Mina Loy is not for everyone. It is not by accident that her work has been misplaced. “Difficult” is the word that has been most often used to describe her. Difficult as a poet and difficult as a person. And certainly difficult to place. Her work has never attracted casual readers. It is easiest simply to ignore her. Until now, the determination required to find her poems, let alone the perspicacity required to read them, has served as a qualifying experience. But her readers, if small in number, have also been large in commitment. Once discovered, if her poems do not immediately repel, they possess. Her work is far more likely to be a toxic or a tonic—quickly sworn off or gradually acquired as a lifelong habit—than a passing interest. In my own experience, and that of many people with whom I have shared her work over the past twenty years, her poems either embed themselves deeply within the imagination or they alienate. With Loy, there is no in between. She is not an academic poet, but her poems are of the intellect. In order to read her with profit, you need at least four things: patience, intelligence, experience, and a dictionary.
One generally takes Loy—or does not—as one takes a vow. She tends to be accepted or avoided. No one considers her “decent.” She is contrary, she is antimetric, and certainly she is indecent. Her first readers found her so, and most contemporary readers still do. You become either a sworn believer or a fast enemy. Loy’s poetry has gradually fostered community among scholars, but it has also helped to define the sides of a poetry war which is quite real. In recent years her poetry has begun to register with a critical valence for the first time since the 1920s; this is new. But there will always remain those who don’t subscribe. She forces us to take sides, and the easiest side to take is the one that looks past her. That is all right, for I believe, finally, that she will establish the reputations of critics more than they will hers, and that a true and good argument about Mina Loy has begun. That argument is needed. There is no version of the twentieth-century canon that includes Mina Loy’s work, yet somehow it has survived. Perhaps her absence from such lists is itself a form of status. Perhaps it was her wish to remain unchosen.
It is not given to each of us
To be desired.
Loy once said in The Blind Man: “Art is The Divine Joke, and any Public … can see a nice easy simple joke such as the sun.” She named her lunar baedeker not for the sun but for its ghost. It is now, just as the sun is setting on the century, that her guide to the moon seems indispensable. How strange her voice still seems. And how disturbing.
I believe there are certain guidebooks we should take with us as we navigate our way toward the next century, and that Mina Loy’s is one of them. I think her poems have a relevance to the formation of a new modernity, and that she might yet prove to be the poet of her century, as Duchamp proved to be the artist of his. For some of us, she is already.
R.L.C.
I
FUTURISM × FEMINISM: THE CIRCLE SQUARED
(POEMS 1914–1920)
Loy in Florence, ca. 1909, holding her daughter, Joella, and wearing a hat and dress of her own design
There is no Life or Death,
Only activity
And in the absolute
Is no declivity.
There is no Love or Lust
Only propensity
Who would possess
Is a nonentity.
There is no First or Last
Only equality
And who would rule
Joins the majority.
There is no Space or Time
Only intensity,
And tame things
Have no immensity.
Parturition
I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction
The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pin-point nucleus of being
Locate an irritation without
It is within
Within
It is without
The sensitized area
Is identical with the extensity
Of intension
I am the false quantity
In the harmony of physiological potentiality
To which
Gaining self-control
I should be consonant
In time
Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal
The open window is full of a voice
A fashionable portrait-painter
Running up-stairs to a woman’s apartment
Sings
“All the girls are tid’ly did’ly
All the girls are nice
Whether they wear their hair in curls
Or—”
At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization
The conception Brute
Why?
The irresponsibility of the male
Leaves woman her superior Inferiority
He is running up-stairs
I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony
Incidentally with the exhaustion of control
I reach the summit
And gradually subside into anticipation of
Repose
Which never comes
For another mountain is growing up
Which goaded by the unavoidable
I must traverse
Traversing myself
Something in the delirium of night-hours
Confuses while intensifying sensibility
Blurring spatial contours
So aiding elusion of the circumscribed
That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast
Comes from so far away
And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth
Is no part of myself
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes Exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation
Relaxation
Negation of myself as a unit
Vacuum interlude
I should have been emptied of life
Giving life
For consciousness in crises races
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes
Have I not
Somewhere
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered moth
Laying eggs?
A moment
Being realization
Can
Vitalized by cosmic initiation
Furnish an adequate apology
For the objective
Agglomeration of activities
Of a life.
LIFE
A leap with nature
Into the essence
Of unpredicted Maternity
Against my thigh
Touch of infinitesimal motion
Scarcely perceptible
Undulation
Warmth moisture
Stir of incipient life
Precipitating into me
The contents of the universe
Mother I am
Identical
With infinite Maternity
Indivisible
Acutely
I am absorbed
Into
The was—is—ever—shall—be
Of cosmic reproductivity
Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life-stir
I am that cat
Rises from the sub-conscious
Impression of small animal carcass
Covered with blue-bottles
—Epicurean—
And through the insects
Waves that same undulation of living
Death
Life
I am knowing
All about
Unfolding
The next morning
Each woman-of-the-people
Tip-toeing the red pile of the carpet
Doing hushed service
Each woman-of-the-people
Wearing a halo
A ludicrous little halo
Of which she is sublimely unaware
I once heard in a church
—Man and woman God made them—
Thank God.
