Introduction

Collision and Cittàbapini were first published together under the title Two Plays in the August 1915 issue of the little magazine, Rogue—a decadent, playful, New York-based literary arts magazine that called itself “the cigarette of literature.” The magazine was associated with the set of artists who congregated in the apartment of Walter and Louise Arensberg and who would later welcome Loy into their circle when she moved to New York in 1916. Cittàbapini was republished on its own in the December 1916 Rogue, the same month Loy co-starred with William Carlos Williams in the Provincetown Players’ production of Alfred Kreymborg’s one-act play Lima Beans. The animated sets, simple plots, and crude comic caricatures in these plays may reflect the influence of popular traditions of cinematograph and puppetry (Suzanne W. Churchill. “Courting an Audience: Loy’s Plays,” Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, edited by Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum, University of Georgia, 2020. Courting an Audience: Loy’s Plays. Accessed 4 June 2024.). See George Méliés Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) and the Italian traditions of “marionetti” and “buratinni.”

Collision may refer both to the Futurists’ antagonistic and aggressive performances, or to their fascination with the representation of forces (as in physics) and with the aesthetics of warfare. However, the term may also have a sexual valence, since in “Songs to Joannes,” a long poetic sequence dedicated to Papini (whose first name was Giovanni, here rendered in German as Joannes, with an h missing—it should be Johannes), Loy refers to sexual intercourse as a kind of collision. The “Man” in Collision resembles Loy’s portrayals of F. T. Marinetti in various scenes from her unfinished roman-à-clef.

~Suzanne Churchill & Laura Scuriatti