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The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems
Mina Loy has been perplexingly absent from British literary history. In America she has been posthumously launched as the electric-age Blake, she has been translated into French and Italian to great acclaim, and in the Times Literary Supplement Thom Gunn compared her to the great Augustan satirists. Her reclamation as an English poet is long overdue.
Pound, Moore and Williams valued her work, while British critics openly scorned it. Not only were her futurist techniques unlike anything they had encountered before, but her subjects -- procreation, parturition, prostitution, suicide, addiction, retardation -- were considered shocking even by some modernists.
She vanished from the literary scene just as dramatically as she had arrived on it, and for much of the century her bold experiments remained a well-kept secret. Carcanet first introduced her work to British readers in 1985 in Roger Conover's The Last Lunar Baedeker, a collected writings. This new edition updates our earlier volume and presents more reliable texts of the essential Loy poems. It includes more extensive notes and apparatus, and features a number of previously unknown works rescued from Dada archives and obscure avant-garde little magazines. All of Loy's canonical Futurist and feminist satires are included, as are the celebrated poems from her Paris and New York periods, the complete cycle of `Love Songs', and her famous portraits-in-verse which define the trajectory of her favoured company and geography -- from fellow modernists Joyce and Brancusi in Paris in the 1920s to fellow destitutes in New York's Lower East Side in the 1940s.
Pound, Moore and Williams valued her work, while British critics openly scorned it. Not only were her futurist techniques unlike anything they had encountered before, but her subjects -- procreation, parturition, prostitution, suicide, addiction, retardation -- were considered shocking even by some modernists.
She vanished from the literary scene just as dramatically as she had arrived on it, and for much of the century her bold experiments remained a well-kept secret. Carcanet first introduced her work to British readers in 1985 in Roger Conover's The Last Lunar Baedeker, a collected writings. This new edition updates our earlier volume and presents more reliable texts of the essential Loy poems. It includes more extensive notes and apparatus, and features a number of previously unknown works rescued from Dada archives and obscure avant-garde little magazines. All of Loy's canonical Futurist and feminist satires are included, as are the celebrated poems from her Paris and New York periods, the complete cycle of `Love Songs', and her famous portraits-in-verse which define the trajectory of her favoured company and geography -- from fellow modernists Joyce and Brancusi in Paris in the 1920s to fellow destitutes in New York's Lower East Side in the 1940s.
256 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1923
76 people are currently reading
2716 people want to read
About the author
Mina Loy
29 books128 followersLoy was born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London, England. On leaving school, she studied painting, first in Munich for two years and then in London, where one of her teachers was Augustus John. She moved to Paris, France with Stephen Haweis who studied with her at the Académie Colarossi. The couple married in 1903. She first used the name Loy in 1904, when she exhibited six watercolor paintings at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.
Loy soon became a regular in the artistic community at Gertrude Stein's salon, where she met many of the leading avant garde artists and writers of the day. She and Stein were to remain lifelong friends.
In 1907, Loy and Haweis moved to Florence, Italy where they lived more or less separate lives, becoming estranged. Loy mixed with the expatriate community and the Futurists, having a sexual relationship with their leader Filippo Marinetti. At this time, she began what would be later known as "Songs to Joannes" [1]", a tour de force of modernist, avant-garde love poetry about Giovanni Papini, another Futurist with whom Loy had an unsuccessful relationship in Florence. She also started to publish her poems in New York magazines, such as Camera Work, Trend, and Rogue. She was a key figure in the group that formed around Others magazine, which also included Man Ray, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. She also became a Christian Scientist during this time.
Loy soon became a regular in the artistic community at Gertrude Stein's salon, where she met many of the leading avant garde artists and writers of the day. She and Stein were to remain lifelong friends.
