Today’s Poem: Brancusi’s Golden Bird

Mina Loy’s experimental poetics

Mina Loy, c. 1905, by Stephen Haweis (Wikimedia Commons)

The avant-garde artist and writer Mina Loy (1882–1966) published only two books of poetry in her long lifetime: the 1923 Lunar Baedeker and, in 1958, Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables. Flitting among early-twentieth-century art forms and movements as among domestic ménages and personal tragedies, to us she may seem to slip like a shadow through a Modernist poetic world peopled by more solidly and enduringly visible figures: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound.

In the early 1920s, the poet and critic Yvor Winters, already formulating his own vision for a strictly hierarchical poetic canon, set Loy alongside both Stevens and Moore: “I think Mina Loy a genius.” Yet today we hardly know her. Perhaps we should know her better than we do.

It was Pound who coined a word applicable to Loy’s experimental poetics. Logopoeia, one of three “kinds” of poetry as defined by Pound in his Literary Essays, involves, as Pound puts it “the dance of intellect among words.” Lest anybody remind him that he has earlier instructed poets to eschew such abstractions as “dim lands of peace,” Pound hastens to explain what this “dance of intellect” means. It “employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage. . . . It holds the aesthetic content which is peculiarly the domain of verbal manifestation, and cannot possibly be contained in plastic or in music.” 

Mina Loy (center) with Jane Heap and Ezra Pound, 1923 (Wikimedia Commons)

To get some handle on what Pound might mean by logopoeia and other related “aspects” of poetry, we can turn to Loy’s 1922 poem, “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” which first appeared in the Dial. An ekphrastic poem, engaging a work of visual art — in this case an abstract sculpture, completed in 1920, by the Romanian-born French artist Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) — “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” seeks less to describe the sculpture than to accomplish in the medium of language what the sculpture aspires to accomplish “in plastic.”

As Brancusi’s sculpture strips a Romanian folk tale about a golden bird, the Maiastra, to a single fluid, suggestive shape, Loy’s poem, too, consciously rejects layers of poetic tradition, especially the traditional presentation of rhyme and meter as a fixed pattern. These lines are not without metrical sense, but they shift from trimeter to dimeter to single-stressed lines, creating a controlled but undulant surface. Additionally, Loy rejects the closure of punctuation. Emdashes signal breaks and departures of thought, and the poem ends on ellipses, but otherwise the lines hang in seeming suspension on the page, open-ended, as if to suggest the sculpture’s fluid “Alpha and Omega / of Form.” 

Constantin Brancusi’s Golden Bird, 1919/1920 (Art Institute of Chicago)

Brancusi’s sculpture renders a traditional, linear narrative into this three-dimensional form with no beginning and no end, no edges or “extremities / of crest or claw.” Likewise, Loy resists the narrative impulse, beginning her poem with a non-sentence which extends into a metaphor, anchored by that “As if” of the third line. At the same time, the poem does things in language that the Golden Bird can’t fully achieve in its medium. In language, Loy can invoke associations that come to us primarily, if not exclusively, in language: the idea of the Christian God, for example, and the story of the Immaculate Conception and Incarnation — but also Osiris, the Egyptian god of death and rebirth.

The poem doesn’t tell these stories. Its business is not to have, in the traditional sense, a beginning, a middle, and an end. Like the sculpture, it’s not meant to represent the arc of flight, but to be its “nucleus.” It simply folds these allusions, and everything we might connect with them, into its seamless, undifferentiating shape, and holds them there. 

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Brancusi’s Golden Bird

by Mina Loy 

The toy
       become the aesthetic archetype

As if
       some patient peasant God
       had rubbed and rubbed
       the Alpha and Omega
       of Form
       into a lump of metal

A naked orientation
       unwinged    unplumed
           — the ultimate rhythm
       has lopped the extremities
       of crest and claw
       From
       the nucleus of flight

       The absolute act
       of art
       Conformed
       to continent sculpture
       — bare as the brow of Osiris —
       this breast of revelation

       an incandescent curve
       licked by chromatic flames
       in labyrinths of reflections

       This gong
       of polished hyperaesthesia
       shrills with brass
       as the aggressive light
       Strikes
       its significance

       The immaculate
       Conception
       of the inaudible bird
       occurs
       in gorgeous reticence . . .

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