Notes on the Text

The following abbreviations are used in the Notes:

AC		Arthur Cravan
AK		Alfred Kreymborg
AS		Alfred Stieglitz
ASP		Alfred Stieglitz Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
CB		Constantin Brancusi
CU		Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
CVV		Carl Van Vechten
CVVP		Carl Van Vechten Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
ENC		Naumburg Collection [Edward Naumburg, Jr.], Rare Books and Special Collections Library, Princeton University
EP		Ezra Pound
FMF		Ford Madox Ford [Ford Madox Hueffer]
FTM		Filippo Tomasso Marinetti
GN		Gilbert Neiman’s letters to Mina Loy. Private Collection
GP		Giovanni Papini
GS		Gertrude Stein
HV		Holograph version (the letters HV denote that a holograph version of the text exists in the named collection or archive)
JCP		Joseph Cornell Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution
JL		Julien Levy’s letters to Mina Loy. Private Collection
LB		Lunar Baedeker (Paris: Contact Publishing Co., 1923)
LBT		Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables (Highlands, N.C.: Jonathan Williams, 1958)
LLB82		The Last Lunar Baedeker (Highlands, N.C.: Jargon Society, 1982; Manchester, England: Carcanet Press, 1985)
LLB96		The Lost Lunar Baedeker (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996)
MDL		Mabel Dodge Luhan
MDLP		Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University
ML		Mina Loy
MLL		Mina Loy’s letters to Julien and Joella Levy. Private Collection
MM		Marianne Moore
MS(S)		Manuscript(s)
NC		Nancy Cunard
NCB		Natalie Clifford Barney
NOMS		Whenever these letters appear, they denote the fact that no manuscript, typescript, holograph version, galley, or proof has been found in any archive to date. A note carrying this symbol indicates that the poem or work to which it corresponds is based on the first published version.
RM		Robert McAlmon
SH		Stephen Haweis
TSE		Thomas Stearns Eliot
WAA		Walter Conrad Arensberg Archives, Francis Bacon Library
WCW		William Carlos Williams
WL		Wyndham Lewis Collection, Rare Book and Manuscript Collection [Carl A. Kroch Library], Cornell University
YCAL		Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, Mina Loy Archive
YW		Yvor Winters

I. Futurism x Feminism: The Circle Squared (Poems 1914–1920)

1. Untitled poem, 1914 (“There is No Life or Death”). First published in Camera Work 46 (April [October] 1914, p.18). The signed, dated HV in ASP is divided into four 4-line stanzas and lacks punctuation except for dashes (after ll. 9–14) and a final period (after l. 16). The text of the present edition follows the poem’s first publication.

Editor’s Note: Shortly after MDL offered this poem to AS, editor of Camera Work, he accepted it. This acceptance should have resulted in ML’s first published poem, but the issue of CW in which it was scheduled to appear was delayed by six months, allowing another poem, “Café du Néant” (n. 4), to appear first. ML’s “Aphorisms on Futurism” (n. 51) had appeared in an earlier issue of CW, marking ML’s first publication in any genre.

2. PARTURITION, 1914. First published in The Trend 8:1 (October 1914, pp. 93–94). A signed, dated HV in CVVP is identical to the first published version in substantives but varies from it in details of punctuation and spacing. In an otherwise friendly letter to her friend (Trend editor) CVV dated “2–13–1915—Firenze” (YCAL), ML explicitly objected to the punctuation that had been added in the printed version. The present text therefore follows the HV, with the exception of two ampersands (ll. 62, 63), which I have spelled out. Reprinted in LB without the final three lines.

Editor’s Note: This poem, rather than the act of childbirth itself, was probably the subject of a comment ML made to CVV in a letter dated October 29, 1914 (CVVP): “I am glad to introduce my sex to the inner meaning of childbirth. The last illusion about my poor mis-created sex is gone. I am sad.” Mina Loy gave birth to her first child in 1904, a full decade before she wrote this poem. She also had children in 1907, 1909, and 1919.

As the putative first poem ever written about the physical experience of childbirth from the parturient woman’s point of view, and the first poem in English to use collage as a texturing device, “Parturition” is a significant event in the history of modern poetry as well as the literature of modern sexuality. Virginia M. Kouidis was the first critic to observe this. Her monograph, Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980) was the first book-length study of ML. ML’s biographer, Carolyn Burke, also offers a brief but useful discussion of this poem in her essay “The New Poetry and the New Woman: Mina Loy” (Diane Middlebrook and Marilyn Yalom, eds., Coming to Light: American Woman Poets of the Twentieth Century [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1985], pp. 37–57).

3. ITALIAN PICTURES, ca. summer 1914. NOMS. First published in The Trend 8:2 (November 1914), pp. 220–22. This text follows the first publication, with one emendation. In “Costa Magic,” Cesira suffers from “pthisis,” emended here to “phthisis” (ll. 28, 51), an archaic term for tuberculosis and other wasting illnesses. Reprinted in LB as “Three Italian Pictures,” with slight modifications, the most significant of which is a stanza break in “Costa Magic” between lines 21 and 22.

Editor’s Note: ML spent the summer of 1914 recovering from a nervous breakdown, psychological illness, or depression of some kind in the Apennine mountain village of Vallombrosa, province of Florence, with MDL and her guests. CVV, the new editor of Trend, was among MDL’s American visitors. At the same time, ML was having an affair with FTM (see n. 4) and preparing to extricate herself from her marriage to SH (1877–1969). ML spent much of the summer anxiously monitoring reports of the German invasion. Only in the fall of 1914 would ML return to 54, Costa San Giorgio, her hilltop residence in Florence (ca. 1907–16).

In Sacred and Profane Memories (London: Cassell and Company, n.d. [1932], p. 116), CVV recalls a conversation with ML at MDL’s villa in Vallombrosa in August 1914. Leo Stein had been describing the Futurists’ positions as a form of political protest, insisting that FTM glorified war and the machine aesthetic but understood little of music or painting. ML, according to CVV, “gave her sanction to this opinion, adding that the futurists also were violent against women and were determined eventually to bear their own children.” ML then asserted that Italian women existed “only for one purpose.” CVV and ML tried to make a list of Italian women who had made significant contributions outside of the arena of opera. This exercise led CVV to conclude that “Italian women do not appear to have left a deep impression on history.”

Under CVV’s editorship, Trend was committed to giving “the younger men free rein to experiment with new forms.” Trend was the self-described enemy of “stupidity, banality, cant, clap-trap morality, Robert W. Chambersism, sensationalism for its own sake.” But it soon lost its financial backing, if not its disingenuous editorial mission; after three issues under CVV, the magazine folded. Before doing so it had managed to introduce ML, “a painter of international fame … who is in sympathy with the Italian school of Futurists.” It remains one of the most elusive of the many elusive magazines in which ML was published, escaping even Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich’s notice in their generally comprehensive survey of little magazines of the (1891–1946) period, viz., The Little Magazine: A History and Bibliography (Princeton University Press, 1946).

4. THREE MOMENTS IN PARIS, 1914. This sequence first appeared as a triptych in Rogue 1:4 (May 1, 1915), pp.10–11, although “Café du Néant” had already been published out-of-suite in International: A Review of Two Worlds 8:8 (August 1914, p. 255). “Café du Néant” was therefore ML’s first published poem. CVV introduced ML’s work to both magazines. The International [formerly Moods magazine] version of “Café du Néant” differs substantially from the only known MS (HV at CVVP), while the Rogue version does not. Therefore I have chosen the latter as my copy-text.

Rogue’s double-column format restricted line lengths, causing many lines to run over; the lineation here preserves the lineation of the HV. I have made three emendations to the Rogue text, all in “Magasins du Louvre.” Left of the emblem ] is the text as presented here; right of the ] is the corresponding text as published in Rogue. Line numbers correspond to the lineation of the present edition:

20: camellia] camelia

21: iridescent] irridescent

35: Having surprised] Having surprising

“One O’clock at Night” was omitted from LB; the other two sections ran as separate poems. One notable variation occurs in the LB version of “Café du Néant”:

  1: leaning      lighted] lighted      leaning (LB)

Editor’s Note: “Three Moments in Paris” is the first of a series of poetic satires on gender roles and male/female relations which make up the bulk, but not all, of this section. Here, ML warms up her satiric voice to address some of the themes she explored during and immediately after the years she spent in Florence—male posturing, female dependency, marital appearance, sexual repression, romantic love. Here, too, she appropriates Futurist vocabulary in mocking defiance of Futurism’s male constabulatory. Informing these satires is her brief but imprinting affair with FTM (1876–1944), Futurism’s founding impresario and chief ideologue, to whom “One O’clock at Night” is addressed. For the reader unfamiliar with ML, FTM, or Futurism’s significance as a prototype for the historical avant-garde, some further background is necessary.

FTM’s charismatic personality and graphic, grammatical, and lexical theories exerted a strong influence on ML long after their uncoupling. His manifestos calling for the revisualization of language, the abolishment of punctuation, and the liberation of words from conventional syntax appealed to ML’s already experimentally inclined temperament. His proposed substitution of traditional sentence structure with the “bizarre rhythms of free imagination” struck her as challenging and logical—a revolutionary formula for a revolutionary age. And his summons to oppose the old poetry of nostalgic obligation with a new poetry of intellectual expectation seemed to beckon and encourage her own imagination.

Given her troubled marriage and her interest in the language-actions of Marinettism, it is difficult to determine how much of ML’s initial flirtation with Futurism had to do with her personal infatuation with FTM, how much with the war propaganda that was sweeping Florence at the time, and how much with curiosity and rebellion. FTM was surrounded by the most intellectual and artistic men in Florence, people who shared an elective affinity for literature and the arts. As Italy was preparing to enter World War I, most of the poets, artists, musicians, and actors in Marinetti’s circle were signing up. FTM himself volunteered in a cyclist unit. Futurists Umberto Boccioni (sculptor), Luigi Russolo (composer), and Antonio Sant’Elia (architect) likewise enlisted. ML would soon volunteer as a nurse in a Red Cross Hospital. And while it is doubtful that the thirty-two-year-old English poet would have agreed with the thirty-eight-year-old Italian polemicist’s characterization of war as “the world’s only hygiene,” she fully embraced his enthusiasm for war and his antipathy toward pacifism. Describing “the effect a pacifist young man has on one here now” is impossible, she wrote CVV. “It almost amounts to the physical repulsion some people have for the sexually perverse.” In other letters written to CVV and MDL during this period, she expressed her envy of young male soldiers going to the front, her desire for “some sort of military training [for] the women who want it,” and her sensation of war as an aphrodisiac. “I’ve got the war fever so badly,” she wrote to CVV in one letter. “My masculine side longs for war,” she confessed in another (CVVP). In “Psycho-Democracy” (1920/LLB82), ML would later express a more favorable view of pacifism and renounce her views of militarism.

But that was later. FTM was a magnetic force for many who came into contact with his virile intellect and personality. For ML, it went even beyond that. His energy reignited her creativity and incited her dormant animus. He jump-started her out of depression into a period of intense productivity, as she explained to MDL unapologetically. In fact, she suspected that she was “the only female who has reacted to it [FTM’s energy]—exactly the way … men do. Of course being the most female thing extant—I’m somewhat masculine” (MDLP). To MDL again: “I am so interested to find I am a sort of pseudo-Futurist” (1914). But in other letters written at the height of her involvement with FTM, she adopted a more guarded stance. To her estranged husband, SH, she wrote: “Do not fear—I am not intellectual enough to have become a Futurist—but have given up everything else.” And in still other letters to MDL she hedged her convictions: “I am in the throes of conversion to Futurism—but I shall never convince myself.”

ML finally objected to FTM’s promotion of misogyny. But did she also thrive under the male caste system over which he presided as patriarch? According to FTM, women embodied the amore to which the male gaze was susceptible, luring them away from the technological vision to which they should be devoting their full concentration. Sentiment, lust, and passion were weaknesses in men, brought on by the animal presence of women. While publicly defending the rights of suffragists, FTM found their eagerness for the right to vote “ridiculous,” for “woman finds herself wholly inferior in respect to character and intelligence and can therefore be only a mediocre legislative instrument.” Although he denied that these principles applied to individual women of ML’s advanced nature, FTM publicly compared women to animals—“wholly without usefulness”—subbeings.

His misogynism was more editorially than behaviorally conspicuous. The ninth tenet of The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism (1909) declared “contempt for women” as one of the movement’s sacred principles. The tenth tenet named “feminism” as one of the enemies Futurism would destroy. Although ML was assured by FTM that these were general principles, that she was a special case, this was a slap in the face of an entire gender—and she took offense at this attempt to extort the female race. In “Lions’ Jaws” (n. 14), ML frames Marinetti’s attempt to wheedle his way into the “‘excepted’ woman’s heart” in terms of moral choices and gender loyalties.