In 1907, Loy and Haweis moved to Florence, Italy where they lived more or less separate lives, becoming estranged. Loy mixed with the expatriate community and the Futurists, having a sexual relationship with their leader Filippo Marinetti. At this time, she began what would be later known as "Songs to Joannes" [1]", a tour de force of modernist, avant-garde love poetry about Giovanni Papini, another Futurist with whom Loy had an unsuccessful relationship in Florence. She also started to publish her poems in New York magazines, such as Camera Work, Trend, and Rogue. She was a key figure in the group that formed around Others magazine, which also included Man Ray, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. She also became a Christian Scientist during this time.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 123 reviews
December 17, 2015
4.5/5
[…]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?
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
[…]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
Defiance of old idolatries
inspires new schools
[…]
-Lions’ Jaws
[…]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
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
“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.”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.
-Ezra Pound, The Little Review 4:11 (March 1918, pp. 56-58)
[…]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.
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
[…]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.
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
[…]Seriously, Modernist Extraordinare. She wrote a poem about Ulysses. Go forth.
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
July 27, 2007
Funk T.S. Eliot, this chick can WRITE. Poetry and I have issues sometimes. I was fed up with all those British dudes. I was like, can I get a woman up in here? And there she was, all fantastic and kickass.
September 13, 2013
A frequent topic of tedious pontification by magazine scribes with heated opinions is the average American's lack of interest in consuming modern poetry. This unfortunate circumstance is often chalked up to the matter-of-factly asserted mantra that "modern poetry is too difficult." What does "difficult" mean in this context? After reading The Lost Lunar Baedeker, a collection of undeniably "difficult" verse penned by underrated T.S. Eliot contemporary Mina Loy, I propose the following definition. It seems to me that there are two types of candies: those that are easily chewed and swallowed, like Whoppers malted-milk balls, and those that, like nougats or caramels, require prolonged mastication before they can be digested. While I wholeheartedly enjoy both varieties of sweets, there is an unignorable difference in character between the two. "Difficult" poetry, I think, is comparable to the latter type.
Over and over again, while reading Loy's poetry, I found myself faced with a nontrivial decision: ought I to gnaw on each line for as long as necessary to understand it fully before progressing to the subsequent line, or ought I to skim entire stanzas or pages (biting off big chunks of Loy's caramel, as it were) in an attempt to process them as larger units before backtracking and rereading? Sometimes I opted for one strategy, sometimes the other. Neither strategy yielded totally satisfactory results: Loy's utterances sometimes sailed over my head despite my best efforts.
Potential first-time readers should be forewarned that Loy is a poet who possesses, and wields, a gigantic vocabulary, bigger than any writer I have ever come across except perhaps Samuel Beckett. I recently had lunch with a nationally ranked Scrabble player, and I showed Loy's book to him. Flipping through its pages, he was instantly captivated by Loy's liberal usage of obscure polysyllabic words, truly head-scratching words like "vinous," "adamic," "indirigible," and "baldachin." If the use of such ten-cent words perturbs you (or, God forbid, elicits from you the knee-jerk response "How pretentious!"), you should avoid this book.
(Incidentally, I have been told that Latinate polysyllables have fallen out of favor among contemporary poets, and Anglo-Saxon monosyllables are now preferred. Why this should be so is not entirely clear to me. I decline to make a normative judgment on this matter.)
Loy's poetry is not really comparable to any other American's. It bears some similarities to the work of Continental European poets like Guillaume Apollinaire, who also trafficked in meandering free verse that shuns punctuation and displays a heady enthusiasm for anything and everything modern. The lankiness and double-jointedness of Loy's lines should not lull you into believing that she is a lax, careless, or sloppy poet. Despite its deceptively soft contours, her poetry is not flaccid: it is always highly controlled, guided by deliberateness and intentionality rather than hazard. I am convinced that her poems always have meaning, regardless of whether you--the reader--succeed in accessing that meaning or not.
There is much beauty here. In one poem, Loy describes a pigeon's red feet as "coral landing-gear." In another poem, she evocatively describes the process of mourning for a deceased spouse: "Slyly, soporose,/patience creeps up on passion." The emotionally harrowing act of reading her dead husband's old love-letters is described thusly: "This package of ago/creaks with the horror of echo." In another poem, the act of getting drunk is described as "pouring a benison/of internal rain/leaving a rainbow in your brain." Loy's facility with intricate slant-rhymes and alliteration is astonishing, and her poems are marked by a mix of ironic humor and deep-felt compassion for the unfortunate. This is not a book for everyone, but I am glad I read it.
