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Mina Loy in Too Much Too Soon: poetry / celebrity / sexuality / modernity - Essays - Critical Essay - Biography
Literary Review, Summer, 2003 by Rob Sheffield
In the summer of 1915, Mina Loy was the most scandalous poet in America. She was a star, a glare urban flash writing the language of the future by the "stellectric" light of her own fame. She had never set foot in New York, or for that matter America, but her obscene four-part poem "Love Songs," published in the debut issue of Others, had made her, the magazine, and the entire New York poetry scene instantly notorious. She was the most famous of the New York poets, attacked in tabloid papers and literary journals. For the rest of her poetic career, the scandal of "Love Songs" followed her. Her only book, Lunar Baedecker, was confiscated at U.S. customs as pornography; nobody knows how many copies ever made it into the country.
These days, Mina Loy is famous again. That's a good thing. Fame becomes her. I first read her in 1989, by accident--I was bored, I was spending a Friday night in the library basement, and as a Wallace Stevens fan I thought I would look up some of the little-magazine poems he chose never to republish. I started reading through Others, and it was like hearing punk rock for the first time, like seeing the Replacements onstage and realizing, "You can just get up there and do that?" The poets in Others were so flippant, so catty, so funny, and Stevens wasn't even the funniest one. Mina Loy was. After reading "Love Songs," I looked for her name everywhere in the magazine. It was a great name, for one thing, "Mina Loy," a name that lent all sorts of tawdry mystery to her instantly recognizable poetic voice. She wrote like a worldly, sullen, slightly mean bluestocking, spilling off the edge of the page with language as pure as New York snow. She showed off constantly, hardly ever writing without overwriting. She queened it up with her arrogant wit, her snide eroticism, her verbal daring, as she crossfaded Romantic icons and Baudelairian junk into a pastiche poetry like nothing I'd ever seen. I was in love. "Love Songs," the first one I read, was the poem that made her a celebrity of her time, although I didn't know that then. The opening invocation was, then as now, her most famous line: "Pig Cupid his rosy snout / Rooting erotic garbage." The expanded 1917 version, "Songs to Joannes," took up the whole April 1917 issue of Others, and it was even wilder:
We might have coupled In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment Or broken flesh with one another At the profane communion table Where wine is spill't on promiscuous lips
Her poetry made a fetish out of immediacy and acceleration, giving me the vertiginous sense that I was fast-forwarding through the collected works of Oscar Wilde. She had a forbiddingly erudite vocabulary, drawing words from all over the language and beyond, and yet her propulsive beat made even her most convoluted lines seem chatty and spontaneous. Like any great punk rocker, she was inspirational because she trusted her own sense of forward motion, plunging ahead, making up her own words when it would take too long to bend an extant one into the right shape, spilling language promiscuously. She wrote like somebody so confident of being listened to--so used to being listened to--that she didn't bother to sell you on her voice; she just invited you to get swept up in the same momentum, this dizzy spin she's in. I didn't know her name, or any of the stories lurking behind it, but I knew that this hot child in the city had changed the way I was going to read from now on. Reading her was an exhilarating sensation. You could just get up there and do that?
Nobody I knew had ever heard of her. I Xeroxed every poem of hers I could find, devoured Virginia Kouidis' 1980 book about her (Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet), taped pictures of her up on my wall. I became a modernist bobby-soxer, even as Loy had once been, long before she actually became a famous poet. Everybody I asked said, "You mean Myrna Loy?" (I still can't watch Myrna Loy movies out of resentment.) I tried to make converts, but even though I could talk about her in a way that got my friends hot to read her, it wasn't as though they could just go into a bookstore or library and find any of her poetry. I spent $800 I didn't have on a copy of her 1923 book, Lunar Baedecker. It didn't have my favorite of her poems, "Anglo Mongrels and the Rose," and the title was misspelled, not that I knew what a "Baedeker" was anyhow, and it was a pretty fragile little item for a non-collector to keep around in a dank Virginia basement apartment--but it was her book. I was still paying it off years later. I flipped for Rogue, an even cooler magazine than Others, even though practically no copies still exist. To read it, I had to scrounge my way up to New Haven and sleep on a friend's couch; I always found reasons why it was worth it.
These days, anybody can look at Mina Loy's poems, in Roger L. Conover's lavish 1996 The Lost Lunar Baedecker, or read her story in Carolyn Burke's heroic Becoming Modern: The Life Of Mina Loy. That's a good thing. Lots of people have written about Mina Loy in the past fourteen years, sometimes well, sometimes not so well, but the point is that people know about her now. Nobody seems to agree on who Mina Loy really is: a poet? A real poet? A great poet? A character? A feminist icon? A well-connected dilletante? A fashion plate? A nice little role model ? A boho scam artist? A mad, bad, and dangerous-to-know psycho drama-vampire lampshade pimp? But that's a good thing, too. Mina Loy is enjoying such a vibrant afterlife because she's all these things. The more light shines on her, the more there is to see.