Like all of ML’s affairs, this one ended abruptly. But she was quick to admit that the relationship had also had its benefits and was relatively sanguine about the loss. Soon she was writing to MDL that although FTM’s “interest in me lasted only two months of war fever … I am indebted to [FTM] for twenty years added to my life from mere contact with his exuberant personality.” In the same letter, she refers to her “utter defeat in the sex war,” a sense of surrender that is alluded to again in “Lions’ Jaws,” qualified by a sense of having won a larger cause. Almost nonchalantly she asked MDL what she was “making of Feminism. I heard you were interested. Have you got any idea in what direction the sex must be shoved?” And to CVV she matter-of-factly mentioned a similar shift in focus: “What I feel now are feminine politics.” While her poems would soon take stern measure of FTM and his sexist gang, her letters speak more about renewal and purpose than rejection and disillusion. In fact, she describes her sense of optimism about the future as an optimism borne of Futurism, and describes FTM not as a devil but as a fallen angel, “sent from heaven to put the finishing touch—& they say he is a brute to women!” (CVVP).

5. SKETCH OF A MAN ON A PLATFORM, ca. autumn 1914. NOMS. First published in Rogue 1:2 (April 1, 1915, p. 12). This text follows the Rogue text. Reprinted in LB, with no substantive changes.

Editor’s Note: This is the first of five poems and two plays ML published in Louise [Mrs. Edgard Varèse] and Allen Norton’s spirited Greenwich Village magazine, which advertised itself as “the Cigarette of Literature,” and was affectionately referred to as “a necessary evil.” Futurist rhetoric is satirically evoked throughout the poem. The pseudo-man on the platform flexing his male fallacies with untroubled superiority bears all the signs of a mock Marinetti. ML pulls the strings; Marinetti is reduced to an amusing spectacle—Marinetti as marionette.

6. VIRGINS PLUS CURTAINS MINUS DOTS, December 1914. First published in Rogue 2:1 (August 15, 1915, p. 10). The present text follows the Rogue copy text except for one variant, following the signed and dated (December 3, 1914) HV (CVVP). Stanza breaks in Rogue vary slightly from the HV.

  2: door’s] doors

Editor’s Note: The word “dot” (l. 5), from the Latin dotem, dowry, was followed by an asterisk and explanatory footnote in Rogue. The HV bears a similar annotation; thus the asterisk/footnote in the present version is an authorial gloss.

7. BABIES IN HOSPITAL, May 1915. First published in Rogue 2:2 [n.s., 3:2] (November 1916, p. 6). This text follows the first publication except for the correction of a misspelling in l. 45 (irresistibly] irresistably). Two HVs of this poem (CVVP) indicate a possible stanza break at ll. 45/46.

Editor’s Note: ML volunteered in a surgical hospital in Florence during World War I; she described the experience to CVV in a letter dated February 13, 1915 (CVVP):

In Italy they will cut through 2 inches wide and deep of a man’s back while he is awake. O dear Carlo men stand pain so much better than women ever so much better.… I’m so wildly happy among the blood & mess for a change.… I stink of iodoform—& all my nails are cut off for operations—& my hands have been washed in iodine—& isn’t this all a change?.… I will write a poem about it—& you should hear what a tramp calls Madonna when he’s having his abdomen cut open without anaesthetic.

In another letter sent to CVV during this period, she made reference to this poem: “I enclose some slight things I thought about some babies I saw in a hospital. Florence is full of soldiers.”

ML is listed among the November 1916 contributors to Rogue as “the writer, and Artist Englishwoman [who] has arrived in New York from Florence. Her first drawing done in this country is in this Rogue.” The drawing, Consider Your Grandmother’s Stays, occupied the page facing her poem and was the first of several she would publish in American periodicals.

8. GIOVANNI FRANCHI, ca. May–July 1915. First published in Rogue 2:1 [n.s. 3:2] (October 1916, p. 4). A single HV of this poem survives in CVVP, signed and dated “Mina Loy Forte-dei-Marmi 23 July 1915.” This text follows the first published version, which differs from the HV only in accidentals. The emendations I have made to the Rogue text are left of the ].

24–25: démodé] demode’

43: cymophanous] symophonous

48: filliping] filliping

53, 115: Paszkowski’s] Paschkowski’s

(Paszkowski’s was and still is a café-bar located on the north side of Piazza Vittorio Emanuelle, Florence; it was a gathering place for artists and intellectuals during ML’s Florence years, as was the more famous Caffè Giubbe. ML frequented both. I thank Carolyn Burke and Marisa Januzzi for this information.)

136: mean] means

154: minarets] minarettes

155: mayonnaise] mayonaise

Editor’s Note: The “Giovanni Bapini” of this satiric work is based on GP (1881–1966), one of ML’s significant lovers and one of Futurism’s philosophical fathers, caricatured more as foolosopher here. Papini began his career as an “anti-philosopher.” His first book, Twilight of the Philosophers (1906), was one of the foundation texts for FTM’s Futurism, just as Lacerba, the journal he founded in 1913, was an important outlet for FTM’s polemical writing. Despite the appearance of solidarity, the two were uneasy colleagues; the charismatic and worldly FTM and the socially insecure and visually impaired GP formed a convenient intellectual alliance that belied a deep personal distrust and competition. This was not helped by GP’s discovery that ML was taking turns with both of them in bed. The exposure of this love triangle put a wedge in the fragile geometry of all three familiars and hastened ML’s divorce and first trip to America. It also exposed the gap between FTM’s practice and teachings, for the “adulterous triangle” was supposedly one of the “four intellectual poisons” that he wanted to abolish (War, the World’s Only Hygiene).

In a letter to CVV written shortly after the triangle broke up, ML rationalized her behavior: “Of course I was in the right having acted entirely in the wrong.” After losing FTM, she was not regretting the past as much as she was dreading the future: “The only thing that troubles me is the fear of not finding someone who appeals to me as much” (CVVP).

The split in Futurist ranks that followed was explained in terms of philosophical differences but was grounded in sexual politics. GP won a number of the movement’s younger disciples to his side, and the biographically unidentified “Giovanni Franchi” of this poem is probably modeled after one of his junior admirers. In an undated letter to CVV, ML wrote of GP: “He’s going to ruin himself—getting narrower & narrower—& when I try to wake him up—he says the medicine’s too strong—decidedly New York I think—don’t you?” Elsewhere she expressed a more disdainful view of GP: “Friends keep me posted as to the errors of his flesh.… He’s really only a fool… & his imagination’s gone to pot.”

Still elsewhere, ML reports to CVV with a touch of sadistic pleasure the play of her ideas on GP’s head: “I had a lovely argument with Papini—I maintained that pederasty was the highest and noblest form of love—& gave the most conclusive reasons—which he couldn’t deny—but [he] ended up by saying it’s morally and physically abhorrent. So you see?”

Describing her guests, MDL sometimes spoke endearingly of her “pederasts.” Discussions on such topics as pederasty, perversion, adultery, pornography, free love, exhibitionism, and homosexuality were common among the reformers, iconoclasts, and artists who visited MDL’s Villa Curonia and frequented Paszkowski’s; the new thinkers enjoyed expressing their support for such behavior, although their persuasion was often more rhetorical than behavioral. Sex was the most intriguing conversational subject from which taboo and superstition had been lifted in the new permissive culture. And sex was the favorite subject at MDL’s gatherings, where tolerance was encouraged and inhibition ridiculed. ML preferred this subject to all others and enjoyed taking extreme positions to challenge and goad her listeners.

CVV was the husband of Fania Marinoff, but did not make a secret of his occasional affairs with men. ML knew he would find the image she presented an amusing one: GP in the awkward spot of having to take a stand on sodomy after listening to his ex-lover extol the virtues of pederasty. The sexually challenged GP had been a jealous lover before she left him and still had not reconciled himself to the separation. He blamed FTM and was avenging his bruised heart by cultivating protégés in an effort to draw followers away from his rival’s splintering movement. GP would not have been at all amused by having his sexual preference questioned, nor by ML’s cynical depiction of the elder Giovanni’s infatuation with the younger Giovanni in “Giovanni Franchi.” It is hard to imagine a greater affront to Futurist sensibilities than the insinuation of homosexual attraction between the mentor and the mentored. The Futurists were steadfast in their masculine pose and saw no humor in their masquerade of manliness; they were hysterical in their defense of virility and even defended rape as the procreative prerogative of victors in war—life must be re-created out of death on the battlefield. ML’s poem bites farcically into the pretense of pedantic male posture and twists with subversive wit the nature of Futurist homophilia.

On the surface, “Giovanni Franchi” is an entertaining lampoon of an apprentice philosopher learning the ways of the world at the feet of his pretentious and intellectually vain elder while three females of indiscrete identity patter complaisantly at the edges of male banter. The insidious subtext only emerges when the incriminating portrait of the Futurist as Pederast is in full view. At the same time, it is difficult not to imagine ML as the self-accusing speaker, reproaching herself for what she didn’t see until too late—the true nature of the recused man. She alone “never knew what he was / Or how he was himself” (ll. 124/125). Now that she understands, she consoles herself. She could not have won, could not even have competed with the object of the elder philosopher’s infatuation: a handsome boy in adolescence with “sensitive down among his freckles” (l.46). She acknowledges with irony and a hint of mock jealousy the qualities she lacked that Giovanni Franchi had, before reducing him to his only advantage. Indeed: “His adolescence was all there was of him” (l.11).

“He was so young / That explains so much” (ll. 77–78).

9. AT THE DOOR OF THE HOUSE, ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse (New York: Knopf, 1917), pp. 64–66. The present text follows the 1917 version, to which I have made two emendations:

  8: inconducive] incondusive

46: aniline] analine

Editor’s Note: MM, Wallace Stevens, WCW, and TSE also appeared in AK’s second Others anthology. EP, in his famous review of this anthology in The Little Review 4:11 (March 1918, pp. 56–58), praises AK for “this first adequate presentation of ML and MM”; he takes their work to be a “distinctly national product” and praises AK for “getting his eye in.” In this first attempt at literary classification of ML’s work, EP coined the term “logopoeia or poetry that is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of intelligence among words and ideas and modification of ideas and characters,” as distinct from melopoeia (“poetry which moves by its music”) or imagism (“poetry wherein the feelings of painting and sculpture are predominant”).

However problematic certain aspects of Pound’s characterization may appear in retrospect, this was the first significant critical notice of ML’s poetry to appear in print, the first of many comparisons to MM, and the first to invoke the name of Jules Laforgue. More important, EP immediately recognized the cerebral nature of ML’s work and predicted that it would be dismissed for its difficulty: “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.” Two months later, TSE weighed in with his opinion of the Others anthology. Writing in The Egoist V (May 1918, p. 70) under the pseudonym T. S. Apteryx, Eliot praised Loy more reservedly: “It is impossible to tell whether there is a positive oeuvre or only a few successes.” Although TSE never revisited that question, or commented on ML again, the aleatory foundation of this poem may have adumbrated the Tarot imagery in The Waste Land (1922).

Conrad Aiken also reviewed the Others anthology in his Skepticisms: Notes on Contemporary Poetry (New York: Knopf, 1919). He didn’t think much of AK’s enterprise and encouraged readers not to waste their time on the “gelatinous quiverings of Mina Loy.”

10. THE EFFECTUAL MARRIAGE, or THE INSIPID NARRATIVE OF GINA AND MIOVANNI, ca. summer 1915. NOMS. First published in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, pp. 66–70. The parenthetical postscript is reproduced here as it appeared in the first published version. ML spent the summer of 1915 in the Italian seaside resort of Forte dei Marmi. This version follows the first publication, to which I have made the following emendations:

  5: Gina] Gian

23: correlative] correllative

60: idiosyncrasies] idiosyncracies

87: variegate] varigate

Editor’s Note: “Gina” and “Miovanni” stand for ML and GP. This poem drew early and favorable comments from both EP and TSE, and has commanded as much critical attention as any poem from ML’s Florence period. TSE pronounced it “extremely good, and suggestive of Le Bosschère.” EP found it “perhaps better written than anything I have found in Miss Moore.” Later, EP excerpted this poem in two anthologies, under the title “Ineffectual Marriage.” In 1932 he still considered “The Effectual Marriage” one of the most memorable poems of the last thirty years, one which defined its epoch. But in memorializing the poem, he also distorted it. Burke has written persuasively about the effect of Pound’s “framing” of this poem. See Burke’s essays “Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference” (American Quarterly 39 [1987, pp. 98–121]) and “Mina Loy,” in Bonnie Scott, ed., The Gender of Modernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).

11. HUMAN CYLINDERS, ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in Others: An Anthology of the New Verse, pp. 71–72. This text follows the first published version, to which I have made one emendation:

33: antediluvian] antedeluvian

Editor’s Note: For EP, the 1917 Others anthology contained the first “adequate presentation” of ML’s work. For John Rodker (1894–1955), the three poems by ML also enabled one to “estimate her actual significance” for the first time. But he was less taken by the evidence than EP, concluding that “she certainly is a poet, but her work remains only—very interesting. Between that and poetry that matters is still a wide gulf. Her visualization is original, often brilliant, but headwork is cold comfort and her capacity for feeling is rather a cold indignation.” He gave qualified praise to “Human Cylinders,” calling it “a good poem,” but suggesting that if only it were “simplified, it might be great” (Little Review 5:7 [November 1918, pp. 31–32]). The twenty-four-year-old reviewer probably knew very little, if anything, of the Futurist sources from which its lines were drawn. (John Rodker was the founder of Ovid Press, publisher of EP’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, and first husband of the English novelist Mary Butts).

