(coloration mine)
AIGH! I can tell why you can’t follow the thought stream. (Note I’m not saying I find the poetry good, so much as I can follow what she means at least some.) You’re not very good with words, are you? The word you wanted there is retarded. I know that’s how you likely say it, and you might have to sound things out as you type them. Please try to remember this for the next time you have to type that word though.
Maybe Argent really meant to call her “retarted”, as in tarted-u p-again? 
Oh by the way, although I’m not a fan of Mina Loy’s poetry in general myself, I confess to really enjoying the last stanza of her “Apology for Genius”:
Criminal mystic immortelles. Criminal mystic immortelles. Criminal mystic immortelles. Wheee! 
Oh, and one more thing:
Well, Ezra Pound didn’t seem to mind it:
You’re completely entitled to your own opinion, of course, but you’re also entitled to know that at least one of the major English-language poets of the twentieth-century (although quite a controversial figure himself, of course) completely disagreed with you. 
I thought she was great in the Thin Man movies.
Oh, I don’t know. I think ending the ‘poem’ with:
Shows a level of self-critique rarely seen in modern artists. 
Or Charles Bukowski. He’d chew these posers up, and then go have a drink.
Well, if the OP didn’t like the “pretentious” Mina Loy, I’m not sure he’d really get grooving on Larkin lines like
(And if he’s against poets being “self-indulgent” and “masturbatory”, to quote the thread title, he’s not likely to appreciate Larkin’s “Love again: wanking at ten past three”! ;))
Bukowski? “While all the fear of the wasted years/ laughs between my toes”? That Bukowski?
Larkin and Bukowski may have used rougher language and more cuss words than Loy (natch, they weren’t writing in the Edwardian era), but both of them could turn out what the OP would probably consider equally silly, pretentious, self-indulgent phrases.
My best friend keeps dragging me to this poetry reading group at a local pub. The place is an absolute dive. We sit through about 3 hours of various people standing up and getting their 5 minutes of fame while reading poetry, theirs or someone else’s. Some of it is interesting and thought provoking but most of it is just shit.
It is good that they have many varieties of beer there. It makes the poetry go down easier.
Yes, and frequently did. However, from the same poem,
He knew the poem was self-indulgent, and yet he was still capable of making it work. You’ll not find that kind of self-awareness in Loy’s featured poem in the OP. Loy’s poem seeks to be intimate without actually revealing anything about the poet. It’s narcissistic without having any point or awareness. With Bukowski, you always knew you were getting the real thing, even when he wrote poems and stories about how full of shit he was. I value that quality very much.
You clipped lines (or indeed you isolated rather that element) with the intention of making something less clear. To my mind it makes perfect sense, but requires a distinct amount of thought to parse the syntax - rather than being a stream-of-consciousness jumble of words.
Touché.
Nobody could accuse this of being pretentious, though.
Should read: “To my mind it makes perfect sense in the context of the rest of the poem”.
Oh granted, there’s lots of good stuff in both Larkin and Bukowski, and I’m fond of poems by both of them (Larkin somewhat less so, maybe, but who’s counting). My attempted point was just that there can be as much self-regarding “posing” in rough-n-tough, butch, masculine, dirty-word poems as in the more mannered, swoony affectations of Loy.
(And the one thing I hate about Larkin’s “This Be the Verse” is that a coastal shelf doesn’t actually “deepen”. The point of the coastal shelf is that it’s shallow, a raised shelf around a continent’s coast. He used the concept because he wanted the rhyme with “self”, and he used it wrong. Grrrr. Other than that, though, yes, great poem.)
Never considered that. The image I always got was of the fall-off cliff on the edge of the coastal shelf. But yes, on consideration you’re completely right.
[Forgot this was the pit… sorry]
But yes, on consideration you’re completely right, pigfucker.
My
Brain
Hurts.
Sometimes
I
Like
To
Hit
Myself
With
Bricks.
And
Then
I
Go
Mad.
Mad
One
Smash
Mad
Two
Smash
Meh. Hunter S. Thompson does(did) this kind of thing much better.
Eh. She’s no William Topaz MacGonagall.
One Smash Two Smash Green Smash Hulk Smash by Dr. Banner
The Head Of The Hatra Apollo
-missing from the Iraqi National Museum, Baghdad, April 2003
No light can gild the sun-god’s cheek but strains through burlap now,
Phoibos the refugee, his head a marble cabbage in a sack,
Jouncing east by pickup down a dirt track,
Across Seleucid wastes, the Parthian plains,
once more fortune’s tourist, bobbing free.
Or not-
Just stashed behind a rubbish mound Where bare-boned goats might crop a scraggy meal,
Scant miles from the museum’s shattered room Stripped of laurel and oracles,
his loom of sacred strings,
No Horai here spin round, Just pacing men who wait to close the deal.
A goatherd sings, slings a Kalashnikov,
The godhead mute since looters hacked it off.
By Peter Spagnuolo
My mother had a book, called Listen to the Warm by a man named Rod McKuen. It is without a doubt the stupidest pile of drivel ever invented. I could stab myself in the eyes just thinking about reading it. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…