Complete text available at How2. Baudelaire and Laforgue are French poets of the middle to late nineteenth century; Marinetti is an Italian "Futurist" poet of the early twentieth century and Loy's contemporary. For [critic Virginia] Kouidis "Lunar Baedeker" is "a satire of moonstruck escapists," while of "Apology of Genius" she writes that the poem: images the artist's uniqueness and persecution. For the image of the artist as a martyr clown Mina Loy is again indebted to Baudelaire and Laforgue. "Lepers of the moon," the public's hostile epithet, recalls Laforgue's pierrots with "La coeur blanc/tatoue/De sentences lunaires." For the public the lunar image signifies a lunatic divorce from reality. But for the pierrot and the abused artist the moon represents alienation and revolt.14 What Kouidis fails to note here, is that the employment of lunar imagery and decadent language in these post-war poems was a defiant riposte to Marinetti and his proscription of such tropes. Loy's poem ‘Apology of Genius' begins: Ostracized as we are with God—   The watchers of the civilized wastes     reverse their signals on our track Lepers of the moon all magically diseased we come among you innocent of our luminous sores Loy's "apology" draws attention not simply to the alienation of the artist, as suggested by Kouidis, but specifically to those artists who are also women. The use of the plural first person pronoun in the opening line, "Ostracized as we are with God" may be read as referring to the sense of otherness experienced by those for whom she speaks: You may give birth to us or marry us the chances of your flesh are not our destiny— The cuirass of the soul Still shines— And we are unaware if you confuse such brief corrosion with possession… Her appropriation of Laforguian language defies Marinetti's critique of "the sickly, nostalgic poetry of distance and memory; romantic sentimentality drenched with moonshine that looks up adoringly to the ideal of Woman-Beauty." Loy's words, drained of sentimentality, constitute a reply on behalf of those who are formed in this image: In the raw caverns of the Increate we forge the dusk of Chaos to that imperious jewelry [sic] of the Universe —the Beautiful—, While to your eyes A delicate crop of criminal mystic immortelles stands to the censor's scythe. The "mystic immortelles" of the final lines, defined according to the OED as "everlasting flowers," also translates from the French as "immortal women," those whose writing is ineluctably subject to "the censor's scythe." The poem can thus be read as asserting the subversive or oppositional creativity of the woman poet. [. . .] Similarly, "Lunar Baedeker" satirises those decadents referred to by Marinetti and described by Kouidis as moon-struck escapists. She writes, "The poem recreates their exotic lunar refuge in a décor of Decadence shaped by gilded words and images, and lush patterns of sound." Kouidis discusses the manner in which the employment of Laforguian imagery of death and decay in "Lunar Baedeker" provides a critique of an outworn poetic language (according to Loy, ‘in the museums of the moon') and of those artists who seek escape from the world in "lunar" flights from reality. This reading does not, however, go far enough, since such a critique would coincide with the disdain of Marinetti and the Futurists for those to whom he refers ironically as "our Symbolist Masters." However, there are a number of ironic references in "Lunar Baedeker" which suggest that Loy's barbs are aimed not so much at the language of Symbolism as at Marinetti himself. In 1909, the year in which they first became acquainted, Marinetti had published an extravagant Futurist fantasy entitled "Let's Murder the Moonshine," in which a horde of Futurist artists sets out to "lay the great military Railroad to the flanks of Gorisnakar, summit of the world!" He writes: Our nerves demand war and despise women, because we fear supplicating arms that might encircle our knees on the morning of departure!…What can they want, women, the sedentary, invalids, the sick, and all the prudent counsellors? To their vacillating lives, broked by dismal agonies, by fearful dreams and heavy nightmares, we prefer violent death and glorify it as the only thing worthy of man, that beast of prey. However, the advance of the Futurist hordes is interrupted at midnight by the appearance of the moon as it breaks through the clouds: suddenly we felt the carnal Moon, the Moon of lovely warm thighs, abandoning herself languidly against our broken backs.      A cry went up in the airy solitude of the high plains: "Let's murder the moonshine!"Some ran to nearby cascades; gigantic wheels were raised, and turbines transformed the rushing waters into magnetic pulses that rushed up wires, up high poles, up to shining humming globes,      So it was that three hundred electric moons cancelled with their rays of blinding mineral whiteness the ancient green queen of loves. In this hyperbolic Futurist vision, man overcomes the "carnal" desires conjured by moonlight, symbol of womanhood, and thus defeats the so-called "debilitating" influence of female eroticism. "Lunar Baedeker" constitutes Loy's wry response to Marinetti's tirade. Its hallucinatory vision conjures the astral zone of death, to which those women associated by the Futurists with moonshine were exiled. Loy's poem begins: A silver Lucifer serves cocaine in cornucopia To some somnabulists of adolescent thighs draped in satirical draperies In a reference to the "lovely warm thighs" of Marinetti's lunar seductress, Loy conjures "some somnabulists/of adolescent thighs/draped/in satirical draperies." She appropriates a decadent sense of ennui, and the language of death and decay—"infusoria," "tombstones," "ashes," "Necropolis," "mildews"—to project her own vision into what Marinetti had referred to as the "fearful dreams and heavy nightmares" of these despised women. There is an incantatory quality in the combination of the polysyllables in "cornucopia," "somnambulists," and "hallucinatory," together with the alliterative clustering of consonants in lavish phrases such as "Peris in livery/prepare/Lethe /for posthumous parvenues." Moreover, the Futurist weapon of death, electricity generated by "gigantic wheels," is parodied by Loy as a ZODIAC CAROUSEL (using the capitalised typography which originated with Marinetti himself), as Loy takes her poetic revenge on the Futurist "Crusaders": Cyclones Of ecstatic dust And ashes whirl Crusaders From hallucinatory citadels Of shattered glass Into evacuate craters As the Futurists are mockingly vanquished, the notion of eroticism as an expression of romantic love is postulated as mere illusion, an obsolete poetic deception: Onyx-eyed Odalisques And ornithologists Observe The flight Of Eros obsolete And "Immortality" Mildews In the museums of the moon NOCTURNAL CYCLOPS CRYSTAL CONCUBINE Pocked with personification The fossil virgin of the skies Waxes and wanes. Like the outworn lunar metaphor, "pocked with personification," woman must struggle to gain access to any kind of self image, which has not been already constructed for her. Loy's deliberate imitation of symbolist language and topoi in "Lunar Baedeker" and "Apology of Genius" constitute a gendered critique of Futurism and an assertion of the female poet's artistry and selfhood.

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