12. THE BLACK VIRGINITY, ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in Others: A Magazine of the New Verse 5:1 (December 1918, pp. 6–7). This text follows the first publication. I have made the following emendations to the 1918 text:

10: Truncated] Troncated

11: segregation] segration

17: Anaemic] Aenaemic

38: Subjugated] Subjuguted

13. IGNORAMUS, composed ca. 1915. NOMS. First published in LB (section 1: “1921–1922”). Although not published until 1923, ML refers to this poem in a letter to CVV written in 1915: “The best thing I did was ‘Ignoramus’” (CVVP). Thus I have placed the composition date at 1915. This text follows the first publication, except for the following emendations:

28: Mating] Making

53: last”] last

Editor’s Note: The title character of this poem is a purehearted and innnocent-natured tramp—very much in the spirit of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp, who first made his screen appearance in the 1910s. This poem reveals a day in the tramp’s life—a life of disadvantage, resourcefulness, routine, and chance. Performing, maundering, bargaining, improvising, playing, “breakfasting on rain”—these are among the survival habits and alleviating solutions of the sentient alley dwellers and outcasts on whom ML shined her final gaze of compassion—after abandoning society, satire, and homage. “Ignoramus” represents the first appearance of such a figure in ML’s work, prefiguring the lowlife figures featured in several poems written during her Bowery period (Section 4).

14. LIONS’ JAWS. Composition date unknown, ca. 1919. NOMS. “Lions’ Jaws” appears to be ML’s final verse verdict on Futurist affairs—her own, her paramours’, their victims’, their lovers’. First published in The Little Review 7: 3 (September–December 1920, pp. 39–43). The present text follows the first published version except for the following emendations:

  5: mise en scène] mis-en-scene

24: rococo] rococco

49: carnivorous] carniverous

53: lightning] lightening

76: on a] an a

81: vermilion] vermillion

89: ménage] menage

Editor’s Note: This was the first of three contributions by ML to The Little Review, the influential magazine whose foreign editor, EP, solicited ML’s poems. This issue of LR also contained a review by John Rodker of the latest Others anthology (Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse) and a response by ML (see n. 17).

Previous notes have identified some, but not all, of the identities behind the spoof aliases of “Lions’ Jaws.” “Danriel Gabrunzio” is Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863–1938), Italian nationalist, poet, adventurer, and adulterer. “Raminetti” is of course FTM; “Bapini” is GP, the homely Futurist scholar and nearsighted philosopher introduced in “Giovanni Franchi” and “The Effectual Marriage.” “Ram” and “Bap” are mock pet names for competitors Marinetti and Bapini, reminiscent of the sounds of boys playing with toy artillery. And they are both “flabbergasts,” in other words, Futurists. “Imna Oly,” “Nima Lyo,” and “Anim Yol” all refer to ML, who sometimes used these acronymic aliases when referring to herself in the third person. “Imna Oly,” incidentally, made another appearance in 1920. In a Provincetown Players playbill announcing Laurence Vail’s What d’You Want? at the Selwyn Theater on Broadway (December–January, 1919–20), “Imna Oly” played the part of “Esther, a spinster.” Finally, “Mrs. Krar Standing Hail” (l. 124) is a stand-up jab at Mrs. Stan Harding Krayl (a.k.a. Mrs. Gardner Hale), a friend of MDL who had an affair with ML’s husband, SH, in Florence. This relationship is described in some detail in the “Stephen Haweis” chapter of MDL’s autobiographical narrative, Intimate Memories: European Encounters (New York: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1935).

Compositionally this poem belongs with ML’s post-Florence poems. Its attenuating opening line (“Peninsular” is allowed to stand as a pun) and telescopic perspective throughout place the personalities and events described on memory’s horizon. ML was probably living in New York when she wrote this poem, but because “Lions’ Jaws” is set in Italy and represents ML’s last balance sheet of Futurist business, I am including it in this section. The poem could not have been written before 1919, since the last stanza makes reference to Gabriele d’Annunzio’s famous storm on the contested Adriatic port of Fiume, which took place in September of that year. D’Annunzio’s unauthorized siege was designed to prevent Fiume’s incorporation into the then newly formed Yugoslav nation.

Much of the private and public history of ML and the Futurists can be traced in this poem, not to mention the personality traits, ideological tendencies, and character flaws of the protagonists, from FTM’s fantasy of self-propagation (“agamogenesis”), to GP’s sense of inferiority, to D’Annunzio’s insatiable lust for military and sexual trophies. ML is finally capable, at this remove, of viewing her first battle in the sex war as both a personal defeat and a moral victory, and can concede that the complicity, if not duplicity, of her status as an “excepted” woman was a trap which left her with only one choice. I do not wish to transpose too much biography onto this poem, but there is also the suggestion that she may have fantasized—if not actually petitioned—her lovers to father (another) illegitimate child, just as there are hints elsewhere that she may have miscarried or aborted a child by SH.

It seems just to give ML the last word in this particular chapter of her literary struggles on the hom(m)e front:

“Now dear Carlo—If you like you can say that Marinetti influenced me—merely by waking me up—I am in no way considered a Futurist by futurists—& as for Papini he has in no way influenced——my work!! so don’t say a word about it—he’s very passatist—really” (ML to CVV, 1914; CVVP).

II. Songs to Joannes (1917)

15. SONGS TO JOANNES. By early 1917 ML had completed this sequence. She had drafted most of it by August 1915, and made frequent references to the work-in-progress in letters she wrote to CVV that year. Initially, she expressed hesitation about the work (“… no interest to the public … for your eyes only”) and concern about circulating it at all: “I feel my family on top of me—they want to read some of my pretty poems!.… one friend … has dubbed my work pure pornography—”. When SH warned her that she was ruining her reputation by writing as she did, she was annoyed and discouraged. But as the year and sequence matured, it was clear that the poem had introjected itself deeply within her psyche: “If this book of mine is no good it settles me—I am the book and I have that esoteric sensation of creating!” By the time she had completed the project, she could hardly contain her eagerness to make it public: “I send herewith—the second part of Songs to Joannes—the best since Sappho—they are interesting.… If you wanted me to be a happy woman for five minutes or more, you would get [them] published.… My book is wonderful—it frightens me.”

In July 1915, the first four sections of what was eventually to become a thirty-four-song cycle appeared under the title “Love Songs” in the inaugural issue of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (1:1, July 1915, pp. 6–8). The scandal created by the debut of Others quickly earned the magazine “a reputation bordering on infamy,” AK recalled two decades later in Troubadour: An Autobiography (New York: Liveright, 1925). He proudly described the “small-sized riot” that broke out when Others first hit the stands. ML’s “Love Songs” were the favorite victim of the attacks: “Detractors shuddered at Mina Loy’s subject-matter and derided her elimination of punctuation marks and the audacious spacing of her lines,” not to mention her explicit examination of intercourse, orgasm, bodily function, and sexual desire. Although she was yet to make her first trip to America, ML had already secured her reputation in the New York avant-garde literary community. In his famous survey of American poetry, Our Singing Strength (New York: Coward-McCann, 1929), AK again described the “violent sensation” that ML’s “Love Songs” created: her “clinical frankness [and] sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax and punctuation … drove our critics into furious despair.… The utter nonchalance in revealing the secrets of sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd. It took a strong digestive apparatus to read Mina Loy.… To reduce eroticism to the sty was an outrage, and to do so without verbs, sentence structure … [was] even more offensive.” AK was referring to the sty of the limicolous “Pig Cupid” in ML’s all-business opening stanza to “Love Songs,” the most famous of all her lines.

In recalling the outrage of “the average critic … here in enlightened Manhattan” toward “Love Songs” in general and its first stanza in particular, AK also made reference to lineal qualities of another nature. He described the poet as the “exotic and beautiful … English Jewess, Mina Loy, an artist as well as a poet,” then described her avant-garde credentials: “She imbibed the precepts of Apollinaire and Marinetti and became a Futurist with all the earnestness and irony of a woman possessed and obsessed with the sense of human experience and disillusion.” AK was the first writer to explicitly acknowledge ML’s debt to FTM’s Futurist manifestos, or to comment directly on her syntax and subject matter in terms of Futurist technique. Her replacement of “the foolish pauses made by commas and periods” with the more intuitional blank spaces and dashes, her mixing of upper- and lower-case letters, her early use of collage and disjunction, and the charged sexual energy of her poems reflect the influence of FTM and are consistent with the principles he advocated in his manifesto “The Destruction of Syntax” (1913). That ML used these techniques in service of aims directly anathematical to FTM’s makes the cultural impact of her appropriation all the more significant. When her lover became the “other,” she turned his tools into her weapons.

“Had a man written these poems,” AK recalled of “Love Songs,” they might have been tolerated. “But a woman wrote them, a woman who dressed like a lady and painted charming lamp-shades.” Her title promised romance. But her songs delivered unmelodic sex. Chansons sans chanson.

AK’s comment was the first to acknowledge a deeply gendered, largely unspoken bias on the part of the critical establishment’s initial reaction to these transgressive lyrics. AK recalled that the early reviews of “Love Songs” puzzled ML as much as they injured her. This was also true of the early rejections, which ML referred to in a letter addressed to CVV (n.d., 1915). CVV had been encouraging her to write “something without a sexual undercurrent.” Her response: “I know nothing but life—and that is generally reducible to sex.… Apro-po of Joannes Songs—why won’t the pubs publish [?]. This is very sad. And why did Amy Lowell hate my things?… Dear Carlo, I’m trying to think of a subject that’s not sexy to write about … & I can’t in life.”

By 1920, free love was the toast of free verse; E. E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay were considered the ultra-sexual poets of the hour. ML’s experiments had helped clear a path for both, but she was already being trimmed out of modern poetry’s body as if she was a premature growth.

If critics reacted quickly to the publication of “Love Songs,” ML did, too. Within weeks, she wrote to CVV that she liked “the tendency of ‘Others’ and the way it look[ed but was] rather sorry that some words were misprinted such as … ‘Sitting the appraisable’ [l. I.2] instead of silting the appraisable—and ‘there are’ instead of ‘these are suspect places’ [l. I.13].” Comparing the 1915 Others text to the only known MS of this poem (a signed and dated [1915] HV of I–IV), it is evident that the errors she referred to were not present in the handwritten text (CVVP). But it is also possible to see how the words in question could be misread by less than astute surveyors of her casual cursive script. Fragmentary drafts of other “Love Songs” exist at YCAL, but not in sufficiently whole or finished states to serve as copy-texts.

Two years later the complete sequence appeared, taking up an entire issue of Others (3:6, April 1917, pp. 3–20). The above-mentioned errors had been corrected, but certain other changes inconsistent with the HV and the 1915 printing were introduced. Some of them clearly bore ML’s signature. For example, the last four lines of IV in 1915:

For I had guessed mine

That if I should find YOU

And bring you with me

The brood would be swept clean out

became two in 1917:

Before I guessed

—Sweeping the brood clean out

Other changes were more questionable (e.g., “white and star-topped” replaced “white star-topped” in l. I.6; “sewn” replaced “sown” in l. I.7; “spill’t” replaced “spilled” in l. III.5). ML had not indicated that these lines contained errors in her 1915 complaint. More important, she reverted to the original HV of lines I.6 and I.7 when she reformulated the sequence in 1923 (LB), seemingly confirming her original textual intent.

But LB preserved other changes made in 1917, such as the ending of IV. At this remove, in the absence of proofs bearing her corrections, it is impossible to distinguish printer’s errors from editorial changes from ML’s own alterations or to know what “repairs” she might have made in 1917, then reconsidered in 1923. My assumption, finally, is that the 1917 rendering of l. I. 6–7 is either non-authorial or an authorial revision that was later recanted; that it does not stand. The only evidence that I have ever found indicating that proofs of LB existed is RM’s casual statement quoted in Robert E. Knoll, ed., McAlmon and the Lost Generation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962, p. 226), where he mentions checking proofs of LB in Rapallo, Italy, en route from Spain to France.

For the 1917 publication, ML made sure to correct the errors that bothered her most in 1915, substituting “silting” for “sitting” (l. I.2) and “These” for “There” (l. I.13) in the opening section. Beyond that, she made a few new revisions (e.g., the ending of IV) before publishing the sequence in Others. The surprising appearance of “sifting” (l. I.2) in LB in place of what had been wrongly printed as “sitting” (1915) and corrected to “silting” (HV, 1917) is a possible late revision, but more likely a printer’s error. Or, as Januzzi has suggested, this could reflect ML’s attempt to rectify what she knew had been a problematic line in 1915—having forgotten her earlier solution.

I do not view the LB rendition of “Love Songs” as an attempt to put the 1917 cycle into final order but rather as a separate narrative involving many of the same strategies. The result is an altogether different—and arguably less successful—effort. Therefore I present the LB version in Appendix D.

The text of “Songs to Joannes” presented here necessarily relies on the 1917 Others version as its copy-text, and varies from it in relatively few instances. The 1917 text, after all, is the source for thirty of the thirty-four original parts. I rely on ML’s letters, and variants in the earlier (HV) and later (LB) versions, only to mediate discrepancies in I–IV, as mentioned above. In most instances, first and final intentions converge. Where they do not, the copy-text or editorial judgment prevails.

