photo by Johnathan Williams (circa 1960)
“Christ on a Clothesline” Combine 1955-9
Teasing a Butterfly (1902)
Loy in her New York Lamp workshop (1917)
Mina Loy was a poet, artist, writer, inventor, designer, and consummate bohemian of the classical avant-garde. She was affiliated with many of the most influential avant-gardes of the early 20th century, from Futurism to Dada to Surrealism, and produced some of their major documents, like “Aphorisms on Futurism,” but never identified as a member of any of these movements, in part because of explicit sexism, and in part, perhaps, by embodying an artistic power beyond the limits of these movements. Probably she is most famous for not being famous enough! As Wikipedia puts it, “She was one of the last of the first-generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition.” Certainly the general sexism of the time is partially to blame — Harriet Monroe, for example, refused to publish her overtly sexual work in Poetry magazine, and many, like Monroe, found it more pertinent to mention Loy’s beauty than her poetry (Monroe in 1923: “Beauty ever-young which has survived four babies…Yes, poetry is in this lady whether she writes it or not.”) At the same time, Loy herself was something of a mercurial character, protean and constantly evolving, making her difficult to track. She also published only two volumes of poetry, though she was included in many art exhibitions and published widely in small magazines; she even ran a lamp shop backed by Peggy Guggenheim. Loy’s lamp shades were a modest success. Loy had four children, was effectively divorced by 1906 with two children by her first husband and one by her doctor, and had another with husband Arthur Cravan, the Dada Poet-Boxer who, shortly after their marriage, and before the birth of their daughter, mysteriously disappeared off the coast of Mexico on their way to South America. Loy eventually inhabited a bowery apartment where she constructed grotesque and surreal heretical combines out of the garbage and detritus of local derelicts. A show of these works was curated by Marcel Duchamp in 1959. Here is a link to the announcement for that:
https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10993143.
It’s a life that cannot be neatly summed up.
Ezra Pound was an early supporter of Loy, and it was her work that caused Pound to coin “logopoeia,” of his famous trifecta “melopoeia – phanopoeia – logopoeia.” He characterized her work as “logopoeia or poetry that is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modification of ideas and characters.” It’s striking to read that it was Loy’s work that inspired Pound’s famous notion of poetry as “the dance of the intellect.” Bringing it up to the present, it is Loy’s poem-portrait of Gertrude Stein that gives Craig Dworkin’s The Radium of the Word (Chicago U Press, 2020), its title, and his section on Loy’s “Onomastic Imagination” reveals the special provenance Loy gave to proper names, to her friends, to the recombinant paragrammatic potential of words and letters, and to the recesses of language’s aleatoric radiating force. Her portrait of Stein follows in its entirety:
Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word
William Carlos Williams, “divided the psychic landscape of New York’s avant-garde into the Dionysian South of Mina Loy and the fastidious North of Marianne Moore.” That Dionysian spirit is present in Loy’s contribution to the first issue of The Blind Man, Duchamp’s New York Dada magazine of 1917. She writes there: “The Public likes to be jolly; The Artist is jolly and quite irresponsible. Art is The Divine Joke, and any Public, and any Artist can see a nice, easy, simple joke, such as the sun.” Her jokes, however, could be devastatingly serious, even grotesque and macabre. In the “Feminist Manifesto” (1914), using the provocative, aestheticized mask of terror to lamabast society’s bourgeious scruples, a performative identity characteristic of manifestos of the time, Loy suggests that women must sacrifice their “virtue” if they are to be free of Man’s subjugational valuation of women as identified with their physical purity, so “therefore, the first self-enforced law for the female sex…would be the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty — .” Loy’s perverse suggestion, no doubt a radical provocation in 1914, seems even more transgressive in many ways than Valerie Solanas’s call in the later SCUM Manifesto to eliminate the male population, not to speak of the 50 year void between these two radical feminist tracts. Loy was associated with F.T. Marianetti, Duchamp, Man Ray, the surrealist group of Paris including Andre Breton, was friends with the reclusive combine assemblage artist Joseph Cornell, and, like Val Kilmer, she was a Christian scientist, though also, peculiarly, at one time she was a nurse. Gertrude Stein noted that Loy could read with ease all of Stein’s works without any need for commas.
