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Collision

Huge hall— disparate planes, angles—
whiteness— central arc-light— blaze
Emptiness—
But for one man—
A dependent has shut the door—

MAN: “Back! Bang door! Succession—
incentive—ejection—idea—space—
cleared of nothings— leaves everything—
material—exhaustless creation!”[1]

Stares blankly into arc-light— presses
electric button— shattering insistant[2]
noise surrounds room— intermittently
arc-light extinguishes— vari-colored
shafts of lightning crash through fifty-
nine windows at irregular heights— the
floor worked by propellers— rises and
falls irrhythmically— the disymetric receding
and incursive planes and angles
of walls and ceiling interchange kaleidescopically
to successive intricacies—
occasional explosions irrupt the modes of

DISHARMONY.

Man rushes floor— with gesture of veteran
mariner in hurricane—
As the pandemonium of sound and motion
increases— he calms—

MAN: “At last—vibration is intensified
to the requisite ratio—for every latent
conscious and sub-conscious impulse
to respond to automatically—completely—
virility—ceases to be implicated in disintegrant
auto-stimuli—leaving the
Nucleus[3] free for self-activity—

Expansion—Extension—Intension—

CREATION[4]

The vibrations accelerate to super-velocity—
reach the static— the light is
uniform—the planes, – uniplane— motion
repose— din silence—
The man rigid– his mind concentrated—

Out of the attained unison— a new
tremor produces itself— as it graduates
to the primary celerity— in a secondary
Inception—
       the curtain falls—
               the curtain falls—[5]


  1. The first two stanzas imitate the Futurist’s parole in libertà (words in freedom) and disruption of syntax - this was associated both to technology, warfare, but also to a more general questioning of grammar and of the notion of the “subject”, which the MAN here does not seem to be able to relinquish, in spite of his adoption of Futurist style. For examples of parole in libertà. The mention of angles, planes, etc., may also refer to the graphic quality of the parole in libertà (see also similarities to concrete poetry).
  2. Misspellings, inconsistent spellings, and Latinate neologisms are common in Loy's poetry: she was always inventing new vocabularies to express her radical ideas, much like her friend Gertrude Stein, who she portrayed as "Curie/of the laboratory/of vocabulary." But typos are also common in little magazines— low-budget, shoe string operations, whose editors may have had trouble deciphering Loy's manuscripts, especially if handwritten.
  3. In Loy's 1922 poem "Brancusi's Golden Bird," she describes the sculpture as "The absolute act/of art": "A naked orientation/unwinged unplumed/the ultimate rhythm/has lopped the extremities/of crest and claw/from/ the nucleus of flight." Like many modernist poets, she was interested in stripping down language to its core to extract or expose some nucleus or essence.
  4. This is surely a reference to Henri Bergson’s theory of time. Papini had met Bergson in Paris as he studied there, and was one of the first intellectuals to bring pragmatism to Italy, mediating Bergson’s theories in his own philosophical works and also in the magazines that he edited or directed. “Extension” is a crucial concept for Bergson’s theory of time and consciousness. One of Bergson’s most famous works is The Creative Evolution. Yet the poem also echoes language from Loy's 1914 poem "Parturition," which describes childbirth from the perspective of a mother giving birth (another poem that refers to "nucleus of being"), suggesting that she associated artistic creation with procreation.  See: Laura Scuriatti, *Mina Loy's Critical Modernism *(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2019), pp. 46-60.
  5. The repetition of "the curtain falls" is likely a printer's error. The curtain falls only once in Loy's manuscript. Two Plays are digitized in images 42-47.  Loy, Mina. Poems and Plays. 1914. Carl Van Vechten Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Poems and Plays: Yale University Library Digital Collections.

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Futurism, Feminism, and the Right to "Genius" Copyright © 2025 by Alison Dobbins is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.