In the present edition, I have not prefaced this sequence with the dedicatory poem, “To You” (Others [July 1916, pp. 27–28]), as I did in LLB82. Januzzi has persuaded me that despite ML’s plea to CVV [(n.d., 1915) to “get Songs for Joannes published for me—all together—printed on one side of each page only—& a large round in the middle of each page—& one whole entirely blank page with nothing on it between the first and second parts—(pause in between moods)—the dedication—‘TO YOU’”)], I may have taken this request too literally in LLB82. I believe her caution is correct. I now find it difficult to read “To You” as a prelude to “Songs to Joannes,” either thematically or structurally. It has therefore been left out of the present edition altogether.

I explain these issues in detail for several reasons. This is among the most frequently discussed, excerpted, and anthologized of ML’s poems; “Love Songs” and its often forgotten predecessor, “Songs to Joannes,” have a particularly complicated textual and editorial history; certain lines, especially in the opening section which I have just been discussing, have been the subject of more speculation and uncertainty than any other lines she produced. My decisions should be subject to question, but my reasons should not.

I have made the following emendations to the 1917 text, and refrained from making others, as explained below. Dashes here (— — — —) correspond to dashes in Loy’s 1917 text, and are counted as lines of type when they occupy a complete line, for example XXX.5. This is important only for the purpose of cross-referencing lines with emendations below. The LLB96 version is to the left of the ]. The 1917 Others version is to the right:

I.6: white star-topped (following HV, LB)] white and star-topped)

(Editor’s Note: The HV version reads “white star-topped,” as does the first appearance in 1915 Others and later printings, including LB.)

I.7: sown (following HV, LB)] sewn

(Editor’s Note: The HV reads “sown,” as does 1915 Others and later printings, including LB.)

I.8: Bengal (following HV and OED)] bengal

(Editor’s Note: A Bengal light, in nineteenth-century usage, was a firework or flare used for signals, producing a steady and vivid blue light.)

III.5: spill’d (following HV and OED)] spill’t

(Editor’s Note: In 1993, Angela Coon adapted this section (III) for performance by the spoken-word band Bloodfest [San Francisco].)

III.7: daily news (following HV)] daily-news

IV.11: sarsenet] sarsanet

V. 14: don’t] dont

IX.6: spermatozoa] spermatazoa

X.1: (Editor’s Note: “shuttlecock and battledore” would be the correct OED spellings, but I assume that ML is deliberately punning here. Her spelling stands.)

XIX.3: (Editor’s Note: “QHU” remains the most successful poser in ML’s entire lexicon. Its meaning, if any, has so far resisted extraction. I once suspected it was an acronym, or a pun disguised as one, along the lines of Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1920). But no appositive word or translation has yet occurred that convincingly deconstructs the anagram, homograph, or rune that stands behind the upper-case construction. “QHU” may allude to an enchoric name or retronym that was once familiar but has since passed from currency. If so, perhaps some future reader will one day open the lettre de cachet and report its contents. Until then, it remains pure vocable or sonant, a precarious precursor of Lettrisme.
    We can also imagine it as an unbroken cryptogram or enciphered message to Joannes or one of his representatives. In this case, we can only hope that GP grasped its esoteric meaning. It is also possible, more prosaically, that QHU was a printer’s error, the first half of an uncorrected etaoin shrdlu [sic], or an ersatz euphemism designed to escape the censor’s scythe. This pre-digital encryption recently attained electronic status. In 1995 “QHU” was posted as a query to the poetry café of the Internet community. As of now, QHU remains simply an unsolved metaplasm. The virtual café remains open to any latecomers bearing solutions: conover@mit.edu.)

XXVIII. 18: cymophanous] cymophonous

XXIX. 11: caressive] carressive

XXIX.28: (Editor’s Note: The correct spelling would be “incognitos,” but I have chosen not to emend in favor of Januzzi’s enchanting suggestion that this may echo the “philosophers toes” passage in another poem featuring GP [see n. 8]. It is also possible that a pun is intended here; i.e., a low-down, toe-to-toe orgasm.)

XXX.6: archetypal] architypal

XXXIV.1: litterateur (following OED] literateur

Page breaks in 1917 Others occur at these lines, sometimes making stanza breaks ambiguous. Based on sense, HV, and LB, I have decided that 1917 page breaks do not always coincide with stanza breaks, but do in these instances (marked by *), and have lineated the present text accordingly:

II:5/6 (man / To)

*IV:8/9 (hair / One)

XIII: 25/26: (me / Or)

XVIII: 2/3: (hill / The)

*XIX: 22/23: (light / You)

XXII: 4/5: (revival / Upon)

XXIV: 6/7: (lies / Muddled)

XXVI: 2/3: (eyes / We)

XXVIII: 4/5: (Forever / Coloured)

*XXIX: 4/5: (Similitude / Unnatural)

*XXIX: 29/30: (orgasm / For)

XXXI: 2/3: (busy-body / Longing)

In imaginative terms “Joannes” is probably a figure collaged out of ML’s failed relationships with several male lovers. In biographical terms he is most closely patterned after one—GP (“Joannes” translates to “Giovanni” in Italian). Following her fallout with GP (see n. 8) after an enthrallment that lasted over a year, ML confessed to CVV [n.d., 1915] that “love has calmed down to the thing that exists—‘Joannes’ is the most astounding creature that ever lived—in the light of my imagination.… I believe he’s really tried to forgive me … & I think he’s a little jealous of Songs to Joannes—an unexpected effect—”.

The last page of the HV (1915) contains a note to CVV indicating that “Love Songs” (I–IV) may also have been written with an earlier lover in mind: “My dear Carlo these … are subconscious impressions of 8 years ago … associated with my weeping willow man.” This speculation is supported by her indication elsewhere (CVVP) that “Love Songs” (I–IV) were begun in a state of dysthemia (“the first were written in red-hot agony”).

In 1907, eight years before ML wrote this letter to CVV, she gave birth to her second child. Burke’s biography (Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy [New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996]) contains important information on SH and the filiation of this child. Its patrilineage may explain ML’s agony and disillusion with GP.

Recent ML scholarship has greatly enhanced both the textual and contextual reading of this poem. See especially the work of Burke, Linda Kennahan, Kouidis, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis cited in Januzzi’s bibliography of ML in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Maeera Schreiber and Keith Tuma, eds. [Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996]).

III. Corpses and Geniuses (Poems 1919–1930)

16. O HELL, ca. 1919. First published in Contact 1 (December 1920, p. 7). Reprinted in LB, with one substantive change: “the dusts of a tradition” replaces “the tatters of tradition” (l. 7). The present text follows the first published appearance, which in turn follows the only surviving MS (YCAL) in all substantives. I have made one emendation to the Contact appearance:

  9: Caress] Carress

Editor’s Note: When this poem was published in Contact, edited by RM and WCW, it marked the third time (following appearances in Rogue and Others) that ML’s work had appeared in the inaugural issue of an American magazine dedicated to experimental writing. Following the demise of Others in 1919, WCW launched Contact in order to continue the fight that AK’s magazine had begun. WCW sought work that could not be published elsewhere, that was not derivative, and that was not trying to appeal to good taste or win posthumous praise: “We wish above all things to speak for the present.” The first issue contained two contributions by ML: “O Hell” and a prose vignette (“Summer Night in a Florentine Slum”). The prose contribution is not included in this edition (but was reprinted in LLB82). A variation of l. 6 (“our person is a covered entrance to infinity”) occurred in ML’s pamphlet Psycho-Democracy (Florence: Tipografia Peri & Rossi, 1920) as “‘Self’ is the covered entrance to Infinity.” This prose answer to FTM’s War, the World’s Only Hygiene and renunciation of Futurism’s militant tenets was later reprinted in The Little Review 7 (Autumn 1921), pp. 14–19.

17. THE DEAD, ca. 1919. NOMS. First published in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse (New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1920, pp. 112–114). This text is based on the first published appearance.

  3: shrivable] shrivvable

30: Of] of

43: Has] has

Editor’s Note: A year after the appearance of AK’s 1919 anthology, John Rodker wrote an opinion piece in The Little Review 7:3 (pp. 53–56), consisting largely of sarcastic remarks about the writing of the “Others” group. Of ML’s contribution Rodker quipped, “It is painful to notice that since the last ‘Others’ she appears to have lost her grip.” ML responds thrust for thrust in the same issue. The exchange continues in the next issue (LR 7:4). Harriet Monroe, reviewing this anthology in Poetry (17:3 [December 1920, pp. 150–158]) calls ML “an extreme otherist, as innocent of all innocences as of commas, periods, sentences. A knowing one, but we would rather have some other other’s polish our stars.”

Twenty-five years later, Kenneth Rexroth reprinted this poem in full in the second of his “recovery” essays on neglected poets (Circle 1:4 [1944, pp. 69–72]). ML had not been published anywhere for thirteen years, and he wanted something done about it: “It is hard to say why she has been ignored. Perhaps it is due to her extreme exceptionalism. Erotic poetry is usually lyric. Hers is elegiac and satirical. It is usually fast-paced. Hers is slow and deliberately twisting.” Rexroth went on to observe that she “has been singularly isolated historically, with few ancestors and less influence.” He named Herondas, Menander, Lucretius, Lucian, Maximinian, Marston, Donne, Jonson, and Rochester as possible precursors; he then listed Jack Wheelwright, Laura Riding, Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky, and Harry Roskolenko as possible heirs. According to Rexroth, that was the complete genealogy of influence. At least, he concluded, “no others occur to me.”

18. MEXICAN DESERT, ca. 1919–1920. First published in The Dial 70: 6 (June 1921, p. 672). There are two MSS of this poem at YCAL. This version follows the first published text, which in turn follows the MSS in all substantives.

Editor’s Note: This poem is a collaged recollection of ML’s traverse of the parched Mexican desert in 1918 with her second husband, AC (né Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, 1887–?). It was also her first poem to appear in The Dial, although her anti-Futurist play, The Pamperers, had inaugurated its “Modern Forms” section the year before (69:1, July 1920, pp. 65–78). Some of ML’s artwork was also published in The Dial as Two Watercolours (70:4, April 1921, n.p.) and Baby’s Head (72:2, February 1922, n.p.).

The Dial during this period was nominally edited by Scofield Thayer and Gilbert Seldes, but Scofield’s co-owner, Sibley Watson, and his foreign editor, Ezra Pound, were both more editorially influential than Seldes. It is likely that Pound directed ML’s first work to The Dial. Thayer first met ML in New York. When he encountered her again in Vienna, he recognized how valuable her knowledge of the contemporary European art scene could be to the development of the “International Art Portfolio,” a project that was never fully realized but led to the publication of Living Art (1923). In a letter dated March 5, 1922, to Sibley Watson, Thayer referred to ML as his “assistant” in the portfolio project, thereby associating her with one of The Dial’s most ambitious projects (Walter Sutton, ed., Pound, Thayer, Watson & The Dial: A Story in Letters [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994], p. 234).

The Dial was one of the most prominent literary magazines ever published in the United States. Its championing of modern artistic movements was a potent factor in shaping American taste during the 1920s. In its sponsorship of avant-garde work, it was decades ahead of popular taste. It was also one of the few solvent periodicals of its time, and one of the few which paid its contributors.

19. PERLUN, ca. July 1921. NOMS. First published in The Dial 71: 2 (August 1921, p. 142). This text follows the first publication.

26: I’m] i’m

Editor’s Note: The date of composition is conjectural, but the references to Dempsey and Carpentier suggest that this poem was probably written around the time of the much-publicized first million-dollar prizefight in the history of boxing. On July 21, 1921, Jack Dempsey (1895–1983) of the United States defeated Georges Carpentier (1894–1975) of France for the world heavyweight title. “Perlun” shares a number of qualities with another boxer, the eternal adolescent and heavyweight legend AC, poet-pugilist-provocateur. AC vaporized, drowned, or otherwise disappeared in Mexico in 1918, but his “pert blond spirit” seems to resurface here. Perlun’s “immaculate arms,” his traffic with sailors and vamps, his parasitic life-style, his detestation of the idle rich, and his instinctual, rebellious, challenging nature all call to mind AC, who as a teenage runaway worked his way aboard freighters and trains from Europe to Australia to California, where he rode boxcars with hoboes and picked lemons with migrant laborers. In an unpublished prose memoir, ML eulogized AC as “Colossus,” identified in Greek mythology with Helios, brother of Selene, goddess of the moon. Elsewhere she identified him with Mercury, Roman god of eloquence, thievery, and travel. Excerpts of her memoir appear in Roger L. Conover’s “Mina Loy’s Colossus: Arthur Cravan Undressed,” Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ed., New York Dada ([New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986], pp. 102–19). Selections of AC’s writings appear in Four Dada Suicides ([London: Atlas Press, 1995], pp. 33–88).

Alternatively, the mysteriously named title figure of this poem may come to us per luna. Or he may be named for one of his habits; like AC, who boasted that he was a thief, Perlun purloins.

A final note: Francis Picabia printed a doctored portrait of boxer Georges Carpentier on the cover of 391 (October 1924), deliberately passing it off as a portrait of Marcel Duchamp, to whom Carpentier bore a striking resemblance. Thus Carpentier shares with AC the distinction of being the only boxers featured in Dada’s most international and adventuresome journal.

20. POE. Composition date unknown, but in all likelihood this poem postdates AC’s disappearance in 1918. NOMS. First published in The Dial 1:4 (October 1921, p. 406). Reprinted in LB (“1921–1922”) without changes. This text follows the first publication.

9: “ilix” is an uncommon but accepted (OED) spelling of “ilex,” the evergreen shrub, or holm oak.

