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Mina Loy - Songs to Joannes & Other Verse
Mina Loy - Songs to Joannes & Other Verses
Public Domain Poets #7
Containing the entire 34 song sequence, Songs to Joannes, and a generous selection of Loy's other verses (originally published 1914-1923), as well as selected short essays, manifestos, and aphorisms. New edition designed, edited, and selected by Dick Whyte.
I am the jealous store-house of candle-ends
That lit your adolescent learning
—————————
Behind God's eyes
There might be Other lights
Loy (1882-1966) was born in London to wealthy parents. While her father did not believe in formal education for women, Loy convinced him to let her study at Künstlerinnenverein, a women's arts college in Munich, and the Académie Colarossi, in Paris.
Out of the severing
Of hill from hill
The interim
Of star from star
The nascent
Static
Of night
She became close with Gertrude Stein while living in Paris, and then moved to Florence in 1906. Loy began publishing 'free verse' in 1914, dabbled in Futurism, and then in 1916 moved to New York to join the avant-garde arts and literary scene, alongside Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, and publishers Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson (et al.).
The prig of passion———
To your professorial paucity
Proto-plasm was mad
Evolving us———
Loy would go on to be a leading poet of the post-1913 'new verse' movement – culminating in her 1923 book, Lunar Baedeker – and her poetic innovations were praised by numerous contemporaries, including William Carlos Williams, Alfred Kreymborg, Walter Arensberg, and T.S. Elliot. Though it would be 25 years until Loy would publish a 2nd book of poetry, she continued to write and make assemblages until her death in 1966.
Gertrude Stein
Curie
Of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word
Public Domain Press is dedicated to producing contemporary editions of out-of-print poets and poetry collections, particularly with regard to compressed and fragmented "free" verse from the late-1800s and early-1900s. All poems start as facsimiles - to preserve the original fonts - which are then cleaned up, edited for consistency, and spaciously laid-out, adorned with borders, illustrations, and ornaments from the books and magazines they originally appeared in. These are not "reprints" of previously existing books, but newly crafted collection, lovingly edited from public domain material, for the serious poetry lover.
Public Domain Poets #7
Containing the entire 34 song sequence, Songs to Joannes, and a generous selection of Loy's other verses (originally published 1914-1923), as well as selected short essays, manifestos, and aphorisms. New edition designed, edited, and selected by Dick Whyte.
I am the jealous store-house of candle-ends
That lit your adolescent learning
—————————
Behind God's eyes
There might be Other lights
Loy (1882-1966) was born in London to wealthy parents. While her father did not believe in formal education for women, Loy convinced him to let her study at Künstlerinnenverein, a women's arts college in Munich, and the Académie Colarossi, in Paris.
Out of the severing
Of hill from hill
The interim
Of star from star
The nascent
Static
Of night
She became close with Gertrude Stein while living in Paris, and then moved to Florence in 1906. Loy began publishing 'free verse' in 1914, dabbled in Futurism, and then in 1916 moved to New York to join the avant-garde arts and literary scene, alongside Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, and publishers Jane Heap and Margaret Anderson (et al.).
The prig of passion———
To your professorial paucity
Proto-plasm was mad
Evolving us———
Loy would go on to be a leading poet of the post-1913 'new verse' movement – culminating in her 1923 book, Lunar Baedeker – and her poetic innovations were praised by numerous contemporaries, including William Carlos Williams, Alfred Kreymborg, Walter Arensberg, and T.S. Elliot. Though it would be 25 years until Loy would publish a 2nd book of poetry, she continued to write and make assemblages until her death in 1966.
Gertrude Stein
Curie
Of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word
Public Domain Press is dedicated to producing contemporary editions of out-of-print poets and poetry collections, particularly with regard to compressed and fragmented "free" verse from the late-1800s and early-1900s. All poems start as facsimiles - to preserve the original fonts - which are then cleaned up, edited for consistency, and spaciously laid-out, adorned with borders, illustrations, and ornaments from the books and magazines they originally appeared in. These are not "reprints" of previously existing books, but newly crafted collection, lovingly edited from public domain material, for the serious poetry lover.
