Modernist Aesthetics
Modernist Aesthetics
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W. H. Auden
The Unknown Citizen
Context and Influences
Multimedia Recitation
Discussion
Works Cited
Wallace Stevens
Context
Domination of Black
Recitation
Discussion
Works Cited
Gertrude Stein
Context & Influences
Sacred Emily
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Recitation
Discussion
Works Cited
Mina Loy
The Widow's Jazz
Discussion
Context and Influences
Multimedia Recitation
Works Cited
"The Widow's Jazz"
The white flesh
quakes
to the negro soul
Chicago!
Chicago!
An
uninterpretable wail
stirs in a tangle of
pale snakes
to the
lethargic ecstasy
of steps
backing in to
primeval goal
White man quit his actin' wise
colored folk
hab de moon in dere eyes
Haunted by
wind instruments
in
groves
of
grace
the
maiden saplings
slant to the
oboes
and
shampooed gigolos
prowl to the sobbing taboos.
An
electric crown
crashes the
furtive
cargoes of the floor.
the
pruned contours
dissolve
in the
brazen shallows of the dissonance
revolving mimes
of the encrouching Eros
in adolescence
The
black brute-angels
in the human gloves
bellow through a monstrous growth of metal trunks
and
impish musics
crumbles the ecstatic loaf
before a swooning flock of doves.
Caravan
colossal absentee
the substitute dark
rolls to the incandescent memory
of love's survivor
on this rich
suttee
seared by the flames of sounds
the widowed urn
holds impotently
your murdered laughter
Husband
how
secretly
you
cuckold me with death
while this
cajoling jazz
blows with its tropic breath
among the echoes of the flesh
a
synthesis
of racial caress
The
seraph
and the ass
in
the unerring esperanto
of the earth
converse
of everlit delight
as my
desire
receded
to the distance of the dead
searches
the
opaque silence
of unpeopled space.