I’ve made no secret on Robert Frost’s Banjo that I have tremendous admiration for Mina Loy’s poems; & since I decided after posting Patchen’s And What With the Blunders last week, that I’d devote the September Weekly Poems to some real personal favorites—with a great deal of weight to both “personal” & “favorite.” I’m not here to debate whether Kenneth Patchen & Mina Loy are “great poets,” whatever that term may actually signify. I do know that as someone who’s spent a fair amount of time writing poetry & a fair number of years living & thinking about & feeling things, their poetry is “significant,” both in the common use of the term & in the deeper, etymological sense of being charged with meaning.
Loy’s poetry is dense—Lunar Baedeker is actually one of her “easier” poems (also—in a very relative sense—better known than most), as it presents a relatively recognizable landscape, tho her language is unapologetically ornate & baroque.
Hope you enjoy it, too!
Lunar Baedeker
A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia
To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies
Peris is livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues
Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones
lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous
the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts
Stellectric signs
WING SHOWS ON STARWAY
ZODIAC CAROUSEL
Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe the flight
of Eros obsolete
And "Immortality"
mildews
in the museums of the moon
NOCTURNAL CYCLOPS
CRYSTAL CONCUBINE
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes
Mina Loy