutwhatyouarenot,’ she counsels; ‘seek within yourselves to find
outwhatyouare’. In the context of her intimacies with Futurism, she sets herself to
understand the attractions of a man like Marinetti and of his ideas and discourses,
even as she tries to adjust the imbalance of power within that alliance and to create
an independent means of expression. ‘Women must destroy in themselves, the
desire to be loved,’ she asserts. That act of destruction came increasingly to be
involved with the wider political crisis of the First World War.
In her private statements on the war, Loy tended to combine the rhetoric of
Futurist militarism characteristic of Marinetti with the often naive projection of
experience that is found in some of the poems collected inScars Upon My Heart.‘My
masculine side longs for war,’ she wrote to the pacifist Mabel Dodge, in the period
before Italy joined the conflict in late spring 1915. She asked Carl Van Vechten at the
same point, ‘don’t you sense—what wonderful poems I could have written—round
about a battle field!’^10 Loy claimed to have taken up nursing in a Red Cross hospital
‘entirely devoid of sentiment—entirelyon the chance of getting near a battlefield
& hearing a lovely noise!’ ‘I’m so wildly happy among the blood & mess,’^11 she
enthused. Her poetry of the period resists this rhetorical giddiness, however. Instead
of pursuing Marinetti’s poetic strategy of creating militarist performance epics such
asZang-tumb-tumbwith its drum accompaniment to represent noises of battle,
Loy began writing poems about sex and birth. The gaucheness that characterizes
Loy’s letters about war disappears in a difficult poetry that explores the territory of
gendered conflict which Futurism ignored. By the time that Italy entered the war, her
biographer Carolyn Burke suggests, ‘the European war and the ‘‘sex war’’ were...so
thoroughly entwined [for Loy] that one combat suggested the other’.^12 This was
no easy metaphorical transference, however. ‘Songs to Joannes’ develops a radically
strange discourse that is quite unlike received ideas of First World War poetry.^13 The
sequence of thirty-four lyrics is an often obscure, extravagant, and argumentative
dialogue about the failures of a love affair. At the same time, though, it is poetry
that suggests—both rawly and allusively—the ways in which human intimacy was
invaded by the forces and the language of a new kind of violence in Europe.
(^9) Loy, ‘Feminist Manifesto’, inThe Lost Lunar Baedeker, 155.
(^10) Loy, quoted in Burke,Becoming Modern, 185 and 187.
(^11) Loy, quoted ibid. 187. (^12) Ibid. 184.
(^13) Loy, ‘Songs to Joannes’, inLost Lunar Baedeker, 53–68.