Over and over again, while reading Loy's poetry, I found myself faced with a nontrivial decision: ought I to gnaw on each line for as long as necessary to understand it fully before progressing to the subsequent line, or ought I to skim entire stanzas or pages (biting off big chunks of Loy's caramel, as it were) in an attempt to process them as larger units before backtracking and rereading? Sometimes I opted for one strategy, sometimes the other. Neither strategy yielded totally satisfactory results: Loy's utterances sometimes sailed over my head despite my best efforts.
Potential first-time readers should be forewarned that Loy is a poet who possesses, and wields, a gigantic vocabulary, bigger than any writer I have ever come across except perhaps Samuel Beckett. I recently had lunch with a nationally ranked Scrabble player, and I showed Loy's book to him. Flipping through its pages, he was instantly captivated by Loy's liberal usage of obscure polysyllabic words, truly head-scratching words like "vinous," "adamic," "indirigible," and "baldachin." If the use of such ten-cent words perturbs you (or, God forbid, elicits from you the knee-jerk response "How pretentious!"), you should avoid this book.
(Incidentally, I have been told that Latinate polysyllables have fallen out of favor among contemporary poets, and Anglo-Saxon monosyllables are now preferred. Why this should be so is not entirely clear to me. I decline to make a normative judgment on this matter.)
Loy's poetry is not really comparable to any other American's. It bears some similarities to the work of Continental European poets like Guillaume Apollinaire, who also trafficked in meandering free verse that shuns punctuation and displays a heady enthusiasm for anything and everything modern. The lankiness and double-jointedness of Loy's lines should not lull you into believing that she is a lax, careless, or sloppy poet. Despite its deceptively soft contours, her poetry is not flaccid: it is always highly controlled, guided by deliberateness and intentionality rather than hazard. I am convinced that her poems always have meaning, regardless of whether you--the reader--succeed in accessing that meaning or not.
There is much beauty here. In one poem, Loy describes a pigeon's red feet as "coral landing-gear." In another poem, she evocatively describes the process of mourning for a deceased spouse: "Slyly, soporose,/patience creeps up on passion." The emotionally harrowing act of reading her dead husband's old love-letters is described thusly: "This package of ago/creaks with the horror of echo." In another poem, the act of getting drunk is described as "pouring a benison/of internal rain/leaving a rainbow in your brain." Loy's facility with intricate slant-rhymes and alliteration is astonishing, and her poems are marked by a mix of ironic humor and deep-felt compassion for the unfortunate. This is not a book for everyone, but I am glad I read it.
February 4, 2022
I became fascinated by Mina Loy during my reading of an anthology of American poetry, so I picked up and avidly read this collection of her work right away. Part of her fascination is her life story, but most of it was the poetry itself, which to me finds this perfection between clarity and ambiguity, while also being able to convey a powerful emotion or meaning.
Unfortunately, the sad thing is she didn't write very much - and the volume was rather slim. Most of it was earlier poetry too when she was still finding her special, particular voice. But once she hits her peak in poems like "Poe" there's nothing like her and nothing better in this particular style
(elements of which I find in other contemporary poets, such as Cynthia Cruz). Her life story (very long) is fascinating. She is very much an overlooked poet. She didn't belong to any particular "school" and mocked both Eliot and Pound. She was her own thing.
Anyway, strongly recommended to all (super-strongly to poets) - and try not to dismiss her as "pretentious" - once you figure out what she's doing, and her outstanding poetic construction (out loud it's wonderful to read), it's just so difficult to do what she does.
Here’s two poems:
Poe
a lyric elixir of death
embalms
the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves
on moon spun nights
sets
icicled canopy
for corpses of poesy
with roses and northern lights
where frozen nightingales in ilex aisles
sing burial rites
Moreover, the Moon —-
Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.
