Shades of Meaning: Mina Loy's Poetics of Luminous Opacity

BUT the Future is only dark from outside. Leap into it —and it EXPLODES with Light.

NOT to be a cipher in your ambiente, But to color your ambiente with your preferences.

—Mina Loy, “Aphorisms on Futurism”¹

When ancient Psyche was no longer content to remain in darkness, she broke her word and shined a light on her lover for the first time. In that instant she both recognized his divinity and marked its frailty, burning him with a drop of oil from her lamp. Eros immediately abandoned her. From “Pig Cupid” to verbal fragments and a scandalous tone lamenting the end of a love affair, the myth of Eros and Psyche permeates Mina Loy’s Songs to Joannes. Several scholars have discussed the implications that these troubled trace references have for the speaker’s broken psychology, tortured desire, and discursive/discordant lyricism.² Yet none to my knowledge has given sustained attention to the modernity of Loy’s gesture. It matters that Loy’s modern Psyche might flip a light switch rather than ignite an oil lamp, for this new light casts different allusive meanings—especially when filtered through unique, artfully constructed shades. Loy’s speaker is one who “live[s] in my lantern,” intimately enveloped in its ambiance while still maintaining and directing the “subliminal flicker” emitted through “Coloured   glass.”³

Given Loy’s own fascination with illumination, closer consideration of this distinctly modern light suggests new ways of seeing not only the Songs but also Loy’s broader poetic sensibilities. Her poems abound with references to astronomical, animal, and human-made light sources. At the same time, readers have long noted her work’s obfuscating features, including lack of punctuation, layered linguistic registers, ambiguous syntax, and allusive fragments. Although these can seem like paradoxical impulses, they invite comparison with Loy’s work in the visual arts—most specifically with her famous interest in lighting design. Reading Loy’s poems in light of her lampshade art elucidates semiotic, philosophical, and social meanings that might otherwise remain opaque: doing so changes not only the object in view but also the surrounding critical setting—and thus reveals new relationships between Loy’s poetry and its environment of modernity.

In Songs to Joannes and other poems, we see, for example, Loy’s work both reflecting and refracting the modernist metaphor of “light” for sexual interaction. More importantly, the structure and content of her poetry reveals ambivalence toward early electrical lighting that metonymically expresses her ambivalence towards the male-dominated avant-garde of the early 1900s. Just as her lampshades enfold, direct, and decorate the radiance of electric light, her poetics of luminous opacity appropriates, filters, and shapes the brilliance of the avant-garde according to her unique and expressive need and desire. For her, it seems, light is not so much a metaphor for power and penetration as an actual substance at work in the world—including the world of art and literature.

Many previous writers on Mina Loy have noted the lampshade as a ubiquitous artistic form in her career and eccentric life. Her contribution to the illustrious Independents’ Exhibition of 1917, for instance, was a painting entitled Making Lampshades; shortly thereafter she attended a Dada costume ball wearing a lampshade-inspired dress (details noted by both her biographer Carolyn Burke and the 2006 Daughters of Dada retrospective at Francis M. Naumann Fine Art in New York).⁴ Moreover, the publisher Sylvia Beach recalls that “[w]hen you went to Mina’s apartment you threaded your way past lamp shades that were everywhere: she made them to support her children. . . . Her hats were very like her lamp shades; or perhaps it was the lamp shades that were like her hats. She wrote poetry whenever she had time.”⁵ In Beach’s description, and evidently in Loy’s living space, the lampshades and hats themselves fill most of the room. Beach touches on these items’ economic significance (anticipating feminist scholarship highlighting Loy’s status as a working woman artist) and briefly muses on similarities between the shades and hats (noting a Futurist-Dadaist...