She both moved within and exceeded the boundaries of the distinctive avant-grade groups of Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists, posing, perhaps, not unlike her friend Marcel Duchamp, an indeterminate erotic component, expressed but inexpressable, fundamental to these avant-gardes, a base material unifying all things while throwing into question those things’ being. Like eros’s subversion of all identity as “the secret Universe of omniscient creative impetus compris[ing] the power-house generating our obvious universe,” Loy’s heterogeneric practice produces “a vibrational co-identity” between artist, world, and reader/viewer, creating “a continuous reciprocal radiation that distance does not disrupt.” This power of “co-identiy” and “erotic coupling” is important for the “Feminist Manifesto” when she advocates that “Another great illusion that woman must use all her introspective clear-sigtedness & unbiased bravery to destroy — for the sake of her self respect is the impurity of sex the realisation in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex — except in the mental attittude to it.” This goes for the sexual act as well as to that act’s dissolution of individual identity or fixed gender category. Provocative, tireless, powerful, and influential, Mina Loy’s idiosyncratic individuality that is also no individuality constitutes a highly particular expression of the early avant-garde, and its ambivalences and paradoxes. For example, Loy subverts the heroic concept of genius in “Modern Poetry,” while also embodying genius itself. While noting the wide influence of Ezra Pound, she suggests that genius is a partially unconscious power traveling through artists, rather than a quality of particular artists; in this sense, artists are apertures open to the movement of the world and creators of the world, and she urges men to become women and women to become men, that is, to unify in selves what is beyond self. This puts her in some dialogue with Laura Riding Jackon’s Anarchism is Not Enough, but that must be saved for another episode. Similar to Georges Batailles’s writing on eros in The Accursed Share, Vol II. as a power identified by Freud though not taken to its limit as a possible basis for revolutionary action as that inalienable force which destroys identity in identity, thus offering a ground for novel social and material configurations, a force that is a latent power of all art that endeavors to bring us to the brink and beyond our individual being, Loy finds within Freud’s thinking of the unconscious an Eros we must take absolutely seriously as a pathway to eliminating outmoded, oppressive inhibitions: “Freud is unnecessary to the future. His utile achievements lay in his solution of the problem, “To mention or not to mention.” By making it, aided by the scientific aegis – – – fashionably polite to mention. Clearing a way out for inhibition.” (Eros, Loy).
While Loy published widely in little magazines of the era such as Camera Work, Trend, Rogue, Little Review, Contact, and Dial, she published only two volumes of poetry in her lifetime: The Lunar Baedeker (1923), and The Lunar Baedeker & Time-tables (1958). As if in self-conscious reflection of her own nomadic itinerancy, a lifetime lived in Paris, New York, with travels to Mexico, Buenos Aires, Florence, a life that was a constant evolving redefinition, Loy’s “Lunar Beadeker’s,” travel guides to the moon and beyond, bring language to an alien, scientific, and nearly counter-poetic non-place of exactitude and ambiguity. Posthumously, Jonathan Williams published an updated version of The Lunar Baedeker called The Last Lunar Baedeker (Jargon Society, 1982). The Lost Lunar Baedeker (Farrar Straus Giroux) was published in 1996, where “Modern Poetry” is collected, and more recently Dalkey Archive Press has published Stories and Essays of Mina Loy (2011) which includes “History of Religion and Eros,” there published, I believe, for the first time, from manuscript pages held at Yale’s Beinecke Library collection of Mina Loy’s papers. The collections locates “History of Religion and Eros” from around 1948-early 1950s, meaning quite late in Loy’s career, and written over two decades after “Modern Poetry.” The Beinecke’s Mina Loy collections are amazing, and, as Joanna pointed out to me, fully digital since 2007!
Here are the manuscripts of “History of Religion and Eros”
https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/11703077
The whole collection:
And some cool notes:
notes for Loy’s “Universal Food Machine”
https://archives.yale.edu/repositories/11/archival_objects/675046
Invention manuscripts:
https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/11866211
“Modern Poetry” was actually first published in the lifestyle magazine Charm 3:3 (April 1925, pp. 16017, 71). As it is put in The Lost Lunar Baedeker, “Charm was an eclectic magazine published in the 1920s, devoted to women’s fashion and clothing. Djuna Barnes contributed several articles to it, some under the pseudonym Lady Lydia Steptoe.” I have not been able to find a pdf of the issue that it was published in; however, in an article included below there is a spread from Loy’s article, and information about Charm itself.
I’ve spent a bunch of time on this interesting site put together by faculty and students at Davidson College, Duquesne University, and University of Georgia.
https://mina-loy.com/about-us/team/
She also has an EPC page:
http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/loy/
There was a Mina Loy feature in Jacket October 1998:
http://jacketmagazine.com/05/index.shtml
There is a 1960 interview with Loy and Paul Blackburn from 1960 on Pennsound:
https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Loy.php
Billy Corgan has a pretty bad song called Mina Loy:
Thurston Moore also has a weird song called Mina Loy:
Charles Bernstein (is he a little Corgan-like?) reading Aphorisms on Futurism:
And despite Loy’s critical neglect in the 20th century, there has been an enormous amount of work done on her recently. Notable for us is Cristanne Miller’s, Cultures of Modernism: Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, and Else Lasker-Schüler (University of Michigan Press, 2007).
I’ve also included The Lost Lunar Baedeker, Loy’s Stories and Essays, the aforementioned article on Charm Magazine, and an essay arguing that Loy’s notion of eros goes beyond George Bataille’s.
Looking forward to this conversation!
Brent
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1zJIzZ-HahBAgW-ZP9t59bqamll0UhpOC?usp=sharing