Fluorescent
truant of heaven
draw us under.
Silver, circular corpse
your decease
infects us with unendurable ease,
touching nerve-terminals
to thermal icicles
Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle become an elf.
Unfortunately, the sad thing is she didn't write very much - and the volume was rather slim. Most of it was earlier poetry too when she was still finding her special, particular voice. But once she hits her peak in poems like "Poe" there's nothing like her and nothing better in this particular style
(elements of which I find in other contemporary poets, such as Cynthia Cruz). Her life story (very long) is fascinating. She is very much an overlooked poet. She didn't belong to any particular "school" and mocked both Eliot and Pound. She was her own thing.
Anyway, strongly recommended to all (super-strongly to poets) - and try not to dismiss her as "pretentious" - once you figure out what she's doing, and her outstanding poetic construction (out loud it's wonderful to read), it's just so difficult to do what she does.
Here’s two poems:
Poe
a lyric elixir of death
embalms
the spindle spirits of your hour glass loves
on moon spun nights
sets
icicled canopy
for corpses of poesy
with roses and northern lights
where frozen nightingales in ilex aisles
sing burial rites
Moreover, the Moon —-
Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.
Fluorescent
truant of heaven
draw us under.
Silver, circular corpse
your decease
infects us with unendurable ease,
touching nerve-terminals
to thermal icicles
Coercive as coma, frail as bloom
innuendoes of your inverse dawn
suffuse the self;
our every corpuscle become an elf.
April 28, 2020
I'm trying to squeeze out my brain to remember if I had ever read any poetry in my life that is like hers and I don't think I've ever had. It's one of a kind and utterly powerful. Her poetry slaps, people. It slaps you right across the face unapologetically. There's something about her work that should already make her on the top lists with all the great modernists because my gods, she belongs there. I fairly think that not having known about her is my fault but at the same time I'm very delighted that I found her. I still want to go into her work and read more, but suffice to say that this little collection was enough to dazzle me for ages to come. There's something about her poetry that you can't put in tangible words.
November 2, 2022
Mina never caught her ideas whole, she did however manage to construct a trail of dancing images. Little flickers of light, faded, perhaps, but never full, roaring bodies of light, like the sun. The power lies in her incompleteness, which produced some kind of confusion alluding to the sublime.
December 16, 2021
Mina Loy has written a body of poetry I've always wished existed but have never before encountered.
February 6, 2018
visceral, provocative — learned a lot of new words with this one
October 30, 2008
On a second go through of these poems--Joyfully cutting, strange, resistant, hermaphrodititic! A binarian's nightmare. What else from a feminist who hung out with Marinetti?
This Selected was put together to put Mina Loy back into the modernist canon and "Songs to Joannes" & almost every poem in "Corpses & Geniuses" prove she belongs there.
I mean
In one impalpable
Omniprevalent Dimension
We are turned inside out
Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs
Street lights footle in our ocular darkness
in 1919!
The notes compiled by the ed Conover are vital for anyone interested in the landscape of Modernist poetry--for what Modernism is & what, in Loy, the Modernist center was afraid to embrace/what was excised from later definitions of.
This Selected was put together to put Mina Loy back into the modernist canon and "Songs to Joannes" & almost every poem in "Corpses & Geniuses" prove she belongs there.
I mean
In one impalpable
Omniprevalent Dimension
We are turned inside out
Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs
Street lights footle in our ocular darkness
in 1919!
The notes compiled by the ed Conover are vital for anyone interested in the landscape of Modernist poetry--for what Modernism is & what, in Loy, the Modernist center was afraid to embrace/what was excised from later definitions of.
July 3, 2013
Indispensable.
