women’s poetry of the two world wars of birth pains, Loy comments, ‘I should have been emptied of life’.^25 Inthe later
poem, it seems that its speaker has been.
‘Songs to Joannes’ performs a difficult dialogue with a silent lover in a context
of war. Like Gertrude Stein, Loy is not interested in evoking or reacting to distant
events; instead, she explores the ways in which the conflict insinuates itself within
private experience. The sequence is not about war, but about a sexual life within war,
and about the limits and possibilities of a woman’s poetic language and technique
as it engages with and emerges from those tensions. A later poem, ‘Der Blinde
Junge’ (c.1922), perhaps Loy’s best-known piece, can be read as a post-war coda to
these preoccupations. Its evocation of a blinded war veteran playing a mouth-organ
on the streets of Vienna has a more specific social context than the earlier sequence,
but the exploratory rhetoric and the fascination with the relationship of war, sex,
and birth remain. It begins in terms reminiscent of the first lyric of the ‘Songs’, as
human sex is rendered animal:
The dam Bellona
littered
her eyeless offspring
Kriegsopfer
upon the pavements of Vienna^26The young veteran is here both an ‘offspring’ of the Roman war goddess and a sac-
rificial animal (‘Kriegsopfer’) to the war that his mother embodies. ‘Pig Cupid’ has
become a violent dam that destroys her young, and throughout the poem the soldier
is conceived as animal before, in the final section, he becomes a ‘thing’. Birth, long-
drawn-out in ‘Parturition’, frustrated in ‘Songs to Joannes’, is profligate here, as war
herself delivers her damaged young on to the city streets of Europe. Yet ‘Der Blinde
Junge’, like all Loy’s best work, combines brutal statement with an intelligent, wry
adaptation of Futurism’s amoral celebration of energy. The boy might be a ‘purpose-
less eremite’, but, as in the central lyric of the earlier sequence, private anguish and
vulnerability embody a hidden connection between twentieth-century war and the
normalcy of a civilized city apparently distant from barbarism. The poet demands
that the sighted citizens of Vienna listen to ‘How this expressionless ‘‘thing’’|blows
out damnation and concussive dark||Upon a mouth-organ’. War has invaded the
boy; he is its product, and ‘damnation’ is within him. However, in a knowing parody
of the militarist performance poetry of Marinetti and the Futurists, the boy is shown
to express its dark energy and transform the light of the normal morning through
his other, exclusive knowledge. Like the anonymous speaker of the ‘Songs’, he is a
distanced witness, victim, and performer of the extremities of the First World War.
Mina Loy, true to her Futurist credentials, does not seek resolution or deliverance
in her war poetry. ‘Songs to Joannes’ ends with a typically wry and sceptical appraisal
(^25) Loy, ‘Parturition’, inLost Lunar Baedeker,4–6. (^26) Loy, ‘Der Blinde Junge’, ibid. 83.