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This article explores the notion of intercultural and intertextual crossing (in the combined senses of migration and intersection) in Sarah Howe’s poetry collection Loop of Jade (2015). Born in Hong Kong to a Chinese mother and British father, Howe grew up in the UK. Loop of Jade explores the experience of cultural hybridity and deracination through an intertextual poetics predicated on artifice and irony, going against the grain of a simple, unmediated confessional poetic narrative “of the origins.” After the actual experience of return paradoxically leads to a crisis of identification, intertextuality becomes an alternative route allowing Howe to approach her origins obliquely. A Borgesian epigraph – a surprising abecedary of apparently arbitrary categories of animals given in a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” – becomes a structuring device for the whole collection, announcing its project to reflect on real or imaginary cultural differences. Working through various constructions and misconceptions of Asia in the Western imagination, the poems ultimately develop a complex sense of belonging. This article argues that Howe uses a multiplicity of intertexts to create what Homi Bhabha calls an “in-between,” interstitial subjectivity, which reflects on its intercultural plurality and fragmentation, and explores the degree to which modern identity is shaped by cultural differences. It also explores the political dimensions of Howe’s use of intertextuality, denouncing China’s history of repression and censorship, as well as the violence against women and the anxiety of miscegenation in traditional culture. Finally, I also show that Howe ambivalently engages with the legacy of modernist poetry, particularly with Ezra Pound’s appropriation of Chinese culture and writing system.

This article examines the textual and artistic strategies used by three female modernist writers—Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Elsa von Freytag Loringhoven—to probe into the specificities of the female modernist obscene. In the works of these three authors, daring sexual and corporal images abound, creating a surprisingly precocious poetics of the obscene, which emerged around 1915, independently from the experiments of their male contemporaries. On the one hand, this poetics works against the repressive grip of the norms of propriety ruling bourgeois society. But on the other, Barnes’s and von Freytag-Loringhoven’s works also unsettle the canonical image of the female body as an object of desire, by using grotesque, repulsive, scatological, and androgynous images. Secondly, this article raises the question of how female modernists engaged with the most iconic experiments of male authors, by taking the example of the obscenity trial of Joyce’s Ulysses. While in their defense of Joyce’s novel the three authors engaged in an uncompromising collective modernist fight against censorship, Loy in particular suggests that the obscene fantasies of Joyce, D.H. Lawrence and other male modernists did not sufficiently represent the reality of female experience.

This article focuses on a little-explored case of modernist collaboration situated at the crossroads between different arts: the performance of Alfred Kreymborg’s play Lima Beans, produced by the Provincetown Players in December 1916, in which poets Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams played the two leading parts, together with poet and artist William Zorach, who also designed the sets. The play’s novel aesthetics breaks with the principles of the realist dramas typical of the time and favored even by more experimental groups like the Provincetown Players. First, the article examines how the play creates a distancing effect towards the deliberately mundane story of a married couple, using incongruous elements like the proto-absurdist nonsense of the dialogues, the abstract, Futurist sets, and the groundbreaking acting techniques inspired by puppet theater. Second, it specifically focuses on the blurring of the boundaries between the different arts—drama, poetry, and dance among others—in this play, whose dialogues were conceived as free verse. Finally, it delves into the intertextual and intermedial dialogues between the play and Loy’s and Williams’s poems published in the little magazine Others, edited by Kreymborg.

This article focuses on the emergence of a poetics of cross-cultural observation in the work of Mina Loy. It explores how this transnational poetics evolves in her poems, essays, and manifestoes, while also confronting it with the question of Loy’s “American” identity. It suggests that many of Loy’s writings are ironically positioned as a Baedeker guide to cross-cultural differences as well as to the transnational artistic phenomena of her times.

This paper focuses on Mina Loy’s “Aphorisms on Futurism,” written in Florence while she was involved with Futurist leaders F.T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini, and first published in 1914 in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work. In Loy’s “Aphorisms” emerges the utopian idea of a poetic “language of the Future,” which reflects the Futurist project to destroy language, replacing a traditional syntax that has become obsolete with a telegraphic language of modernity. On her own copy of “Aphorisms,” Loy later replaced the word “Futurism” with the word “Modernism,” suggesting, perhaps with a certain irony, that the project of a poetic “language of the Future” extends beyond the aesthetics of Italian Futurism to the Modernist movement as a whole, yet pinpointing the problem of Modernism as a chain reaction of “isms,” each with its own agenda of radical experimentation in search of a new poetic language of modernity. Taking this key later revision as its departure point, this paper reads Loy’s text with a double focus: on the one hand, situating it in the context of its composition and reading it through the prism of Futurism’s incendiary rhetoric, and on the other, within a broader definition of Modernism, tracing how this violent call for destruction of traditional discourse later collapses into a poetics of silence, whose dimensions are both aesthetic and historical. The ironic ambivalence of “Aphorisms” is already inherent in its strategic generic ambiguity: it reads both as a Futurist manifesto and as a series of aphorisms, oscillating between the revolutionary rhetoric of the manifesto and the ironic silence of the aphorism, which becomes a key vehicle for reflecting ambivalently on the crisis of modernity. Finally, this paper also suggests that the aesthetic principles outlined in Loy’s “Aphorisms” can be used as an interpretative lens through which to examine her poetic strategies of extreme concision and density.