March 20, 2020
Mina Loy belongs to the class of artists (Nick Drake and R Stevie Moore come to mind) plagued by an obscurity that was perhaps nearly as self-perpetuated as it was created by factors beyond their control; in any case, Loy has never received her dues for being a true champion of modernism and a highlight of the poetry that has been classed under the label. All of the poems here are cryptic, but each one has the capacity to be reread and unraveled for comprehension – certainly nothing here could be described as ‘word salad’ or classified with the pejorative ‘imagism’ that oft lingers in the criticism of Eliot’s magnum opus. Perhaps one of Ezra Pound’s most significant achievements was his championing of unknown poet vagabonds who would never have found any audience due to various circumstances, and his praise, albeit somewhat begrudging, might have opened the door wider for Loy. Her poems cover expansive ground, are highly cerebral, dualistically personal and exoteric, and certainly necessary for any true understanding of modernism and its history, from which Loy’s name is disappointingly absent despite her immense presence among figures like Stein, Duchamp, Marinetti, Brancusi, William Carlos Williams, HD, Brancusi and many others. The up-and-away ‘hit single’ of the collection is “Human Cylinders”, in my view a contender for one of the Great modernist poems, but highlights are abound and frequent in this summative volume.
December 20, 2022
absolutely stunning i love mina she exceeds everything
May 21, 2020
The early poems.
September 28, 2014
I first encountered Loy's poetry in Rothenberg and Joris's Poems for the Millenium, Vol. 1, and was immediately intrigued by her and wanted to read more. However, this collection of her poetry slipped under my radar until Jenna posted her review of it last fall. Her review is very much worth reading since it does a wonderful job of expressing the difficulty of reading Loy. It is here https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...
I love this book. Much is made of Loy's life. I doubt I would have liked her, but I love her poetry. Why when it's so difficult to grasp all of the things she's getting at? Well, because she's getting at so many things while using such spare and fascinating language. Her use of such compact, complex, loaded language strikes me as playful. Some people have found it pretentious but I think they're taking her the wrong way. For me, her work brings to mind the best of Dickinson--taken to another degree and then adding collage. Another way that Loy pulls me in is her playfulness with sound. Her work is full of alliteration, admittedly sometimes overburdened with it in her later work. I'm a sucker for sound effects so I enjoy this even when overdone.
On this first reading I chose not to mark all of the passages that wowed me because it was clear there would be many. This will be a treasured book to be gone over again and again it that impractically expected Nevertime when I will be free to read and contemplate what I read without concern for other demands in life. However, I'll provide some examples to give people a taste.
Here is the last stanza from "Joyce's Ulysses" that I think is such an apt and verbally quirky summing up that it tickles the funny bone:
Empyrean emporium
where the rejector--recreator
Joyce
flashes the giant reflector
on the sub rosa--
An instance of her being more concrete from "Ephemerid" the first part of which has her eye catching on something she can't quite make out in the hustle-bustle of the city:
As always, has a wisp of whiteness loveliness
to lift the eyelids;
to whisper of subvisual resources
in the uncolor of the unknown.
Across indefinite curbstones
focus
this creature of fictitious
faery,
this eccentric of traffic:
after all
the illicit insect
is only
a little girl--
--a long white muslin curtain,
tied to her pull-over,
afloat from her,
she pilots an ideal load
And an example of her loading obscure associations from the poem "Lunar Baedeker." Baedeker referring to a tour guide:
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete
And "immortality"
mildews . . .
in the museums of the moon
"Nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
------------------
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes--------------
The dashes are Loy's though fewer in number to cover the same space. There are extensive notes in the back of the book but I partook of them sparingly this time around. This poem itself probably requires looking at a map of the moon to become familiar once again with the names of the features. And to stop and think about associations with the moon. Loy has a mind that has sucked in huge amounts of information and impressions that are being flashed in her poems. On top of that, she's undermining about half of them with multiple meanings. Orient as in the East, or as in orientation on a map or as in orientation in space? How do we orient ourselves by the moon? I have no idea what ornithologists are doing in there unless the moon is thought of as a bird in flight, which I've never considered.
So there is Mina Loy. I think she's fantastic and worth a lifetime of investigation. This is a book I'll keep and plague teenage nursing home volunteers by asking them to read to me from it and stop after a stanza or two and start prying about what she must mean.
