Dialectical Constellations in “Songs to Joannes”

Chapter 1 reexamines Loy’s first major text, the poetic sequence “Songs to Joannes” (1915–17). While most interpretations of the poem focus on Loy’s personal involvement with F.T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini, as well as her reaction to the aesthetics and ideology of Futurism, my reading emphasizes the staggering multiplicity of other aesthetic influences at work in the poem and foregrounds Loy’s complex collage strategies, exploring her technique of condensing a myriad of oblique allusions into enigmatic fragments. I argue that the labyrinthine structure of the poem announces the hybrid, intertextual nature of Loy’s poetic idiom, creating polyvalent constellations that function as dialectical knots. The chapter opens with a discussion of Loy’s text in relation to Mallarmé: I argue that Loy’s disjunctive structures are closer to his idea of the poem as a constellation than to Marinetti’s “parole-in-libertà”. I then examine the poem’s use of photographic and cinematic techniques to visualize the increasingly scientific understanding of the psyche, consciousness, and affect. I discuss this in relation to Bergson’s idea of the cinematographic nature of perception and knowledge, as well as Freud’s idea that the dream “thinks in pictures,” arguing that the poem reads as a dream recollection of intimate experience.