21. APOLOGY OF GENIUS, ca. 1922. First published in The Dial 73 (July 1922, pp. 73–74). Reprinted in LB without changes. No MS has been located, but a fragmentary draft of a sequel, “Apology of Genius II,” dated 1930, is among ML’s papers at YCAL. Reprinted in LB without substantive changes. The text of this frequently anthologized poem follows the first published version, except for the following emendations:

13: fools’] fool’s

37: immortelles] immortels
    (According to the OED, “immortelles” are various composite flowers of papery texture which retain their color and shape after being cut and dried. Immortelles are commonly used to adorn gravestones and tombs. ML wore them in her hats. Here she evokes them in praise of artistic genius.)

Editor’s Note: This was one of two works by ML which YW felt “need, in [his] judgment, yield ground to no one.” The other was “Der Blinde Junge” (see n. 24). YW’s essay is one of the first significant attempts to come to terms with ML’s work, both on its own terms and in relation to that of her contemporaries; the only significant prior attempt was EP’s review of the 1917 Others anthology in which he first took up ML and MM (n. 9). Winters concluded that ML had more to offer than Moore and Stevens, and is “one of the two living poets who have the most … to offer the younger American writers.” WCW was the other. Of the four poets, YW found ML’s achievement “by all odds the most astounding. Using an unexciting method, and writing of the drabbest of material, she has written seven or eight of the most brilliant and unshakably solid satirical poems of our time, and at least two non-satirical pieces that possess … a beauty that is unspeakably moving and profound.” Of all the modernists, he declared WCW and ML the two who “present us with a solid foundation in place of Whitman’s badly aligned corner-stones, a foundation which is likely to be employed, I suspect, by a generation or two.… If it materializes, Emily Dickinson will have been its only forerunner.” YW’s essay bears reading in its entirety (Yvor Winters, “Mina Loy,” The Dial 70, June 1926, pp. 496–99). His assessment stands in sharp counterpoint to Harriet Monroe’s review of LB:

Mostly, her utterance is a condescension from a spirit too burdened with experience to relax the ironic tension of her grasp upon it. The load being too heavy to talk about, she carries it as she may … making gay little satiric moues as she passes, and giving forth sardonic little cries.

(Poetry 23:2 [November 1923], pp. 100–3)

“Apology of Genius” was ML’s first poem translated into French. NCB was so moved by ML’s May 6, 1927, reading at her 20, rue Jacob salon that she later translated this poem and published it in her memoirs (Aventures de l’Esprit [Paris: Editions Emile-Paul Frères, 1929], pp. 213–16), along with an account of the poet reading it:

Her beauty has withdrawn into itself. She offers us this “apology of genius,” and an entire prismatic poetry which, thanks to some perception of a fourth destiny, she escapes.

(Translation by John Spalding Gatton, ed., NCB: Adventures of the Mind [New York: NYU Press, 1992], pp. 100–3)

22. BRANCUSI’S GOLDEN BIRD, 1922. First published in the The Dial 73 (November 1922, pp. 507–8), opposite CB’s studio photograph of the Golden Bird. The same image had previously been reproduced in the “Brancusi” number of The Little Review 8 (Autumn 1921, pl. 17) accompanying EP’s essay on CB. A typescript in WAA appears to be a copy of the Dial text transcribed by Arensberg. Reprinted in LB (“1921–1922”). This text follows the first published version, to which I have made one correction:

28: aggressive] agressive

Editor’s Note: This is one of two works by ML featuring CB (1876–1957). The other, a pencil portrait of the sculptor’s head, is reproduced in LLB82 (pl. 18). Although ML and CB would later become friends in Paris, and appear in photographs with Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, and Tristan Tzara, “when she wrote this poem she had never met the Rumanian genius of sculpture … the poem represents a real intuitional appreciation” (Eugene Jolas, Paris Tribune, July 24, 1924). ML’s poem is among the first “American” appreciations of CB’s work. Along with Henry McBride, she was the first writer to champion Brancusi in The Dial.

ML’s sixth and final contribution to The Dial appeared in the magazine’s famous Waste Land issue. The magazine quickly sold out its sixteen thousand copies and prompted a vituperative exchange between Scofield Thayer and his managing editor, Gilbert Seldes. Thayer objected to the reproduction of CB’s photograph on the grounds that it had “no aesthetic value whatever” and was “commercially suicidal.” Seldes shot back that it was ML’s poem, not CB’s photograph, that caused “the only row … in that connection.” These events preceded by several years the legal dispute over whether CB’s Bird in Space should be allowed to pass through customs duty-free (as art) or should be considered a piece of metalwork and therefore be subject to import tax as an object of manufacture. This controversy (decided by the Customs Court in CB’s favor) preceded by only one year the dispute over whether ML’s first book (LB) should be able to pass through customs at all, and may partially explain the radical revisions she made to “Songs to Joannes” between its first periodical appearance and its reconstitution in book form as “Love Songs” (n. 15).

Many CB scholars have cited this poem, and it has been reprinted in several books and catalogues on CB, including the historically significant catalogue for his first major one-person show in New York (Brummer Gallery, 1926). All CB literature to date has identified the Golden Bird of ML’s title as the celebrated 1919 bronze sculpture purchased by lawyer, patron, and collector John Quinn (1870–1924), now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. This claim was most recently made by Margherita Androeotti in her essay “Brancusi’s Golden Bird: A New Species of Modern Sculpture” (Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Studies, 19:3, pp. 134–52). Androeotti is correct in speculating that ML could easily have seen the sculpture in either the home of Quinn or at the exhibition “Contemporary French Art” (Sculptors’ Gallery, New York, 1922). These circumstances, coupled with the photograph of the canonical Golden Bird which accompanied the first appearance of the poem, make a convenient case to support this theory. But they do not take into account another fact: that there was a second Golden Bird produced at roughly the same time (1919–20), which was nearly identical to the first in size, form, and materials. Both are listed in Friedrich Teja Bach’s definitive catalogue raisonné, Constantin Brancusi (Dumont: Cologne, 1987) under the French heading l’Oiseau d’Or (cf. entries 155 and 156, pp. 456–57).

The less known of the two (now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts) was originally purchased on December 16, 1921 (for 5,000 francs), by Mariette Mills, the expatriate American sculptor and former student of French sculptor Antoine [Emile] Bourdelle. In the summer of 1921, ML visited her close friends Mariette and Heyworth Mills in their home on rue Boissonnade, where she had an epiphanic encounter with the bronze sculpture. ML recorded her first reaction to the Golden Bird in her 1950 essay “Phenomenon in American Art” (YCAL/LLB82): “Years ago at wonderful Mariette Mills’ I came face to face, or rather face to flight with Brancusi’s Bird.” She then described the “long aesthetic itinerary from Brancusi’s Golden Bird to [Joseph] Cornell’s Aviary,” calling CB’s sculpture “the purest abstraction I have ever seen.” Given the resemblance of the two sculptures, ML could have been responding to either “aesthetic archetype.” But her written recollection strongly suggests that she was writing not about Quinn’s Golden Bird but rather about the less celebrated Golden Bird that she saw at the Millses’ (Bach 156).

23. LUNAR BAEDEKER. Date of composition unknown; LB “1921–1922” opens with this poem, marking its first appearance. NOMS. The present text follows the first published version.

title: Lunar Baedeker] Lunar Baedecker

  8: In Persian mythology “peris” are fairies or elves descended from evil angels and barred from Paradise until they have served penance for their forebears’ sins.

10: In Greek and Roman mythology, Lethe is the river of forgetfulness, flowing through Hades, whose water produced memory loss in those who drank it.

15: Infusoria are microscopic organisms found in decayed organic matter.

38: oxidized] oxidised

Editor’s Note: All collected and selected editions of ML’s poems to date have been named after this corner-poem, the first by her choice, the rest in memory of her ill-starred first book, Lunar Baedecker [sic]. Whatever pleasure ML experienced upon seeing her first book published must have been immediately compromised when she realized that the title was misspelled, not only on the cover, but on the half-title page, title page, and first page of the book. Notwithstanding this lapse, publication by RM’s Contact Press placed ML in select expatriate company. Appearing under the same imprint were first or early books by Ernest Hemingway, WCW, GS, Marsden Hartley, Mary Butts, H.D., and Emanuel Carnevali.

This poem was recently adapted by composer Sebastian Anthony Birch for a musical work entitled “Argentum” (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1994); it is also the first of ML’s poems to be released in CD-ROM format (Fiorella Terenzi, ed., The Invisible Universe [New York: Voyager Press, 1995]).

24. DER BLINDE JUNGE, ca. 1922. NOMS. First published in LB (“1921–1922” section), immediately preceding “Ignoramus.” This text follows the LB version.

title: “Der Blinde Junge” translates from German to “The Blind Youth.”

  1: In Roman mythology, “Bellona” is the goddess of war, sister of Mars.

  4: “Kreigsopfer” is a German compound noun meaning “war victim.”

12: its] it’s

18: lightning] lightening

28: “Illuminati,” plural of “illuminato,” originally referred to certain religious sects, but in modern usage it refers to any persons claiming special knowledge or enlightenment. In its later sense, it is often used ironically (OED), as is the case here.

Editor’s Note: This poem made an immediate and lasting impression on YW, who considered it among ML’s best poems when he first discussed her work in 1926 (n. 21). Some forty years later, he reaffirmed his early estimation of this poem. By this time ML’s work was all but forgotten, but YW was still convinced of its lasting value (Forms of Discovery [Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1967], n.d., n.p.). Between these first and last impressions, YW had issued a mid-career advisory that was less approving: “Mina Loy’s verse is usually so simplified, so denuded of secondary accent, as to be indistinguishable from prose” (Primitivism and Decadence [Arrow Editions, 1937]), a description surprisingly close to Monroe’s characterization of ML’s work as “descriptive, explanatory, philosophic—in short, prose, which no amount of radical empiricism, in the sound and exclamatory arrangement of words and lines, can transform, with prestidigitatorial magic, into the stuff of poetry” (Poetry, November 1923).

Thom Gunn’s consideration of this poem, from which I quote only a brief passage, deserves to be read in its entirety:

Loy is a tough writer, and sentiment in the usual sense is seldom present in her work. Her overt feeling in [“Der Blinde Junge”] is of contempt, turned upon the rest of us, the illuminati reading her poem, complacently assuming that we are heirs to culture.… She is hard, pure, unrelenting. The controlled anger and indignation of the poem make it the equal, to my mind, of the best of Pope or Swift.

(“Three Hard Women: HD, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy,” in Vereen Bell and Laurence Lerner, eds., On Modern Poetry [Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1988])

25. CRAB-ANGEL. Composition date unknown. NOMS. First published in LB (“1921–1922”). This text follows the LB version, except for the following emendations:

  8, 19: its] it’s

21: iridescent] irridescent

40: up-a-loft] up-a-flot
    (While “flot” is an obsolete form of “float” and “up-afloat” could be what ML intended, I have emended to “up-a-loft,” largely on the strength of Jim Powell’s suggestion that “up-a-loft” is a pseudo-archaic, poetical locution for “air, as in theatrical space.”)

52: lightning] lightening

26. JOYCE’S ULYSSES. Composition date unknown. NOMS. First published in LB (“1921–1922”). This text follows the first published version, with the exception of two emendations:

24: satirize] satirise

44: its] it’s

Editor’s Note: This poem was probably written shortly after the publication of the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses (February 1922) by Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company Bookshop, but possibly earlier. ML closely monitored the events preceding its publication, namely, the confiscation and destruction by the U.S. Post Office of four issues of The Little Review in which serial installments of the novel had appeared between 1918 and 1921. Attorney-collector John Quinn (n. 22, 27) tried unsuccessfully to defend the magazine’s editors in court. Shortly after ML met Joyce in Paris, her portrait of him appeared in Vanity Fair (April 1922, p. 65).

27. “THE STARRY SKY” OF WYNDHAM LEWIS. Composition date unknown. NOMS. First published in LB (“1921–1922”), but probably written somewhat earlier, following the reproduction of Lewis’s The Starry Sky (pencil, pen, ink, wash, and gouache drawing, 1912) in the November 1917 issue of The Little Review. This edition’s text follows the first published appearance.

Editor’s Note: Wyndham Lewis (1884–1957), the English painter, writer, and iconoclast, became famous for aiming invective at the Bloomsbury group (“pansy-clan”) in the pages of his polemical puce-colored magazine, Blast, while ML was still in Florence. Like FTM, Lewis was the impresario of an aggressive cultural reform movement, in his case, Vorticism, which assaulted guardians of taste and advocated the overthrow of outmoded institutions and traditions. Vorticism advocated violence against Victorianism and celebrated the vortex as the point of maximum energy, concentration, and power. ML had known Lewis in Paris, had been impressed by his “Timon of Athens” series in the Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in London (1912), and had followed his arguments with FTM. Finally, after seeing his work in a second exhibition at the Grafton Galleries in London (1914), she reintroduced herself as “an old friend of the Montparnasse quarter—Mina Haweis—” then made some polite remarks about the show, before letting go: “Of all the new work which seems to be groping in super-consciousness—yours alone is creating there—masterfully aware.… I am rash—but please tell me what the drawings cost—I must … have one” (WL).