I love this book. Much is made of Loy's life. I doubt I would have liked her, but I love her poetry. Why when it's so difficult to grasp all of the things she's getting at? Well, because she's getting at so many things while using such spare and fascinating language. Her use of such compact, complex, loaded language strikes me as playful. Some people have found it pretentious but I think they're taking her the wrong way. For me, her work brings to mind the best of Dickinson--taken to another degree and then adding collage. Another way that Loy pulls me in is her playfulness with sound. Her work is full of alliteration, admittedly sometimes overburdened with it in her later work. I'm a sucker for sound effects so I enjoy this even when overdone.
On this first reading I chose not to mark all of the passages that wowed me because it was clear there would be many. This will be a treasured book to be gone over again and again it that impractically expected Nevertime when I will be free to read and contemplate what I read without concern for other demands in life. However, I'll provide some examples to give people a taste.
Here is the last stanza from "Joyce's Ulysses" that I think is such an apt and verbally quirky summing up that it tickles the funny bone:
Empyrean emporium
where the rejector--recreator
Joyce
flashes the giant reflector
on the sub rosa--
An instance of her being more concrete from "Ephemerid" the first part of which has her eye catching on something she can't quite make out in the hustle-bustle of the city:
As always, has a wisp of whiteness loveliness
to lift the eyelids;
to whisper of subvisual resources
in the uncolor of the unknown.
Across indefinite curbstones
focus
this creature of fictitious
faery,
this eccentric of traffic:
after all
the illicit insect
is only
a little girl--
--a long white muslin curtain,
tied to her pull-over,
afloat from her,
she pilots an ideal load
And an example of her loading obscure associations from the poem "Lunar Baedeker." Baedeker referring to a tour guide:
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete
And "immortality"
mildews . . .
in the museums of the moon
"Nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
------------------
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes--------------
The dashes are Loy's though fewer in number to cover the same space. There are extensive notes in the back of the book but I partook of them sparingly this time around. This poem itself probably requires looking at a map of the moon to become familiar once again with the names of the features. And to stop and think about associations with the moon. Loy has a mind that has sucked in huge amounts of information and impressions that are being flashed in her poems. On top of that, she's undermining about half of them with multiple meanings. Orient as in the East, or as in orientation on a map or as in orientation in space? How do we orient ourselves by the moon? I have no idea what ornithologists are doing in there unless the moon is thought of as a bird in flight, which I've never considered.
So there is Mina Loy. I think she's fantastic and worth a lifetime of investigation. This is a book I'll keep and plague teenage nursing home volunteers by asking them to read to me from it and stop after a stanza or two and start prying about what she must mean.
February 16, 2014
An inspired and inspiring collection. The appendices are thorough, accessible, and invaluable, though the introduction carries an apologetic tone that I can't see sitting well with Ms. Loy. Nonetheless, this volume is a bookshelf treasure trove, filled with such gems as,
"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."
and
"We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spill'd on promiscuous lips
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings"
and
"We are the sacerdotal clowns
who feed upon the wind and stars
and pulverous pastures of poverty
Our wills are formed
by curious disciplines
beyond your laws
You may give birth to us
or marry us
the chances of your flesh
are not our destiny--"
"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."
and
"We might have coupled
In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment
Or broken flesh with one another
At the profane communion table
Where wine is spill'd on promiscuous lips
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily news
Printed in blood on its wings"
and
"We are the sacerdotal clowns
who feed upon the wind and stars
and pulverous pastures of poverty
Our wills are formed
by curious disciplines
beyond your laws
You may give birth to us
or marry us
the chances of your flesh
are not our destiny--"
February 12, 2013
I love her prose. Her poetry...I found it really mixed. Some of the images seemed easy, their value based in shocking and disrupting. In her Aphorisms she talks about the need to disrupt prudishness. In her Feminist Manifesto she calls for the end to virginity. I get that she seeks to do this through disruption and disgust ("To your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark. They are empty except of your shame" (152).), but when I read the poems I get the overwhelming sense of a speaker who despises love. There, she comes off different from the other moderns she mentions in her criticism. Pound, Eliot, HD, Williams - they are all alive to the overwhelming experience of their souls.
