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Mina Loy (1882–1966)

Author of The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy

19+ Works 575 Members 5 Reviews 11 Favorited

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Includes the name: Loy Mina

Image credit: poets.org

Works by Mina Loy

Associated Works

Surrealist Painters and Poets: An Anthology (2001) — Contributor — 67 copies
The Gender of Modernism: A Critical Anthology (1990) — Contributor — 64 copies
Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (2011) — Contributor — 30 copies
Modernist Women Poets: An Anthology (2014) — Contributor — 17 copies
Modern Women Poets (2005) — Contributor — 13 copies
Contact collection of contemporary writers — Contributor — 1 copy

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I.
I should preface this section by saying that I am a huge admirer of Mina Loy's poetry; in fact, I think she is one of the finest modernist female poets, deservedly in the company of figures like Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein. The Last Lunar Baedeker may well be the best collection of modernist poetry ever, surpassing even William Carlos Williams's Spring and All or Eliot's The Waste Land. (I don't include Eliot's Four Quartets given its publication date is after the Second World War, and thus after the modernist period proper.)

Who else can write such terse verses like these, packed with metaphysical inquiries, ruminations on gender, philosophy, truth, and subjectivity?
The impartiality of the absolute
Routs     the polemic
Or which of us
Would not
Receiving the holy-ghost
Catch it     and caging
Lose it

(from Human Cylinders)
All of the female modernist writers I mentioned above—Barnes, H.D., and Stein—were also equally proficient and talented in prose, especially narrative prose. Barnes's Nightwood might in all reality be the best example of the modernist novel in English; H.D.'s HERmione (link to my Goodreads review) is one of the finest examples of the female Künstlerroman, not to mention a fascinating roman-à-clef that shows the egotistical influence Ezra Pound had on her life and her work; and, of course, Stein's Three Women and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and many other pieces that mingle poetics with prose, from prose poems to libretti, from novels to antinovels.

Insel is Loy's only novel, and it was never published during her lifetime. Unlike the compact, concise, and dagger-sharp precision found in all her verse, Insel lacks these qualities which make Loy's presence among the modernists, surrealists, Dadaists, cubists, and other bohemian art groups in the interwar period such a crucial presence. And Loy is indeed seminal to this period, both as a poet and as a curatorial presence to artistic figures as pivotal as Giacometti, Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray, and many others.

While there are moments of interesting scenes in cafés and clubs that bring to life the artistic world in Europe—and here, we are in an unnamed city in Germany—as well as tragicomical portraits of the surrealist painter Insel himself, Loy's prose meanders and is never sure of itself. At times, Loy is intent on relaying a tête-à-tête between the painter and the narrator, one Mrs. Jones, herself an artist (although very much ashamed of her output alongside more successful figures like Insel); at other times, Loy launches in philosophical comments about the meaning of art or the nature of place insofar as it informs subjectivity; still, in other sections, the growing camaraderie between Insel and Mrs. Jones results in an intriguing character sketch of what it might have been like to be a starving artist during this specific period in history.

But these sections have no flow to them—and, if you look at my favorite book shelf here, you'll see I actually prefer books without structure—and this is to Insel's detriment. Oddly enough, too, there are only a few passages where Loy's prose borders on poetic rumination: so this doesn't feel like "a poet's novel" (much as I hate to use that hackneyed phrase), but rather a poet's attempt to write narrative prose. And there are moments that succeed in doing just this, but far more that fail to cause Insel to be a complete fiction, standing on its own two feet. Rather, its importance to us now is as a social and historical document, which is something I consider in some depth below.


II.
Now, I should preface this section by saying how much I admire presses like Melville House who have just published Loy's Insel as part of their Neversink series. Without presses like Melville House, Dalkey Archive, New Directions, Archipelago, and NYRB, to name but a few, many books would never see the light of day, languishing under layers of dust in an archive somewhere with no readership to savor the succor many of these works afford. So Melville House should indeed be commended for publishing Insel, along with the "Visitation" fragment—which has never before seen the light of day—added in their volume as an appendix.

With that said, because as I stated above that Insel is a social and historical document—and that its import lies there, rather than its flawed attempt as a fictional experiment—I can't help but feel that the Melville House edition of Insel is one that falls flat of the requirements such a document necessitates. Sarah Hayden even addresses this in her introduction:
Due to the exigencies of space and formatting conventions established by the Neversink series, it was not possible to include by extended notes and critical apparatus.
Although Harding is speaking solely about her notes to the "Visitation" fragment, one can well imagine that her notes to Insel itself have also been excised due to these monolithic "exigencies." A social and historical document requires annotations throughout, not just an introductory or prefatory section, in order for readers to continually situate the text within its specific historical, social, and aesthetic contexts. For example, while many of the non-English terms—mostly German—are indeed translated at the end in yet another appendix, most of these annotations are Loy's own. Since Insel does not function solely in terms of fiction, as I have said repeatedly, it requires a contextualization and grounding for which Melville House's "exigencies" do not allow—and, sadly, the dearth of such materials can cause the text to be further isolated from a contemporary reader's experience of the bohemian art world it dramatizes.

