March 27

"Brancusi's Golden Bird" by Mina Loy is very interesting.  In the footnotes it is found that the title to the poem was abstracted from a sculpture made by an artist who used metal for making his sculptures.  The government later tried to tax these pieces of art as raw material rather than pieces of art.  I believe the poem is saying that God is an artist and he molded the earth into its shape and created all the elements thus in.  How can you tax raw materials when they are works of art from God.  And therefore how can you tax Constantin Brancusi's works of art as raw material when they are molded themselves from a work of art.  I really liked the use of vocabulary here, describing the earth as "an incandescent curve / licked by chromatic flames / in labyrinths of reflections".  I can actually see an intense scene where an artist molds and shapes and heats the work to create the work of art that is visualized or reflected deep in the labyrinth of the artists mind.