The name of the drawing celebrated in this poem was keyed to a footnote in LB: “a drawing in the collection of John Quinn.” John Quinn, one of the prime forces behind the 1913 Armory Show, at one time owned Lewis’s The Starry Sky, Brancusi’s Golden Bird, and the manuscript of Joyce’s Ulysses. All three works were featured in The Little Review, and all three were the subjects of poems by ML (see n. 22, 26).

Scofield Thayer once recommended to his partner, Sibley Watson, that WL’s Starry Heavens be included in the “International Art Portfolio” project of The Dial (see n. 18); in the same letter (March 5, 1922), he suggested that Mr. Quinn’s “vanity should be played upon by the mention that his name as a patron of contemporary art would appear in the preface to this folio.… I myself should write a short preface giving names of the artists … and mentioning the name of my assistant Alfred [Kreymborg] or Mina [Loy]” (Sutton, Pound, Thayer, Watson, & The Dial, p. 234).

28. MARBLE, 1923. This poem was published in a prospectus announcing the formation of a new journal, the Paris-based transatlantic review (n.d., 1923), edited by FMF (1873–1939). The text of the present edition follows the first and only known published version (ENC), which differs from the HV (CU) only in the deletion of dashes after ll. 13 and 14. Early drafts of this poem are preserved at YCAL.

Editor’s Note: In planning his new “exile” magazine, transatlantic review, FMF sent a limited number of gratis copies of a “Preliminary Number” to influential friends and prospective subscribers. In it, he listed the writers and previewed the work that his new venture would support: TSE, RM, Mary Butts, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, EP, and ML were among the writers named. Most of the sample poems printed in the prospectus later appeared in official numbers of the magazine; ML’s was one of only three that did not. “Marble” is thus among the most obscure of Loy’s published poems. Its existence was noted by Bernard J. Poli in Ford Madox Ford and the Transatlantic Review (Syracuse University Press, 1967, p. 42).

29. GERTRUDE STEIN, ca. 1924. NOMS. First published in 1924 as an untitled epigraph to a two-part letter in which ML discusses the influences on and maieutic effects of GS’s compositional techniques. ML’s prose statement (reprinted in LLB82) ran in two successive installments of transatlantic review (2:3 [October, pp. 305–9]; 2:4 [November, pp. 427–30]) under the title “Gertrude Stein,” GS’s novel, The Making of Americans, was serialized in tr the same year (1924). This text follows the poem’s first published appearance, with the exception of the title, which I have supplied.

Editor’s Note: ML’s description of GS also applies to her own literary exercise: “a most dexterous discretion in the placement and replacement of … phrases” by an “uncompromised intellect [who] has scrubbed the meshed messes of traditional associations off them.” At one point in her narrative, ML prospects her own epigraph, describing the “incoherent debris … littered around the radium that [GS] crushes out of phrased conssciousness.”

On February 4, 1927, GS was the featured speaker at NCB’s salon. ML was asked to introduce her, and in doing so she drew again on her poem. “Je vous présente Gertrude Stein … la madame Curie du langage” (Aventures de L’Esprit, p. 233). Harold Loeb, editor of Broom, recalled in his autobiography that ML once offered him an essay that accounted for the obscurity of GS’s prose by suggesting that “the author was providing merely a framework upon which the reader could erect whatever superstructure was congenial.” He was probably referring to the essay later accepted by FMF, in which ML insisted that the art of GS, “like all modern art … leaves an unlimited latitude for personal response” (The Way It Was [New York: Criterion Books, 1959], p. 129).

In The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933, p. 162) GS paid tribute to ML’s perceptive readings of her unpublished manuscripts, praising in particular her ability “to understand without the commas.” As for Toklas herself, she remembered ML as “beautiful, intelligent, sympathetic and gay” (What Is Remembered [New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston], p. 76).

30. THE WIDOW’S JAZZ, 1927. First published in Pagany: A Native Quarterly, 2:2 (Spring 1931, pp. 18–20). There is an early draft of this poem at YCAL, but no finished MS has been found. The text of the present edition follows the first published version, with the exception of line 29, where “Craven” has been emended to “Cravan.” ML is invoking by name her missing husband, AC, the subject of the poet’s monodic address later in the poem (l. 39–40).

Editor’s Note: In her memoirs, NCB provides a vivid account of ML’s first public reading of this “just completed” poem at her salon. In preparation for the May 6, 1927, reading, ML worked out with her personal trainer “in the solitude of [NCB’s] second floor.” NCB was quite impressed that a poet should put herself through warm-up exercises before a literary performance, with the support of “a trainer such as boxers have” (NCB, pp. 213–16). Djuna Barnes attended the reading, and later wrote a fictional satire of NCB’s salon in which ML appears as the elusive “Patience Scalpel,” whose ankles “are nibbled by Cherubs” (The Ladies Almanack [Paris: Edward W. TItus, 1928]). In NCB’s autobiographical account, ML is described walking “as though the angels were already nibbling at her heels.”

On September 25, 1927, ML sent a copy of this poem and “Lady Laura in Bohemia” (n. 31) to her daughter Joella, who had recently married Julien Levy and moved to New York: “Would you take it round to the Dial—with my love to Thayer and Marianne Moore and let them see whether they want one of them.… I don’t know what to write to them—in fact I don’t know which of them it is polite to address—don’t know who’s who in the buyer’s department. Do do that little thing for me. Am I not a bore?” (MLL).

It is not known whether MM or Thayer ever saw these poems, but in 1930 Julien Levy was asked by Richard Johns if he could supply some photographs by Eugene Atget for publication in his new magazine, Pagany. Levy obliged, then asked a favor of his own. Would Johns consider publishing two of his mother-in-law’s poems? Shortly thereafter (n.d., 1930) Levy wrote to ML victoriously: “A new magazine called Pagany received my permission on behalf of Mina Loy to announce the forthcoming publication of one or two of your poems [“The Widow’s Jazz” and “Lady Laura in Bohemia”]. It isn’t at all a bad magazine, publishing Billy Williams, Gertrude Stein, Mary Butts.… Much more exclusive than Transition, more alive than the recent Dials, and less conceited than the Hound and Horn. Won’t you send me some more recent work than those two that I have?” (JL).

The contributor’s note in Pagany announced: “Mina Loy, of the Others group, is writing poetry again after several years’ silence.” Indeed, with the exception of “Gertrude Stein”, which was superscribed to an essay, ML had not published anywhere for nine years.

Pagany was launched by Richard Johns in 1930, with the editorial support of WCW. It announced itself as “a speculative venture, filling in the middle scene between the excellent conventional magazines and those which are entirely experimental in content.” It folded in 1933.

31. LADY LAURA IN BOHEMIA. Composition date unknown, but by reference to the letter quoted in the previous note it is clear that this poem was completed by 1927. NOMS. First published in Pagany 2:3 (Summer 1931, pp. 125–27). The present text follows the first published appearance, where page breaks occur between lines 12 and 13 and 44 and 45; in the present edition, these are also stanza breaks.

Editor’s Note: “Zelli’s” (l. 27) was a well-known bar in Montparnasse frequented by ML and her fellow expatriates in the 1920s. Llike “Ignoramus” (n. 13), this poem anticipates the later destitution poems of ML’s Bowery period (Section 4). After the publication of this poem, ML did not publish again until 1946—the longest silence of her career.

32. THE MEDITERRANEAN SEA, ca. 1928. First published in LLB82, p. 250. There is a signed, undated typescript at YCAL, which serves as the basis for the present text; I have made several emendations to it:

22: Lacrimae] Lacrimi

23: imperceptibly] imperceptably

25: Apuane] Appuane
    (Carrara, a region of Italy famous for its marble, sits in the Apuane Alps.)

33. NANCY CUNARD. Composition date unknown, probably late 1920s. First published in LLB82, p. 259. The present text follows the signed typescript at YCAL, to which I have made three emendations:

  3: helmeted] helmetted

  6: vermilion] vermillion

  7: receding] receeding

Editor’s Note: NC (1896–1965), rebel-heiress-seductress-poet, was one of the stormiest and most colorful figures of 1920s Paris. Her temperamental extremes and controversial stands were often limned—unflatteringly—in the fiction of her ex-lovers. Three of them—Aldous Huxley, Michael Arlen and Louis Aragon—featured characters based on her in novels. She also made cameo appearances in the fiction of Evelyn Waugh and Richard Aldington. It has long been hypothesized, although inconclusively, that she was the inspiration for Lady Brett Ashley in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, and it has also been suggested that she modelled for Fresca in TSE’s drafts for “The Fire Sermon” section of The Waste Land, a speculation which does not serve either TSE’s or NC’s reputation well. TSE’s portrait of a spoiled society girl with literary ambitions reveals a “powerful disgust for Fresca’s sexuality and contempt for her poetic dabblings. Intellectual women, he states, are even less interesting than ordinary sluts. Beneath their pretensions, there is the same basic lust” (Anne Chisholm, Nancy Cunard: A Biography [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979], p. 339).

As the founder and editor of the Hours Press, NC was Samuel Beckett’s first publisher. As an avid supporter of the French Resistance, she was high on Hitler’s blacklist. As an outspoken defender of the rights of American blacks, she was once banned from entering the United States. And as the debutante daughter of English shipping magnates Lady Emerald and Sir Bache Cunard, she used her money to support people and causes that made her an outcast in her own family. But it was her bewitching appearance and seductive countenance that drew so many writers’ and artists’ attentions to her. CB, Wyndham Lewis, Man Ray, Cecil Beaton, Oskar Kokoschka, and John Banting were among those who painted, sculpted, or photographed her.

It has been suggested that ML may have been making an ironic comment on NC’s involvement with “race issues” in this poem, but this surmise strikes me as doubtful. Not only were both women sympathetic to some of the same causes, they admired many of the same artists and shared several important friends in common. Because of its careful attention to visual details and physical features, and its markedly iconographic approach to its subject throughout, I think it is far more likely that this poem was written not as a social portrait of NC but as a depiction of an actual portrait. ML was certainly aware of the extent to which NC was an artistically desirable model. This poem may well be based on a specific portrait of NC that she saw alongside portraits of George Moore and Princess Murat in NC’s home on rue le Regrattier, Paris. For example, the poem follows the English Surrealist painter John Banting’s likeness of NC in certain details.

Moore, the Irish novelist, was a lifelong friend of NC, who privately wondered whether she might be his daughter. It was no secret that he had had an affair with her mother, or that he took a paternal interest in the activities of NC, who late in life published a memoir about him (G.M. : Memories of George Moore [London: Rupert Hart-Davis, 1956]). The subject of the other portrait, Princess Murat (l. 23), raises identity questions of another sort. She could easily be the Surrealist cult figure and eccentric French princess Violette Murat, with whom René Crevel smoked opium in an abandoned submarine, just before his death in Toulon in 1930. She would have known NC. She could also be Princess Lucien Murat, friend of the Dadaists. It is more in keeping with NC’s taste and ML’s eye for detail to imagine a likeness of one of these figures occupying space within the frame of the painting and the poem than it is to imagine her as Princess Caroline [Bonaparte] Murat, Napoleon’s sister. But that remains a haute bourgeoise possibility. Finally, an “American princess called Murat” turns up in Peggy Guggenheim’s memoirs. This sketchily described princess rented Guggenheim’s house in Pramousquier (ca. 1927–28), where ML had also been an early guest and painted a fresco on the wall of her bedroom (Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict [New York: Universe Books, 1979], p. 93).

34. JULES PASCIN. Composed ca. June 1930. First published in LBT. This text follows the typescript at YCAL.

Editor’s Note: This is one of two portraits that ML composed of Jules Pascin (1885–1930), the Bulgarian-born Jewish artist whose suicide sent a tremor through the Paris art world. The other is a line drawing dating from the 1920s (LLB82, pl. 17). ML wrote this poem following Pascin’s “Portuguese” suicide (he belted his neck to a doorknob before slashing his wrists). In a letter to the Levys following Pascin’s death, ML boasted: “Pascin’s last words to me were that I was the only one whose poetry was equal to Valéry’s—yes!” (MLL, September 10, 1930).

Later in 1930, ML wrote to the Levys again:

“I sent Bernie Bandler [Hound and Horn editor Bernard Bandler II] my poem about Pascin—because he had begged me to show him something—and he didn’t accept it on the spot as I expected—and at lunch I asked him surprised—apropos of something—but you do take things for the H&H … when he answered me [that] he did—I stared and gasped with amazement—then why don’t you take mine? He said—I’ve sent it on to (someone or other)—we both decide—& I exclaimed—nonsense. Can’t you make up your mind for yourself? And I’ve heard no more of him—I’m going to send some [poems] to Djuna [Barnes].… Djuna wrote to me to send some as she would like to try & place some for me. These high brow magazines are dangerous trifles—of the Dial—Scofield Thayer is hopelessly mad—another of their editors is going mad—& a third is just coming out of madness. And this erstwhile contributor may be mad!” (MLL)

IV. Compensations of Poverty (Poems 1942–1949)

35. ON THIRD AVENUE, 1942. Parts 1 and 2 were first published together in LLB82; part 2 made an earlier appearance in LBT. Neither appeared previously in a periodical. This text follows a signed, dated MS at YCAL, with the exception of two emendations:

  9: preceding] preceeding

32: its] it’s

Editor’s Note: “On Third Avenue” is the first in a series of poems which ML grouped in a folder (YCAL) under the working title “Compensations of Poverty.” ML probably hoped to publish them as a book. In addition to “On Third Avenue” the folder contains “Ephemerid,” “Chiffon Velours,” “Mass-Production on 14th Street,” “Child Chanting,” “Property of Pigeons,” “Idiot Child on a Fire-Escape,” and “Aid of the Madonna,” as well as several other poems which appeared in LLB82 but are not present here.

