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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
"Aphorisms" isn't a great achievement in itself. It's a list of mock-Wildean aphorisms beating the drum for the loosely theorized aesthetic of Futurism, and no matter how hard Loy blusters about "the tremendous truth of Futurism," it doesn't get any less vague in her hands than it already was. "TODAY is the crisis in consciousness" is a pretty good one. "LOVE the hideous in order to see the sublime core of it" isn't bad. "TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness" is bloody awful. But Futurism is just an excuse for Loy to write herself a manifesto. She doesn't proselytize for Futurism: The Concept so much as for Mina Loy: The Futurist. It's obviously the sound of someone learning how the microphone works, figuring out how to rock it, finding out that she likes making noise.
TO your blushing we shout the obscenities, we scream the blasphemies, that you, being weak, whisper alone in the dark. THEY are empty except of your shame. AND so these sounds shall dissolve back to their innate senselessness. THUS shall evolve the language of the Future.
After "Aphorisms on Futurism" came out, Loy had no trouble getting her poems published in New York. She was famous now. She published in the new little magazines that had started to emerge in the wake of the Armory Show, and as a genuine European, a New Woman, a modern iconoclast who flouted social conventions more outrageously than the sweet young dandies of New York could if they tried, and they did, she had a voice that commanded attention. She published in Allen Norton's Rogue: "Sketch of a Man on a Platform" (April 1, 1915, "Three Moments in Paris," "One O' Clock At Night," "Cafe du Neant," "Magasins du Louvre" (May 1, 1915), "Collision," and "Cittabapini" (August 1, 1915), "Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots" (August 15, 1915), "Giovanni Franci" (October 1916), and "Babies in Hospital" (November 1916). She published in Pitts Sanborn's Trend: "Italian Pictures," "The Costa San Giorgio," "July in Vallombrosa," "Costa Magic" (1914), and "Parturition" (1914). She published in Marcel Duchamp's The Blind Man: "In ... Formation" (April 10, 1917), and "O Marcel--otherwise I Also Have Been to Louise's" (May 1917). Most famously, she published in Alfred Kreymborg's Others: the controversial "Love Songs" (July 1915), "To You" (July 1916), "Songs To Joannes" (the entire April 1917 issue, an expanded version of "Love Songs"), "The Black Virginity" (December 1918), "Human Cylinders," "The Effectual Marriage," and "At The Door Of The House" in the 1917 Others: An Anthology Of The New Verse.
Her poetry wasn't just excessive--it was madly in love with excess, celebrating excess as the point where poetry began. Her poems are full of textual noise: asterisks, dots, fields of white space, neologisms, archaisms, non sequiturs, arcane Anglo-mongrel words, dashes, capitals, carats, tildes, readymades, foreign locutions, chatty throwaway lines, catchphrases that, if I'm not mistaken, really don't mean anything at all. Even her most straightforward poems zig-zag into complex verbal liasions, spilling over, feeding back, glowing in the dark. It's showy, hustling a little too hard for attention on an immediate level, which is part of the point. She writes in an exploded vocabulary, one that takes its vitality from the exploded modern city. The poet behind this vocabulary is at home in an artificial world. The poem is marked all over its surface, wearing the scars of its initiation into the world. It's poetry that is thoroughly and visibly fucked with.
