Serious Tourists

Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams employ drastically disparate images of the Mexican landscape as a means of articulating both their respective positions as tourists and their increasingly frustrated relationships to masculinity. Loy’s austere “Mexican Desert,” in its description of an isolated and enervated desert landscape, serves as an elegy to the poet’s husband, who had disappeared in Mexico shortly before the poem’s inscription. Meanwhile, Williams’s explicitly autobiographical “Desert Music” chronicles his tour of the Juarez market and cantinas, where his visual consumption of the tawdry urban geography encourages him to contemplate his anxieties regarding his literary profession, his flagging health, and his identity as a man. While Loy’s unforgiving desert finally presents her husband’s once-hyperbolic masculinity as wholly drained and defeated, Williams’s survey of the border city successfully rehabilitates his identity as both a poet and a man.