August 25, 2012
Mina Loy was an early feminist and an avant-garde poet and writer. This book features Loy's amazing poetry as well as her manifestos on futurism and feminism. My favorite poem is Songs to Johannes. It is basically just an edifying book for any woman working in the avant-garde who has been led to believe that the avant-garde had been a largely male domain until the 1960s. As more and more collections of poetry and biographies emerge on Loy, Baronness Elsa, and a host of other women, our contributions to the avant-garde and to poetry and art in general are being acknowledged and our stories told.
July 26, 2007
One of my all time favorite poets, Mina Loy is incredibly cerebral & sensuous at the same time. Note the series, Love Songs to Johannes, probably the sexiest serial poem ever written. A hammer of a vocabulary delivered in perfect lines, breaks with the breath, funny as hell and positively delicious in every way. Only drawback is that this book excludes the long poem, Anglo-Mongrels & the Rose, which was in the earlier Jargon Press edition. On the other hand, this edition is smaller, and thus easier to carry around. I have both. Essential reading.
January 8, 2023
more fascinated rather than enamoured by it most of the time (which is kind of ironic considering her stance on modernism in the essay late in this book), but damn i could definitely envision futurism utopia where every human could conjure imageries as visceral as her, where we could just dump any pretense of "ideas" therein
August 2, 2019
a collection of very intellectual and multifaceted poems which I'm glad I stumbled upon. if you're looking for poems dedicated to feminism, this would be a good one. x
"Omen of Victory"
Women in uniform
relaxed for tea
under a shady garden tree
discover
a dove's feather
fallen in the sugar.
"Omen of Victory"
Women in uniform
relaxed for tea
under a shady garden tree
discover
a dove's feather
fallen in the sugar.
August 24, 2007
One of my early influences. She made lampshades, she wrote poems. She slept with all the Futurists.
December 11, 2007
i think i'm in love.
March 15, 2023
“Her poems would have puzzled Grandma”
April 20, 2017
I hate to side with the academy, especially since it is mostly male and therefore slanted in favor of masculine standards and voice. I want to be knocked dead by these poems, but the truth is, in my struggling-to-be-humble-about-Loy opinion, they read like jottings in a notebook the writer carries around to take down memories and impressions as they strike, unassembled, unordered, unedited. The lines are disconnected; they eschew punctuation; but their worst fault is abstraction. What can we make, for example, of these notes on the subject of pain in childbirth?
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation [sic]
Almost devoid of concrete images that will connect us, many of these poems are held together by weak rhymes (activity ...declivity ...propensity ...nonentity...equality ...majority ...intensity ...immensity), or conversely, dys-integrated by strings of -tion words. Sometimes she almost makes up words to force the vocabulary to even greater abstraction: fluidic, reproductivity, agglomeration.
On the plus side, it is clear Loy has influenced some better writers who came after, or at least they have taken ideas from her. I've found sources in the volume for poets as different from one another as Sylvia Plath and Erica Jong. She attempts portraits, readings, of strangers on on a train, a routine exercise now but relatively new in her time as these trials take for subject the common man. This effort in terms of art politics is noble, but its realization in Loy's hands lacks utterly the powers of image that sustain readers:
Fundamentally unreliable
You leave others their initial strength
Concentrating
On sketching the theoretic elastic of your conceptions
Till the extent is adequate
To the hooking on
Of any - or all
Forms of creative idiosyncracy [sic]
Loy was all alone, like a wolf trapped on a flooded penninsula in an Arctic storm. She had few models - Dickinson, or Barrett maybe - so her observations that feel so 'done' to me - and often poorly done - were a genuine struggle for her, cutting new trails, trying to fit masculine language to feminine experience. When was childbirth ever a subject in her day except from the point of view of a man standing on a porch in the snow?
More than literature, The Lost Lunar Baedeker (fantastic title, as well as apt) is a historical artifact. I feel some obligation to accompany Loy on her journey, in the same way curiosity and sympathy enjoin us to watch Hattie McDaniel movies.