- GenresPoetry
144 pages, Paperback
Published July 22, 2024
About the author
Mina Loy
29 books136 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 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 29, 2025
I wish I could say I understood these poems but I didn’t 💀 They seemed cool, but I fear I must spend some time pondering them (aka attend my English lectures)
Edit: I have attended my lectures and I still don’t really get it. That’s the whole point I suppose?
Re-edit: I have read the whole poem again and focused on the senses it evokes and I actually quite like it now lol… modernism is an odd literary period for sure
Re-edit AGAIN: Song to Joannes is a masterpiece wtf
Edit: I have attended my lectures and I still don’t really get it. That’s the whole point I suppose?
Re-edit: I have read the whole poem again and focused on the senses it evokes and I actually quite like it now lol… modernism is an odd literary period for sure
Re-edit AGAIN: Song to Joannes is a masterpiece wtf
January 2, 2026
Some parts were hard to read, some parts were cutting: human cylinders and aphorisms on futurism were my fav
Read
March 31, 2025not the same edition i read in class, just wanted to log some quotes i like. taylor swift would love mina loy.
“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’t on promiscuous lips.”
“I am the jealous store-house of the candle-ends
That lit your adolescent learning
—
Behind God’s eyes
There might
Be other lights”
“Let us be very jealous
Very suspicious
Very conservative
Very cruel
Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations
Disorb inviolate egos
—
Where two or three are welded together
they shall become god.”
and especially i liked this last bit:
“Crucifixion
Of a busy-body
Longing to interfere so
With the intimacies
Of your insolent isolation”
“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’t on promiscuous lips.”
“I am the jealous store-house of the candle-ends
That lit your adolescent learning
—
Behind God’s eyes
There might
Be other lights”
“Let us be very jealous
Very suspicious
Very conservative
Very cruel
Or we might make an end of the jostling of aspirations
Disorb inviolate egos
—
Where two or three are welded together
they shall become god.”
and especially i liked this last bit:
“Crucifixion
Of a busy-body
Longing to interfere so
With the intimacies
Of your insolent isolation”
February 5, 2026
My review of Songs to Johannes specifically:
I LOVE when artworks are feminist in a freaky, weird, even perverse way. This is so far from the male Elizabethan sonnet poets and their silent female muses (who didn’t even represent themselves, but were mere symbols of power). This is female desire, female yearning, after a male muse.
Why is it still so rare? Even just addressing a male name in the title with the same admiration Beethoven addressed Elise feels modern. A male name can also have a romantic connotation! Even rarer is love poems that seek to disrupt and disturb, that aren’t delicate and appetising. It’s human experience: unsanitized, recollected to the grotesquely honest depths of the human mind.
Imagine a steak. When drawn, or described, it is subconsciously simplified and polished. A real steak contains gristle and sinew. Things that remind you that you’re in fact chewing on carcass, but still very real aspects of the experience of eating a steak. Following this analogy, Loy takes care to name the gristle and sinew. She describes the uncensored version of the human bodily experience.
Usually, erotic depictions are at least slightly polished and tidied up to entice. Anais Nin, like Mina Loy, also sought to capture and uncover the female experience in relation to the sexual. However, even in her most explicit descriptions, each ingredient of intercourse is romanticised to a certain degree, as if dressed in a thin veil of prettiness that smoothes over an absolute truth. In Bataille’s Eroticism, he mentions a perceived cleanliness: that a beautiful woman evokes the urge to dirty her up, to disrupt perfection as an invigorating assertion of power. Almost like a dog pissing on something to mark its territory (my words, not his).
What Bataille described, unknowingly, is an objectification of the female body (and the titillating obscenity, the vulgar shock of realising that she is, in fact, of organic, touchable material). Almost bordering on the madonna-whore complex: the male invincibility of realising you can make a «whore» out of a «madonna». Dirtiness, however, lies innate in the human body (and even when smoothly shaven, the female body is firstly a human body, with bodily fluids, odour, and functions). A fact that Loy brings forth to make the complete picture as it has never been made before.
It reminds me of a particularly grotesque, unappealing sex scene in The Ugly Stepsister (2025) which I love! Never has sex been so unsexy, like a comical wake-up call. It takes place in a stable; there are close-ups of things you’re not used to seeing so close on-screen, animal noises, and parallels between the naked couple and the animals around them. It’s a body horror film. Yet, what Loy does with these love poems is not so different.
