Figuring (Co)loss(us)

Abstract

Chapter 9 examines the texts Loy wrote about Arthur Cravan, whom she called “Colossus” in her eponymous memoir. While “Colossus” is one of the beacons in Loy’s avant-garde pantheon, after his haunting disappearance he becomes the catalyst of a poetics of loss and melancholia omnipresent in Loy’s late work. These poems create a palpable mirror effect between the spectral memory of Colossus and Loy’s own poetic voice that becomes increasingly spectral and otherworldly. Thus, apart from being a chronicle of Loy’s loss and suffering, these poems prove illuminating to her poetic strategies of withdrawal and silence. The chapter begins with a close reading of “Mexican Desert,” reading its proto-Surrealist imagery through the lens of the visual vocabulary developed by Surrealist painters like Giorgio de Chirico or Frida Kahlo. I then turn to the poem “The Widow’s Jazz,” which stages the withdrawal of the poetic I in a hermit-like isolation. Finally, I examine one of the last poems Loy wrote, “Letters of the Unliving,” where the term “letters” with strategic ambivalence refers not only to Cravan’s love letters, but also to Loy’s poem itself and to her poetry as a whole, soon to be “unwritten” by “death’s erasure” of its author.