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation [sic]
Almost devoid of concrete images that will connect us, many of these poems are held together by weak rhymes (activity ...declivity ...propensity ...nonentity...equality ...majority ...intensity ...immensity), or conversely, dys-integrated by strings of -tion words. Sometimes she almost makes up words to force the vocabulary to even greater abstraction: fluidic, reproductivity, agglomeration.
On the plus side, it is clear Loy has influenced some better writers who came after, or at least they have taken ideas from her. I've found sources in the volume for poets as different from one another as Sylvia Plath and Erica Jong. She attempts portraits, readings, of strangers on on a train, a routine exercise now but relatively new in her time as these trials take for subject the common man. This effort in terms of art politics is noble, but its realization in Loy's hands lacks utterly the powers of image that sustain readers:
Fundamentally unreliable
You leave others their initial strength
Concentrating
On sketching the theoretic elastic of your conceptions
Till the extent is adequate
To the hooking on
Of any - or all
Forms of creative idiosyncracy [sic]
Loy was all alone, like a wolf trapped on a flooded penninsula in an Arctic storm. She had few models - Dickinson, or Barrett maybe - so her observations that feel so 'done' to me - and often poorly done - were a genuine struggle for her, cutting new trails, trying to fit masculine language to feminine experience. When was childbirth ever a subject in her day except from the point of view of a man standing on a porch in the snow?
More than literature, The Lost Lunar Baedeker (fantastic title, as well as apt) is a historical artifact. I feel some obligation to accompany Loy on her journey, in the same way curiosity and sympathy enjoin us to watch Hattie McDaniel movies.
November 6, 2025
How Does She Fucking Do It...... loy often eschews rhyme/assonance and grammar itself, and her choice of words is always unexpected and strange (to the extent of her making up/misspelling words). her poems have a certain rhythm to it somehow, owing to how short her lines are + lack of punctuation, and the images she evokes aren't always vivid/clear, but definitely disturbing. when a poet has a certain thematic obsession, this often comes with a certain set of keywords that they inevitably fall back on. her most famous poems deal with sex/obscenity, but its always remade new somehow.... even tonally, her oeuvre of poems can startle, delight, solemnise. but all her works demand a slowing-down, a contemplation of every word (and i guess this is what pound means when he describes her poetry as logopoeia). its difficult to become immerse in that mental space, and it can feel like a drudge after a long time, but it is definitely a new experience. in the introduction shes described as a poet whom readers either love or hate; i thought i would be in the latter, but rn i think im definitely obsessed
February 15, 2020
4.8 stars!
A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia
To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies
Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues
Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones
Marianne Moore and painter Mina Loy are my favorite female modernist poets. Mina wrote like she lived in the Future. Mina called London, Paris, Munich, Florence, New York City, and Aspen home.
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete
And "Immortality"
mildews...
in the museums of the moon
"Nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
-------
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes----
The orignal modernist Milf.
Essential addition to any modernist poetry collection.
A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia
To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies
Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues
Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones
Marianne Moore and painter Mina Loy are my favorite female modernist poets. Mina wrote like she lived in the Future. Mina called London, Paris, Munich, Florence, New York City, and Aspen home.
A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis
From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidized Orient
Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete
And "Immortality"
mildews...
in the museums of the moon
"Nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
-------
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes----
The orignal modernist Milf.
Essential addition to any modernist poetry collection.
July 10, 2017
A poet uncomparable to any other. She can create surrealistic images with her poetry. The vocabulary is beautiful and unexpected. Every line is further away from cliche than the other. Themes like womanhood, universe and modernity come together with the most surprising collection of phrases. It is a very unique work and, because it is so different, not everybody will like. But if you are searching for something original, you should definably try it!
January 20, 2021
I love Mina
April 13, 2022
rekindled my relationship with poetry. futurism through surrealist poetics. unmelodic sex, pig cupid, coke-selling lucifer.
Read
February 14, 2023And I am done, after a long and tedious journey with Mina Loy! All I can say is umm??? What the???
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