Mina Loy in Too Much Too Soon: poetry / celebrity / sexuality / modernity - Essays - Critical Essay - Biography

Literary Review, Summer, 2003 by Rob Sheffield

When Loy started writing this language, she was still dreaming New York from across the ocean, writing about a modern city life that as yet only existed in her imagination. But her poetry quickly became part of the city. She had been waiting for New York, but New York had also been waiting for her. In November 1916, Djuna Barnes, as a cub reporter for the New York Morning Telegraph, described a typical bohemian apartment in Greenwich Village:

   There are the evenings in the studios, blue and yellow candles
   pouring their hot wax over things in ivory and things in jade.
   Incense curling up from a jar; Japanese prints on the wall. A
   touch of purple here, a gold screen there, a black carpet, a
   curtain of silver, a tapestry thrown carelessly down, a copy of
   Rogue on a low table open at Mina Loy's poem. A flower in a vase,
   with three paint brushes, an edition of Oscar Wilde, soiled by
   socialistic thumbs.

The Rogue/Others crowd was an ideal audience for Loy, a group of poets, editors, and readers bored by the stale, sexless style of modernist poetry, bored by the rules that the Boston-Chicago modernist kingpins had already established. They deliberately set out to design a modern poetry that Pound and all his fans would find repulsive; they succeeded. While Pound was working hard to rescue poetry from "the softness of the 'nineties,'" the New York magazine modernists were constantly paying homage to Oscar Wilde and The Yellow Book, flirting with images of scandal and sexual deviance. Donald Evans described the group as the "true child of the brave and battlesome 'Yellow 90s' of England," and for mainstream modernists, that was precisely the problem. Amy Lowell dismissed Evans and Norton as "merely 1890 gone a little mad," while Pound dismissed Kreymborg as "of no importance but as a symptom." Louis Untermeyer, writing in the New Republic, cited Mina Loy's "Love Songs" as "Exhibit A" in his case to condemn Others as "scraps from The Yellow Book rewritten by Gertrude Stein."

The sexual provocation of the New York magazine dandies was their most effective polemical weapon. As Robert Christgau has written of the New York Dolls, "By their camping they announced to the world that hippie mindblowing was a lot more conventional than it pretended to be, that human possibility was infinite," and that sums up the Rogue/Others group perfectly. Their attack on Boston and Chicago modernism meant writing glam poetry frosted with ornamental artifice, fetishizing the Yellow 90s because they rejected any pretense to the authority of the natural. They took the private autoerotic sites Dante Gabriel Rossetti envisioned, and translated them into sidewalks rather than greenswards or oriels. They tarted up modernism, and wrote lyric that flippantly mocked any kind of coherent lyric voice. Wallace Stevens later declared that poetry makes the visible a little hard to see, but at this early stage, he and his confreres and consouers were trying to make the virile a little hard to see, scrambling the gender codes of modern poetry.