As early as 1915, one can detect in ML’s letters and poems a sympathy for and identification with tramps, addicts, and derelicts. Late in life, she wrote with as much animation about her encounters with them as she once had about her meetings with great artists and poets. In 1936 ML left Europe for the last time; she spent much of the next seventeen years moving from one communal rooming house to another in lower Manhattan and the Bowery. During this last artistically productive period of her career, she became increasingly reclusive and isolated, gradually losing touch with all but a few of her old friends. Dispossessed of the furniture and friendships of the art world, she replaced them with the castoffs and human refuse of her daily rounds. She had once enjoyed cerebral exchanges in the parlors of geniuses; now she was more comfortable exchanging cigarettes with strangers she met on the street.

By the early 1950s, Berenice Abbott, Djuna Barnes, Joseph Cornell, and Marcel Duchamp were among the few “official” visitors whose knock Loy would still acknowledge at the drab door of her shared apartment on Stanton Street. She was a kind of sidewalk saint to the loafers and indigents of her Bowery neighborhood, an ethereal white-haired figure floating past doorways with shopping bags full of cardboard and cans, offering cures for the hungover and wine for the thirsty. “Mama Mina,” some called her. To others she was “the Duchess.” Like a modern Saint Gilles, the legendary protector of lepers and cripples, she was generous with change, favors, and had an unlimited inventory of stories. No one knew or cared if her recollections were delusional. She was part of pedestrian ecology, part of the communal street. She held séances, worked crossword puzzles, and patented designs for curtain rods and other household inventions out of what others threw away. Her attraction to trash began in the 1900s; it preceded Dada.

She once drew portraits of the great modernist icons of her generation and trafficked in surrealist paintings; now she drew figures of shoeless demimondaines huddled in doorways and stuffed her closets with egg crates. She had once been a model and a modiste; now she wore her nightgown in the street, part of the human shuffle known as the Bowery sidewalk. She existed in the margins of the formal economy and outside the notice of official culture. She had always been an outsider, but now, as an insider in a world of outsiders, she was creating identity for a people and place as far beneath the dignity of museums as her “Love Songs” of the 1910s had been beneath the dignity of critics. When she scavenged the back alleys for flattened cans and abandoned mopheads, it was not to fashion a shelter but to create a poignant vision of shelterless existence. We will never know how many of these raw collages of homeless, angelic bums watching over the street or curled next to parking meters in innocent sleep were lost, but a number of them have been preserved as a result of a show curated by Marcel Duchamp at the Bodley Gallery in 1959. This was the last public event focused on ML until her funeral. ML did not attend the opening.

During this period, she was also writing her last poems, drawing on the same unheroic figures and streets to depict the underside of an urban environment which was now her own—a zone where panhandlers and unknown poets saw their broken dreams reflected in each other’s eyes, and were constantly having to adjust themselves to the ever-shrinking boundaries of their social space. When she wrote about marginalized, discarded people precariously living their anonymous lives between pigeons and curbstones, she was not doing so with pity or disgust. She was describing the spiritual compensations of penury, perched as she was in dishabille at dignity’s last doorway. Some of these poems feature scenes, figures, and phrases also found in her three-dimensional assemblages.

36. MASS-PRODUCTION ON 14th STREET, 1942. This text is based on the signed, dated (July 27, 1942), hand-corrected MS at YCAL. First published in LBT; no periodical publication.

28: Carnevale] Carneval
    (I assume that ML was aiming for the Italian spelling, but “Carnaval” [French] is also possible here.)

43: simulacra’s] simulacres’

37. IDIOT CHILD ON A FIRE-ESCAPE, 1943. First published in Partisan Review 19:5 (September–October 1952, p. 561). This text follows the first published version, with the exception of two changes in punctuation: the substitution of a comma for a period after line 5 and the addition of a comma after line 6. These emendations follow ML’s dated typescript (MLA), which bears a notation in her hand recording the publication in PR.

Editor’s Note: This poem was submitted to PR by Levy and accepted by Philip Rahv.

38. AID OF THE MADONNA, 1943. The first three stanzas were published in Accent 7:4 (Winter 1947, p. 111). The Accent text corresponds to the first page of a signed and dated MS at YCAL, the second page of which contains three additional stanzas.

Editor’s Note: In a variation from the stated editorial policy of this edition, I am following the text of the MS, on the assumption that this represents the version prepared by the author for publication. In all likelihood the second half of the poem was cut by Accent, or possibly by Gilbert Neiman (see n. 39). I base this assumption on the fact that ML circulated the longer version to Joseph Cornell (JC) and other friends shortly after the poem’s publication, and that all six stanzas were completed prior to its first publication in 1943.

39. EPHEMERID, 1944. First published in Accent 6:4 (Summer 1946, pp. 240–41). This text follows the Accent version, which differs very slightly from the MS (YCAL) dated August 1944. The latter indicates no stanza breaks between ll. 16 and 17 and 41 and 42, an upper-case “M” at the beginning of l. 3, and substitutes the word “Elevated” for the more colloquial “El’s” in l. 5.

Editor’s Note: Accent was considered one of the best of the university-based literary magazines of its era. ML’s poems were sent to its editor, Kerker Quinn (then a faculty member of the University of Illinois English Department), by Gilbert Neiman, the novelist (There Is a Tyrant in Every Country [Harcourt Brace, 1947]). Neiman was a friend of Henry Miller and Frieda Lawrence and a longtime admirer of ML. He was not the first or last reader to express an interest verging on obsession in the poet and her work. Long before he met her, and seemingly out of nowhere, he deluged her with letters, sometimes addressing her as “the love of my youth,” other times as his “preceptress.” ML’s poems seemed to have a talismanic effect on the young writer, operating almost as philters. Following a dinner in New York arranged by Miller, Neiman wrote (November 9, 1945): “I would like to send your poems to Accent. I mentioned you, and they were very interested. If you would send them to me first, I’d be able to copy a few for myself—which I’d far prefer” (GN). Accent accepted all four poems Neiman submitted. “Ephemerid” was the first to appear, marking ML’s return to print after thirteen years.

Encouraged by his success with Accent, Neiman tried without success to place other poems for ML in the late 1940s and early 1950s. He was turned down by Circle, Poetry, and several other magazines. He also tried to interest his own editor at Harcourt Brace in publishing a collection of her poems, possibly “Compensations of Poverty”, in 1947.

40. CHIFFON VELOURS, 1944. First published in Accent 7:4 (Winter 1947, p. 112). The present text follows the Accent version, which varies from the draft MS dated May 6, 1944 (YCAL) only in accidentals (comma at the end of l. 16, dashes at end of l. 21 and beginning of l. 22).

Editor’s Note: These variations could well have been introduced by Neiman, who wrote ML on November 23, 1945: “I’ve promised Accent I would send the poems of yours. I’ll type off a few” (GN).

41. PROPERTY OF PIGEONS. Composition date unknown. First published in Between Worlds: An International Magazine of Creativity 1:2 (Spring/Summer 1961, pp. 203–4). I have made several emendations to the BW text, based on ML’s hand-corrected MSS at YCAL and GN, which clearly establish her wishes at the time of publication:

27: frowardly] forwardly

32: to] of

33/34: no stanza break

37: a] A

44: intestate] interstate

Editor’s Note: In 1960 Neiman, who had last written to ML in 1945, wrote to her again, this time from his new post at the Inter-American University of Puerto Rico:

We are starting a magazine that has as its goal the rapprochement of creative writers of the East and the West, on the basis of creative art and not creative physics. It will have no politics whatsoever, no criticisms and no book reviews.… We will print the work of young writers in the so-called growth areas: Puerto Rico, the West Indies, Ghana, India, Japan, all of Central and South America. Alongside these newcomers we want to print famous writers from the great creative movements of our time: Dadaists, Surrealists, Existentialists, and even a few Beatniks.… It would be of inestimable help to us, and especially to me, a great pleasure to be able to print something of yours.”

ML apparently responded, for on September 8 of the same year GN thanked her for her letter: “Even though you don’t seem to remember me … I feel as devoted to your poetry … as I did at a starry-eyed sixteen, when I decided that Sandburg didn’t have all the answers” (GN).

Neiman published seven poems by ML in his new magazine; they were the last poems she published anywhere during her lifetime. With the exception of the Partisan Review appearance in 1952 and the publication of “Aviator’s Eyes” in an obscure article by Larry Krantz (“Three Neglected Poets,” Wagner Literary Magazine [Spring 1959, p. 54]), Neiman was responsible, directly or indirectly, for every periodical appearance ML made after 1931. The last two poems that she would live to see published both appeared in the pages of his magazine. She was eighty. Neiman’s effort is remarkable only because it indicates how different the published record might have been had other editors taken similar initiatives. When Neiman expressed interest in ML’s work, she obliged. It didn’t matter that she had no recollection of meeting him or that he was writing on behalf of an offshore magazine of no standing. In 1961, ML’s name would certainly have been unfamiliar to most readers of BW, but that didn’t keep Neiman from announcing ML’s work in oracular terms on the inside front cover: “poems by the sibyl of the century.”

Jim Powell has provided a most elegant and inspired elucidation of this poem in “Basil Bunting and Mina Loy,” Chicago Review 37:1 (Winter 1990, pp. 6–25).

42. PHOTO AFTER POGROM, ca. 1945. First published in Between Worlds 1:2 (Spring/Summer 1961, p. 201). This text follows the BW version, which in turn follows ML’s hand-corrected MS (YCAL) in all substantives.

Editor’s Note: Readers who consult YCAL will find the MS dated 1960, but the poem was actually written during or shortly after World War II, as its subject suggests. Several copies of Accent 7:4 (Winter 1947) contain the last twelve lines of this poem beneath a pasted-down sheet (p. 112) on which lines 19–23 of “Chiffon Velours” are printed. The editors of Accent apparently received this poem as early as 1946, had it typeset and printed, and then decided, for whatever reason, not to run it. I am grateful to Marisa Januzzi for this observation, which I have independently confirmed by examining two copies of Accent containing the paste-down.

43. TIME-BOMB, ca. 1945. First published in Between Worlds 1:2 (Spring/Summer 1961, p. 200). This text follows the BW version, which is identical to a signed typescript labeled “Selection to: ‘Between Worlds’ Oct. 1960” (YCAL).

Editor’s Note: It is possible that Gilbert Neiman influenced the extra spaces between words and punctuation in this poem, for upon receiving the first batch of submissions from ML he wrote: “For my part … you are not allowing yourself the ample spaces you once did” (GN). But these were not the allowances he was referring to.

44. OMEN OF VICTORY. Composition date unknown, although it can be conjecturally dated ca. 1945, coinciding with the victory of the Allied forces in World War II. This text follows the MS at YCAL. First published in LBT. No prior periodical appearance.

Editor’s Note: In his foreword to LBT, WCW writes: “Mina Loy was endowed from birth with a first rate intelligence facing a shoddy world. When she puts a word down on paper it is clean; that forces her fellows to shy away from it because they are not clean and will be contaminated by her cleanliness. Therefore she has not been a successful writer and couldn’t care less. But it has hurt her chances of being known.… The essence of her style is its directness in which she is exceeded by no one.” WCW ends his foreword by quoting “Omen of Victory” in full, describing it as “an epigrammatic gem which many of the poets of our own day might follow for its punch and delicate if sardonic humor.”

45. FILM-FACE. Composition date unknown, although presumably written sometime after Marie Dressler’s death in 1934. This poem has not appeared in any periodical or collection, although it was printed in a limited-edition broadside in 1995. The present text is identical to a signed typescript at YCAL, whereon ML noted that it was submitted to Between Worlds in 1960.

Editor’s Note: Actress Marie Dressler (Leila Marie Koerber [1869–1934]) made her screen debut in Tillie’s Punctured Romance (1914), in which she co-starred with Charlie Chaplin. A homely woman of considerable girth, she was America’s biggest box-office draw in the early 1930s. She won an Oscar for her lead role in Min and Bill (1930), a romantic comedy about a scruffy waterfront couple. In an earlier stage production, Mina and Bill (WCW) played husband and wife in Alfred Kreymborg’s Lima Beans (1916) at the Provincetown Playhouse, a poetic playlet in which romance is punctured by vegetables. Marie Dressler and Myrna Loy were both MGM actresses in the 1930s and worked with some of the same directors. Only coincidence connects these alluring facts.

46. FAUN FARE, 1948. First published in Between Worlds 2:1 (Fall/Winter 1962, pp. 28-30). A typescript dated December 27, 1948, is preserved at YCAL. The present text follows the BW version, which in turn follows the MS in all substantives. I have made the following emendations to the published text:

19: ocular] acular

24: tongue] tonque

38: addict] addicy

Editor’s Note: This poem’s publication marked the last magazine publication of ML’s work before her death in 1966, and the successful placement of a poem which had earlier been rejected by New Directions (GN). Neiman overreaches in his contributor’s note; his view is not one that many of his own generation would have shared: “Mina Loy is considered by many to be, despite the paucity of her work, the best poetess in English of the century.”

