HUMAN CYLINDERS

By: Mina Loy
June 19, 2026

A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.

Liubov Popova’s “Traveling Woman” (1915)

The human cylinders
Revolving in the enervating dusk
That wraps each closer in the mystery
Of singularity
Among the litter of a sunless afternoon
Having eaten without tasting
Talked without communion
And at least two of us
Loved a very little
Without seeking
To know if our two miseries
In the lucid rush-together of automatons
Could form one opulent wellbeing

Simplifications of men
In the enervating dusk
Your indistinctness
Serves me the core of the kernel of you
When in the frenzied reaching out of
     intellect to intellect
Leaning brow to brow      communicative
Over the abyss of the potential
Concordance of respiration
Shames
Absence of corresponding between the
     verbal sensory
And reciprocity
Of conception
And expression
Where each extrudes beyond the tangible
One thin pale trail of speculation
From among us we have sent out
Into the enervating dusk
One little whining beast
Whose longing
Is to slink back to antediluvian burrow
And one elastic tentacle of intuition
To quiver among the stars

The impartiality of the absolute
Routs the polemic
Or which of us
Would not
Receiving the holy-ghost
Catch it and caging
Lose it
Or in the problematic
Destroy the Universe
With a solution

— “Human Cylinders” was written around 1917, appearing in Alfred Kreymborg (ed.)’s Others anthology that year, though sometimes cited as 1915, and later published in her collection The Lunar Baedeker in 1923, capturing Loy’s commentary on modern life, love, and mechanized existence.

Michael Golston’s The Science Fiction of Poetics and the Avant-Garde Imagination suggests that “Human Cylinders” (1915), with its panting “automatons” coupling in “the enervating dusk,” may be “the first true sci-fi poem.” However, see this index. Marinetti’s “To My Pegasus” (1908), Lewis Milligan’s “The Super-Man” (1910), and Maurice N. Corbett’s “Black Kingdoms of the Future” (1914), among others, should be taken into consideration. Also, speaking of mechanized humanoids, compare this poem with Randolph Bourne’s “Sabotage” (1912), Jessica Dismorr’s “Monologue” (1915), and Álvaro de Campos [Fernando Pessoa]’s “Time’s Passage” (c. 1914–18). Having made this objection, I agree that this poem is one of the earliest true sci-fi poems; one would have to really define one’s terms, of course, to settle this argument.

Gilbert Adair writes in a review of The Science Fiction of Poetics and the Avant-Garde Imagination, that the author

visits various contemporaneous forms of mechanical agency and the humans they quasi-assimilate. The latter include Marinetti, at the time one of Loy’s lovers, yearning to be taken up into hurtling metal; and Princess Langwidere in Frank L. Baum’s Ozma of Oz (1907) — unexpected choice! — who spends her days trying on for the mirror the various heads she has had struck from the shoulders of other women. Golston pegs her as “a cold image of commodity collapsed in upon itself” — unsurprising, perhaps, given Baum’s day job as Fifth Avenue window-dresser, where he choreographed living mannequins to entice prospective customers into the store. Loy’s “automatons” are also recognizably human in reflecting the fuller emotion they fitfully grope after in their impulse to “Destroy the Universe / With a solution.” As Golston observes, the “gender polemic at [the poem’s] base is nixed by the neutrality of cosmic indifference to all things human.”

Also:

Golston has identified in “the science fiction impulse” a motivation for avant-garde poetry active now for at least a century, along with the lineaments of a potential new field of poetics.

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HUMAN CYLINDERS

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