LUNAR BAEDEKER
By:
August 26, 2023
A (pro- or anti-) science-, mathematics-, technology-, space-, apocalypse-, dehumanization-, disenchantment-, and/or future-oriented poem published during sf’s emergent Radium Age (c. 1900–1935). Research and selection by Joshua Glenn.
A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia
To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies
Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues
Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah’s tombstones
lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous
the eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts
Stellectric signs
“Wing shows on Starway”
“Zodiac carrousel”
Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl
crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
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
— Loy published Lunar Baedeker, a cluster of poems whose title/conceit was inspired by Baedeker’s city guides, in 1923. Loy tours us around an “irreal” New York/Berlin/Parish-ish city variously depicted as an orgiastic afterlife necropolis, a city viewed in black-and-white as if on film, and — certainly in this case of the poem reproduced here — a city located on Earth’s “fossil virgin” moon. Whichever is the case, this city’s moth-like denizens have been attracted to it by the “light” of sex, drugs, and other excesses.
PS: In my reading, the phrases set off by quote marks seem to be neon signs or other advertisements.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.