This poem is reminiscent of ML’s early satires, but its subject—the sexual ambiguity of male guests at a Manhattan cocktail party—is more surprising, its language more terse, and its perspective, if anything, more unusual. I include this poem with thanks to Jim Powell and in memory of Arthur Cravan (ML’s own faun, who had the head of a poet, the body of a boxer).

65: “Evoe” is an exclamatory utterance associated with Bacchanalian orgies, e.g., “wild evoes and howlings” (OED).

47. LETTERS OF THE UNLIVING. Composed June 19, 1949. An edited version of this poem appeared in LLB82. No prior periodical appearance. The present text follows the signed and dated typescript at YCAL, with two emendations:

37: calligraphy] caligraphy

78: blasé] blase

Editor’s Note: This poem, concerned with time, memory, loss, and the boundaries of identity, is addressed to AC (see n. 18, 19), whom ML once described as “the one other intelligence” she could converse with and whose unexplained disappearance remained one of her life’s greatest unassimilables. He is the long-eclipsed author of the “authorless” letters whose “creased leaves,” these many years later, still held hostage the poet’s irremediably bruised heart. His past words have been preserved, and their pastness opens onto the present in the “calligraphy of recollection.” But memory is more punishing than amnesia given “death’s erasure/ … of the lover.”

Well into her seventies, ML was still grieving over her husband’s premature “death,” describing his body, and speaking of his great “potential.” A selection of the letters he had written to her during their brief separation four decades earlier was recently published in Jean-Pierre Begot, ed., Arthur Cravan: Œuvres (Paris: Editions Ivrea, 1992), pp. 155–83. LLB82 contains a superlinear abstraction of AC in the form of ML’s diary entries (pp. 317–22), as well as a description of their superlunar bond (xlvii–lxi).

48. HOT CROSS BUM, 1949. First published in New Directions 12 (1950, pp. 311–20). A signed and dated (August 30, 1949) typescript at YCAL denotes ML’s address as 5 Stanton Street. This text is based on the ND version, to which I have made several emendations, all following the MS:

  25: delight’s] delight”s

128: hot-cross] hot-cros

149: crossroads] cross-roads

167: ragged] rugged

183: adamic] academic

213: anomoly] anomaly

242: ebon aide] ebonaide

The 1949 MS. carries several other variations from the first published version which I have not incorporated into the present text. Some are clearly spelling errors, but others bear reporting, since it is not clear at what stage (or by whom) the changes were made:

    9: to Ecstasia] in Ecstasia

  35: faces] Faces

  50: directions] direction

177a: {line deleted}] in somehow irresponsive ideals

221: once patroned] patroned

222: entice] console

Editor’s Note: Kenneth Rexroth, in 1944, ended his essay (n. 17) on ML with a strong exhortation to his publisher at New Directions Press: “Mr. Laughlin, the ‘Five Young Poets’ are still Eliot, Stevens, Williams, Moore, Loy—get busy.” Whether at Rexroth’s urging or not, James Laughlin did engage in correspondence with ML; the publication of this poem in ND is the one tangible result. Laughlin also considered publishing her novel Insel, but eventually explained that he could not do so “due to the heavy backlog we have.” He suggested she send it a friend of his at Simon & Schuster, where it was also rejected. The novel was eventually published by Black Sparrow Press in 1991.

“Communal cot” (l. 270) obviously refers to the space of the modern street within the poem’s context; it is also the title of one of ML’s cloth and cardboard constructions of street scenes exhibited at the Bodley Gallery in 1959 (see pl. 29, LLB82), now in the collection of William Copley.

49. AN AGED WOMAN. Composition date unknown, but certainly a late poem. An edited draft version of this poem first appeared posthumously in LLB82, under the title “An Old Woman”, following the title of an earlier HV (YCAL). No prior periodical appearance. The present text is identical to ML’s revised HV at YCAL.

Editor’s Note: The HV is unmistakably signed and dated prospectively at the bottom of the page in ML’s hand: “Mina Loy. July 12, 1984.” I have to assume this postdating is deliberate, given the question (“is the impossible / possible to senility[?])” addressed to the prosopoeia in possession of the old woman’s body and the issue raised in the first stanza about the future’s (in)exploitability. The “Bulbous stranger” in the mirror, the bloated beldam who has invaded the erstwhile slim and athletic self, is an alien self, an “excessive incognito / … only to be exorcised by death.” The use of the present perfect tense in the poem’s first, third, and final stanzas describes the speaker’s knowledge at the time of speaking, but if we take the “future” date of composition into account, this knowledge is still premonitional. At the time of composition, the poem’s very existence was called into question by its date, making the spectral encounter between the self and its reflected image theoretical. The mind’s incubus was thus as subject to elimination by senility as its body’s was by death. An attempt, perhaps, to blur the lines between spatial, temporal, and psychological modalities; and a teleology, if not a demonstration, of dementia’s tricky logic.

50. MOREOVER, THE MOON— — —. Composition date unknown. First published in LLB82. No prior periodical appearance. This text is based on the MS at YCAL, to which I have made one emendation:

13: innuendoes] inuendos

V. Excavations & Precisions (Prose 1914–1925)

51. APHORISMS ON FUTURISM, January 1914. First published in Alfred Stieglitz’s epochal quarterly, Camera Work 45 (January [June] 1914, pp. 13–15). A single signed, dated HV of this work survives (ASP); it varies from the first published version only in accidentals. In the HV, ampersands replace “and” throughout, and line 9 EXPLODES with LIGHT with more calligraphic flourish than can be expressed typographically. I have made two emendations to the published version, the first based on standard orthography and the second following the HV. Each paragraph is counted as a line. Thus:

  7: dilapidated] delapidated

34: ambiente] ambient

Editor’s Note: This composition dates from ML’s Futurist period and marks her first recorded appearance in print. A printed leaf of the CW text at YCAL bears ML’s penciled substitution of the word “modern” for “future” and “Modernism” for “Futurism” throughout. ML probably made these notes after abandoning her Futurist allegiance; although she might have retrospectively preferred to call this piece “Aphorisms on Modernism,” I have retained the original title. In form, its debt to Futurism is clear; its content also reflects Marinetti’s influence. Among publications by Futurist-inspired women, “Aphorisms on Futurism” was preceded only by the writings of parodist Flora Bonheur (Diary of a Futurist Woman, 1914) and manifesto writer Valentine de Saint-Point (see n. 52).

52. FEMINIST MANIFESTO, November 1914. First published (inaccurately) in LLB82. For this edition, I have followed ML’s signed and dated HV (MDLP), with the exception of the emendations noted below. Since the manifesto was written as prose, I have not preserved the lineation of the HV, except where a pronounced break signals a new paragraph or transition.

  3: psychological] pschycological

  4: centuries] centuaries

21: are] is

46: character] charactar

56: ridiculously] rediculously

68: psychic] pschycic

80: desire] disire

Editor’s Note: The only known copy of this text was sent to MDL in 1914. The text was still in a provisional state, uncorrected and unfinished, as indicated by ML’s apostil to MDL on the first page of the MS: “This is a rough draught beginning of an absolute resubstantiation of the feminist question      give me your opinion—of course it’s easily to be proved fallacious—There is no truth———anywhere.” In a subsequent letter to MDL, ML wrote: “By the way—that fragment of Feminist tirade I sent you—flat? I find the destruction of virginity—so daring don’t you think—had been suggested by some other woman years ago—see Havelock Ellis—I feel rather hopeless of devotion to the Woman-cause—Slaves will believe that chains are protectors … they are the more efficient for the coward—.” Later in the same letter, ML refers to Frances Simpson Stevens (1894–1976), the American Futurist painter who had rented ML’s studio at 54, Costa San Giorgio, Florence, in 1913. “My dear, I hear that you see Frances Stevens in New York. What do you think of her? I have got the impression from her letter that America is the home of middle class hypocrisy. Is it, outside the charmed circle you preside? Do tell me” (MDLP). When she referred disapprovingly to Stevens’s “virginal hysterics” over Margaret Sanger’s “idiotic book of preventive propaganda,” ML knew that she was directing her comments to interested ears. MDL had arranged Stevens’s introduction to ML, and was the grande dame of Manhattan’s most important avant-garde salon, where Sanger, Ellis, and many other sexual reformers were guests.

This manifesto was probably written in part in negation to FTM’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909). It may also have been conceived to counterbalance feminist manqué and French poet Valentine de Saint-Point’s [pseud. of Desglans de Cessiat-Vercell, 1875–1953] “Manifesto of the Futurist Woman” (1912) and “Futurist Manifesto of Lust” (1913). Saint-Point’s manifestos announced the birth of a strong and instinctive superwoman and affirmed the rights of female sexual desire. Loy’s conception of a superior female race is further developed in “Psycho-Democracy,” where she diagrams a vision of “compound existence” between advanced human beings of both sexes.

Rachel Blau DuPlessis has written convincingly of this work’s problematic relationship to the feminine ideology of “Love Songs” in Ralph Cohen, ed., Studies in Historical Change (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992, pp. 264–91). The notes to her essay “‘Seismic Orgasm’: Sexual Intercourse, Gender Narratives, and Lyric Ideology in Mina Loy” point out regrettable editorial errors and mistranscriptions introduced in the LLB82 rendering of this text, which I have tried to correct in the present edition.

53. MODERN POETRY. Composition date unknown, ca. 1925. First published in Charm 3:3 (April 1925, pp. 16–17, 71). NOMS. The present edition follows verbatim the first and only published version.

Editor’s Note: This text represents ML’s only known critical discussion of modern poetry. As such, it offers a valuable insight into her views of her contemporaries, and an original, personal, and mature glimpse of her taste in contemporary poetry. Along with her essays on GS and Joseph Cornell, it is one of the very few examples we have of ML’s attempt to establish a critical voice. It is also the only published text that I know of in which she discusses her own diction and what it means to write in the American-immigrant idiom. I discovered this text well after the publication of LLB82, which raises the possibility of other unknown Loy publications being found in similarly obscure or non-literary periodicals. 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. Given that its content was for the most part of a non-literary nature, it is not surprising that its existence was not recorded in Hoffman, Allen, and Ulrich, eds., The Little Magazine (Princeton University Press, 1947). Copies of Charm are extremely rare. The New York Public Library has a run; I am interested in learning of copies catalogued elsewhere.

54. PRECEPTORS OF CHILDHOOD, OR THE NURSES OF MARAQUITA. Composition date unknown, ca. 1922. First published in Playboy: A Portfolio of Art and Satire 2:1 (first quarter, 1923, p. 12). Signed, undated MS at YCAL. I have made one emendation to the published version:

III.4: tassel] tassle

Editor’s Note: The original Playboy, edited by Egmont Arens, was a quarterly review devoted to “informal, spontaneous, uncensored and frankly experimental material by “those who are trying to blaze new paths of artistic expression … against the dullness, ugliness and backwardlookingness of our own day.” Playboy had earlier published a reproduction of a watercolor by ML in its May 1921 issue (p. 22). This autobiographical sketch has remained uncollected until now. In it, ML recalls her own childhood governesses by their actual names, but fictionalizes herself as Maraquita. I thank Marisa Januzzi for bringing this text to my attention.

55. AUTO-FACIAL-CONSTRUCTION. Composition date unknown. NOMS. First published as a promotional pamphlet for private distribution (Florence: Tipografia Giuntina, 1919). The present text is a verbatim transcription of the first published text.

Editor’s Note: The 1919 brochure was signed “Mina Loy, Sociétaire du Salon d’Automne, Paris,” raising the possibility that this bizarre scheme may have been conceived as early as 1906, when ML was elected a member of the Salon d’Automne. More likely, she was trading on an earlier credential and conceived the idea of offering her services as a prosopologist following her return to Italy after the disappearance of AC, when she was desperate for income. This was the first of many entrepreneurial attempts ML made to pitch business ideas to clients. In a letter to MDL (n.d., 1920?) she wrote: “Am enclosing a prospectus of a new method I shall teach when not drawing or writing about art. It came as a most unexpected revelation. And it works. I think the life-force inspired me with it to solve the problem of keeping bodies alive without prostituting art.” In a later letter to MDL, ML lamented, “I have been too ill to make my facial discovery convincing” (MDLP).

GP may have influenced ML’s thinking about facial destiny; as the self-described ugliest man in Italy, he was preoccupied with the effect of his appearance on the formation of his character, and was given to speculating on the relationship between visage and destiny.

I include this text not for its literary value but because it represents an important aspect of ML’s creative imagination not evident in her other writings. Throughout her life ML was preoccupied with income-producing schemes and brought to bear her considerable esoteric knowledge of art, technology, and human nature to advance practical experiments, test entrepreneurial ideas, and promote business strategies in order to pay the rent and support her children. This text documents one of her many ideas which failed, but she was indefatigable in her attempts to file the next patent or launch another business that might succeed. Her design and manufacture of lamps and lampshades in Paris in the 1920s attained a certain amount of commercial success and earned her notice in the design world of her own time as well as a place in the subsequent history of industrial design (e.g., Mel Byars, The Design Encyclopedia [London: Laurence King, 1994], pp. 340–41). Surprisingly, not a single example of her work as a lampiste is known to survive. I am still in search of examples.