I know that many readers have issues with academic presses, largely due to the costs of their products; however, I think that the only proper way to do Insel justice is to have the excised notes (and whatever other materials Hayden possessed and which were not placed on Melville House's website, which they have done in the case of Hayden's as far as "Visitation" goes). It is only with recourse to them that the world in Insel can come to life. Would an academic press have done a better job with the text? While I can't answer that question, I can almost assuredly say that they probably would have.

When reading fiction, minimal notes are always best so as to not detract from readers' experiences of the text. (I recall, for instance, a friend's experience reading several of Woolf's novels in the Harcourt editions, failing to realize there were notes toward the back as Harcourt chose not to "blemish" the main text with any indication—superscript, asterisk, or otherwise—that there were annotations.) But Insel is not fiction to be enjoyed: its whole raison d'être should and must be as a social and historical document: one requiring the laborious and sometimes cumbersome footnotes and annotations of academic work. Only then can this text be properly placed within its context; as it stands now, in this edition, the context is lost, thus making Loy's only flawed (failed?) attempt at fiction all the more glaringly futile when taken solely on its own terms.
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proustitute | 2 other reviews | Apr 2, 2023 |
Mina Loy might be a fine poet, but there's a very good reason why this novel wasn't published during her lifetime despite her numerous attempts: the writing is awful. There seems to be an amusing story about a nightmarish artistic mooch buried in the tortured prose, but unfortunately not amusing enough to warrant the effort of digging it out.
 
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giovannigf | 2 other reviews | Nov 14, 2017 |
A tremendous novel that should be better known. It's a character study of an artist on the fringe of the Paris avant-garde in the 1930s. The language and imagery are exquisite. As the editor mentions in her concluding essay, it serves as a kind of mirror to André Breton's Nadja.
 
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le.vert.galant | 2 other reviews | Jan 26, 2015 |
4.5/5

[…]

The smell of small cooking
From luckier houses
Is cruel to the maimed cat
Hiding
Among the carpenter’s shavings
From three boys
—One holding a bar—
Who nevertheless
Born of human parents
Cry when locked in the dark

[…]

-Italian Pictures: The Costa San Giorgio


I want someone with the tendency to obsess over Modernism and Futuruism and other Patriarchal Eurocentric Difficult Things (I know you're out there) to pore over this with a fine-tooth comb. I know I missed the most of it, what with not being fluent in French/German/Italian/smattering of Spanish and all the requisite references, but what I did manage to get is simply extraordinary. There's also the Latin business, but let's work our way up, shall we?

[…]

Defiance of old idolatries
inspires new schools

[…]

-Lions’ Jaws


Most of what I got went along the lines of sex and censor and the matter of thought not fitting into body into box. History talks about First Wave Feminism and its complacency with legality, a nice and neatness that would work if Loy hadn't been rocking around Second Wave (right to fuck) and Third Wave (right to not be white/rich/straight/cis) with her poems on childbirth and

[…]

And I who am called heretic,
and the only follower in Christ’s foot-steps
among this crowd adoring a wax doll
—for I alone am worshipping the poor
sore baby-the child of sex igno-
rance and poverty.

[…]

-The Prototype


and likely the only reason she and they survived is due to her not making a ruckus in the society spreadsheet of the time and drawing as much attention as the rest, aka

“One wonders what the devil anyone will make of this sort of thing who hasn’t all the clues….I am aware that the poems before me would drive numerous not wholly unintelligent readers into a fury of rage-out-of-puzzlement.”

-Ezra Pound, The Little Review 4:11 (March 1918, pp. 56-58)


but of course must one keep in mind that she spent a good portion of that talked-about time unmarried and taking care of her child. Which meant money, which meant reputation, which meant her not only seeing everything in terms of sex but writing about it in as esoterically linguistic a manner as possible just wouldn't do while she was a woman if she wanted to eat.

[…]

Is it true
That I have set you apart
Inviolate in an utter crystallization
Of all the jolting of the crowd
Taught me willingly to live to share

Or are you
Only the other half
Of an ego’s necessity
Scourging pride with compassion
To the shallow sound of dissonance
And boom of escaping breath

[…]

-Songs to Joannes


As you can see, it didn't stop her from publishing every so often, drawing enough attention and the rare combo of literary editor and rabid fan to bring her work into the new millenium. I question the "new", really, for her life will still attract the "whore" and "slut" and every other word the gynephobic use when especially afraid of women embracing their sex drive. You are not free to malign such a phenomenal spirit in such a way, but if you wish to say as such while fucking a pinecone, be my guest.

[…]

You may give birth to us
or marry us
the chances of your flesh
are not our destiny—
The cuirass of the soul
still chines—
And we are unaware
if you confuse
such brief
corrosion with possession

[…]

-Apology of Genius


She hung out with Stein and Barnes and this Nancy Cunard person whom I'd kick myself for not hearing about sooner except for, well, she's exactly the type to be buried in the chronicles posthaste.

[…]

The impartiality of the absolute
Routes 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


Seriously, Modernist Extraordinare. She wrote a poem about [Ulysses]. Go forth.
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½
 
Flagged
Korrick | 1 other review | Oct 23, 2014 |

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