Marie Dressler
The very short poem “Film-Face” ends with a revelatory mention of a name now mostly lost to history, but who was a huge movie star in her day. In fact, Marie Dressler was the woman who won the fourth Best Actress Oscar ever handed out.
Joannes
This is the title character who appears in a cycle of thirty-four poems collectively titled “Song of Joannes.” It is thought that Joannes is not directed toward any one particular actual person, but is rather a patchwork collection of various aspects of various lovers. The cycle is notable for exchanging romantic lyricism for rather forthright sexual symbolism.
Gertrude Stein and Madame Curie
The titular figure of the poem “Gertrude Stein” needs little introduction. She is one of the most figures of the Modernist literature movement of the 1920’s. Interestingly, the verse with a reference to the co-discoverer of radium, Madame Curie, in a pithy little work that compares the way Stein used literature to working in a laboratory.
Constantin Brancus
Technically, of course, the actual character of interest in the poem titled “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” is artist Constantin Brancusi’s most famous—arguably, perhaps—sculptural creation. The bronze “bird” perches atop a short stone base which itself is seated upon a large wooden base. The “bird” receives its “air quotes” here because to the unsuspected viewer it could just as easily be mistaken for a flame. The poet even recognizes and comments upon this elasticity of interpretation in her verse:
“an incandescent curve
licked by chromatic flames”