Italian Pictures
July in Vallombrosa
Old lady sitting still
Pine trees standing quite still
Sisters of mercy whispering
Oust the Dryad
O consecration of forest
To the uneventful
I cannot imagine anything
Less disputably respectable
Than prolonged invalidism in Italy
At the beck
Of a British practitioner
Of all permissible pastimes
Attendant upon chastity
The one with which you can most efficiently insult
Life
Is your hobby of collecting death-beds
Blue Nun
So wrap the body in flannel and wool
Of superior quality from the Anglo-American
Until that ineffable moment
When Rigor Mortis
Divests it of its innate impurity
While round the hotel
Wanton Italian matrons
Discuss the better business of bed-linen
To regular puncture of needles
The old lady has a daughter
Who has been spent
In chasing moments from one room to another
When the essence of an hour
Was in its passing
With the passionate breath
Of the bronchitis-kettle
And her last little lust
Lost itself in a saucer of gruel
But all this moribund stuff
Is not wasted
For there is always Nature
So its expensive upkeep
Goes to support
The loves
Of head-waiters
The Costa San Giorgio
We English make a tepid blot
On the messiness
Of the passionate Italian life-traffic
Throbbing the street up steep
Up up to the porta
Culminating
In the stained frescoe of the dragon-slayer
The hips of women sway
Among the crawling children they produce
And the church hits the barracks
Where
The greyness of marching men
Falls through the greyness of stone
Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction
Hoarsely advertised as broken heads
BROKEN HEADS and the barber
Has an imitation mirror
And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves
Shaving
ICE CREAM
Licking is larger than mouths
Boots than feet
Slip Slap and the string dragging
And the angle of the sun
Cuts the whole lot in half
And warms the folded hands
Of a consumptive
Left outside her chair is broken
And she wonders how we feel
For we walk very quickly
The noonday cannon
Having scattered the neighbour’s pigeons
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
Fluidic blots of sky
Shift among roofs
Between bandy legs
Jerk patches of street
Interrupted by clacking
Of all the green shutters
From which
Bits of bodies
Variously leaning
Mingle eyes with the commotion
For there is little to do
The false pillow-spreads
Hugely initialed
Already adjusted
On matrimonial beds
And the glint on the china virgin
Consummately dusted
Having been thrown
Anything or something
That might have contaminated intimacy
OUT
Onto the middle of the street
Costa Magic
Her father
Indisposed to her marriage
And a rabid man at that
My most sympathetic daughter
Make yourself a conception
As large as this one
Here
But with yellow hair
From the house
Issuing Sunday dressed
Combed precisely
SPLOSH
Pours something
Viscuous
Malefic
While listening up I hear my husband
Mumbling Mumbling
Mumbling at the window
Malediction
Incantation
Under an hour
Her hand to her side pressing
Suffering
Being bewitched
Cesira fading
Daily daily feeble softer
The doctor Phthisis
The wise woman says to take her
So we following her instruction
I and the neighbour
Take her—
The glass rattling
The rain slipping
I and the neighbour and her aunt
Bunched together
And Cesira
Droops across the cab
Fields and houses
Pass like the pulling out
Of sweetmeat ribbon
From a rascal’s mouth
Till
A wheel in a rut
Jerks back my girl on the padding
And the hedges into the sky
Coming to the magic tree
Cesira becomes as a wild beast
A tree of age
If Cesira should not become as a wild beast
It is merely Phthisis
This being the wise woman’s instruction
Knowing she has to die
We drive home
To wait
She certainly does in time
It is unnatural in a Father
Bewitching a daughter
Whose hair down covers her thighs
Three Moments in Paris
I. One O’Clock at Night
Though you had never possessed me
I had belonged to you since the beginning of time
And sleepily I sat on your chair beside you
Leaning against your shoulder
And your careless arm across my back gesticulated
As your indisputable male voice roared
Through my brain and my body
Arguing dynamic decomposition
Of which I was understanding nothing
Sleepily
And the only less male voice of your brother pugilist of the intellect
Boomed as it seemed to me so sleepy
Across an interval of a thousand miles
An interim of a thousand years
But you who make more noise than any man in the world when you c
lear your throat
Deafening woke me
And I caught the thread of the argument
Immediately assuming my personal mental attitude
And ceased to be a woman
Beautiful half-hour of being a mere woman
The animal woman
Understanding nothing of man
But mastery and the security of imparted physical heat
Indifferent to cerebral gymnastics
Or regarding them as the self-indulgent play of children
Or the thunder of alien gods
But you woke me up
Anyhow who am I that I should criticize your theories of plastic velocity
“Let us go home she is tired and wants to go to bed.”
II. Café du Néant
Little tapers leaning lighted diagonally
Stuck in coffin tables of the Café du Néant
Leaning to the breath of baited bodies
Like young poplars fringing the Loire
Eyes that are full of love
And eyes that are full of kohl
Projecting light across the fulsome ambiente
Trailing the rest of the animal behind them
Telling of tales without words
And lies of no consequence
One way or another
The young lovers hermetically buttoned up in black
To black cravat
To the blue powder edge dusting the yellow throat
What color could have been your bodies
When last you put them away
Nostalgic youth
Holding your mistress’s pricked finger