English 317 - Fall 2004

Duplessis - On Loy

The confrontation with Loy's work shows her to be a passionate intellectual in poetry--this is a fairly rare, but not impossible type.  One might say--a loy unto herself.  That is, Loy uses poetry investigatively: for thought, for hypotheses, for demonstrations.  She writes what both I and Michael Palmer have, independently, called the 'analytic lyric.'  She resists easy or cliched poetic pleasures by her impasto phrases, filled with multi-valent allusions to discourses of biology, religion, philosophy, psychology.  Such phrases are deeply condensed; they are tamped down; they are explosive nuggets.  They often distill an almost instransigent emotional knowledge, and sometimes a deep, proud pain.  Each is intensive in its own right; together, linked by a sometimes opaque syntax, they make for a chunky, abrasive texture whose argument is sometimes difficult to decipher. There are very few sets of literary works that could sustain an analogy with both cubist and metaphysical practices, but Loy's is one.  This is a poetry which is absolutely not soothing. Reading it, one understands how much poetry is downright soothing, even if also witty, and how thoroughly poetry as a cultural institution acquiesces in that consoling task.  As Marianne Moore argued about her own work, one could argue that Loy did not write 'poetry'--except that there is no other category in which to put it.  Or we could change the definition of poetry, because of such practices as Loy's.

Sincerely,

Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Courses | Sherwood |IUP English | IUP
Last Updated: 09 December, 2008