Her Baroness Stripped Bare By The Bachelor, Even
Elsa Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven was a German-born avant-garde visual artist and poet, who was active in Greenwich Village, New York, from 1913 to 1923, where her radical self-displays came to embody a living Dada. She was considered one of the most controversial and radical women artists of the era. Photo from United States Library of Congress.
The early Twentieth Century saw a glorious liberating explosion in the world of Art. From Dada anarcho-insanity to the fascist Futurists with their exaltations of the Machine, from total abstraction to dream realism, from Duchamp making art of toilets to Picasso simultaneously looking abroad at ancient Africa and outwards to trans-Einsteinian dimensions, overnight the unthinkable became quotidian. And a lot of artists became very famous and very rich. But not all of them: my poem is a biographical sketch of a woman who was there at the start of this creative burst, responsible for a great deal of it, and yet whose name has mostly been forgotten.
1
Her in pained labour, the nurses terrified but professional.
They’ve never seen such a birth before.
“Push!”
Her legs spread as usual, her fingers clutching anything she’s offered.
Her face, the things she’s done with her face!
“Push!”
Her distended below, her hurts to create.
Bursts in slow-motion into new life, an awful bubble through her then there’s someone else.
Something else.
“Another one!”
They add it to the pile: on the maternity-ward floor
There’s a snow-shovel, a bicycle-wheel, an iron,
Elsa’s lubricating juices drying on them as life dawns,
There’s a neat pile of bricks, a green apple with a toothy bite out of it, a flat cow,
Hard out of her, “Another one!”
“Push!”
2
Enduring onward: in the city she bangs her city toe against a rusted metal ring. Something left from a building-site. Loose, heavy-ish,
It looks to her like the Goddess of Love, it looks to her like a toilet-seat.
Urban debris, refuse that refuses to be refused,
The gone still here,
Elsa sees Art in it. Gives the trash a title.
Signs her name and stakes her life on any it.
She’s in galleries.
3
In life only three things are certain: birth, death, and chess.
“Checkmate.” A square full of squares, a day and night grid on wood, wooden armies
Face each other on the light and dark board. They haven’t started yet, he’s already won.
In the hotel he owns Marcel pushes forward a pawn.
Seen from straight ahead Marcel looks normal but tilt to either side and see the exposed cross-section skull-and-bones-and-goo of sideways Marcel.
“You’re as wet as any of us, Marcel,” she purrs like a German.
He’s a bastard so why can’t he be her bastard?
She buys him a tie it’s a salmon’s skeleton,
He finds her a scarf it’s a you-know-what noose.
She wants to try on his lipstick,
He dresses as the woman he’d like her to be.
She’s invented a few more Deadly Sins,
He doesn’t like to talk about his work in progress.
She wants to kiss his tobacco, wants to leave her tongue in his mouth,
He’s cogs behind glass.
She flaunts her dreams, he describes her.
She has a love-hate relationship with the part of him that hates her.
Logic insists there must be a part of him that loves her.
He takes her pawn.
She throws her face angrily to the floor; he takes her knight.
She takes her own bishops, she knows where she can stick them.
Marcel to be her boy, boys taste of balloons,
She wants a cold warm cock soft hard in her mouth, there’s nothing stranger than life. She’s life:
He makes sense make nonsense of the machine.
He’s seen more than enough forest.
He has bananas for her scissors.
His brain plays with itself while he yawns for her to make her move, “Arserose rr” he could do something with that.
Seriously running silly experiments he is applauded every time he steps anywhere.
In New York he sometimes remembers he’s human and cries for those who did not make it.
He can paint without any.
A mindyourownbusinessman, he’ll turn the world the wrong way round and sign his name and stake his life on bits of it.
“Check.”
4
She lives on one island or another.
Still dreams of hitting her smackdaddy back.
Dreams she’s a boy with guns of her own.
Daydreaming sees her mother practicing invisibility.
Bleeding hershell
Poetry out of the bits she’s not supposed to show.
What we do is not
Memories keep her up: nights wearing nothing but a tiger,
Funny’s a scream, grimacing dada:
She has a piano in a cage, a gun with an eye where its hole should be.
Does she have the right to
She’s the do in doubt,
She can’t wait to throw a messy menopause in their faces.
Tin-can soup clothes, splayedswish cactus (thou) Art,
Inexcusable humour, milch poetry, “9 Apologies For Herself.”
The gaps between her floorboards, the continental drift of her teeth.
Pain between her
Singing her fairytale: “The scavenger’s daughter – her house is in his hat – think about nothing and you think about that.”
5
Most buildings she’s known have been knocked down but not all of them by her.
Everybody wrote a book in which she died.
She greeted the world naked, let futuremen stick sexwant things in her.
And vice vicer.
Gassed to death, avant garde to the bitter end.
Elsawhere – good bad girls born decades after her dream of her,
Her mushroomy graves,
A headstone on which they write anything except her name and dates:
Baroness Elsa Plötz Endell Greve von Freytag-Loringhoven 1874-1927