The physicality in these poems reminds me of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on The Body. In it, Winterson chronicles the human body in relation to desire. Like Loy, she also seeks to include the whole flavour palette in order to capture human experience more fully. The «yeasty» smell of private parts is recollected. The narrator craves Louise down to her blood’s plasma. She doesn’t write about a non-human, sleek female body as Bataille boyishly fantasies about. She writes about a real human body (she doesn’t have to objectify to yearn).
These poems are abstract by virtue of being so private and intimate. Sensory inputs and personal allusions a wider audience wouldn’t necessarily be privy to enough to understand, but could still appreciate. In contrast to Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, it’s non-sensical in an honest, and not performative way. In doesn’t experiment aimlessly, but with intent, ambition and - should I say, with blood and guts.
I LOVE when artworks are feminist in a freaky, weird, even perverse way. This is so far from the male Elizabethan sonnet poets and their silent female muses (who didn’t even represent themselves, but were mere symbols of power). This is female desire, female yearning, after a male muse.
Why is it still so rare? Even just addressing a male name in the title with the same admiration Beethoven addressed Elise feels modern. A male name can also have a romantic connotation! Even rarer is love poems that seek to disrupt and disturb, that aren’t delicate and appetising. It’s human experience: unsanitized, recollected to the grotesquely honest depths of the human mind.
Imagine a steak. When drawn, or described, it is subconsciously simplified and polished. A real steak contains gristle and sinew. Things that remind you that you’re in fact chewing on carcass, but still very real aspects of the experience of eating a steak. Following this analogy, Loy takes care to name the gristle and sinew. She describes the uncensored version of the human bodily experience.
Usually, erotic depictions are at least slightly polished and tidied up to entice. Anais Nin, like Mina Loy, also sought to capture and uncover the female experience in relation to the sexual. However, even in her most explicit descriptions, each ingredient of intercourse is romanticised to a certain degree, as if dressed in a thin veil of prettiness that smoothes over an absolute truth. In Bataille’s Eroticism, he mentions a perceived cleanliness: that a beautiful woman evokes the urge to dirty her up, to disrupt perfection as an invigorating assertion of power. Almost like a dog pissing on something to mark its territory (my words, not his).
What Bataille described, unknowingly, is an objectification of the female body (and the titillating obscenity, the vulgar shock of realising that she is, in fact, of organic, touchable material). Almost bordering on the madonna-whore complex: the male invincibility of realising you can make a «whore» out of a «madonna». Dirtiness, however, lies innate in the human body (and even when smoothly shaven, the female body is firstly a human body, with bodily fluids, odour, and functions). A fact that Loy brings forth to make the complete picture as it has never been made before.
It reminds me of a particularly grotesque, unappealing sex scene in The Ugly Stepsister (2025) which I love! Never has sex been so unsexy, like a comical wake-up call. It takes place in a stable; there are close-ups of things you’re not used to seeing so close on-screen, animal noises, and parallels between the naked couple and the animals around them. It’s a body horror film. Yet, what Loy does with these love poems is not so different.
The physicality in these poems reminds me of Jeanette Winterson’s Written on The Body. In it, Winterson chronicles the human body in relation to desire. Like Loy, she also seeks to include the whole flavour palette in order to capture human experience more fully. The «yeasty» smell of private parts is recollected. The narrator craves Louise down to her blood’s plasma. She doesn’t write about a non-human, sleek female body as Bataille boyishly fantasies about. She writes about a real human body (she doesn’t have to objectify to yearn).
These poems are abstract by virtue of being so private and intimate. Sensory inputs and personal allusions a wider audience wouldn’t necessarily be privy to enough to understand, but could still appreciate. In contrast to Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, it’s non-sensical in an honest, and not performative way. In doesn’t experiment aimlessly, but with intent, ambition and - should I say, with blood and guts.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 1, 2026
(only read the songs to joannes) OH MY GOD THE FORM THE ALLITERATION THE ANALOGIES THE CLIMAX.
February 5, 2026
Shoutout Philip Coleman for lecturing
Read
April 2, 20263.5* li os cantos para johannes da não edições, que não se encontra presente aqui. portanto vai este.
September 15, 2026
"a god's doormat // on the threshold of your mind"
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews