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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
Mina Loy was on this audience like gravy on meat loaf. The audience she had found with "Aphorisms On Futurism" inspired her poetry as much as her poetry inspired the audience. "To You," published in Others in July 1916, is a good example of how the city worked in Loy's poetic imagination. "To You" imagines being a stranger in New York, an alien in a city where "shadows are yours for the taking." Loy fantasizes about walking around the city incognito, interpreting the shadows, looking around but not belonging to anything, just overhearing "the tattle of tongueplay." The commotion of the city surrounds her, and yet the freedom of being an alien exhilarates and inspires her. It's a city full of personality crisis, and Loy belongs there. "To You" is her poem to her idealized audience, one that she dreamed up and believed in, the audience that existed partly because she helped to invent it. It's a love song to New York that no New Yorker could have written.
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At this point, Loy had never visited New York. She just knew it was Somewhere Else, a place she dreamed of running away to, a place where she could leave Ducie Haweis behind and become the Mina Loy that she was hungry to be. She wrote her New York fantasy all over the flamboyant visual surface of her poetry. But by the time she really did run away to New York, her fantasies had become part of the urban landscape; her fantasies had made the city a little closer to the place she had imagined. She could only make that fantasy real for herself by first making it real to an audience, and so she had to create Mina Loy and make her real to an audience. Fame, fame, fatal fame. It can play hideous tricks on the brain.
In the boxes and boxes of Mina Loy papers at Yale's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, there is an unpublished, undated essay titled "The Library of the Sphinx." Loy's point of departure is Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, in which the decadent Lord Henry Wotton dismisses women as "Sphinxes without secrets." (Loy seems to return this quote often in her papers--Wilde does loom large in her project of coming up with a feminist style of decadence.) The essay focuses on the asterisk, a punctuation mark that she uses in her poetry sometimes, ostensibly as another ornament on the printed page. But the way Loy explains it in "The Library of the Sphinx," the asterisk is there to make noise out of "the secret of the sphinx," a visual sign for the unarticulated secrets behind the poem. Loy writes, "While the sphinx retains her secret, who shall reveal the unconsummated significance of the asterisk--Nonwithstanding that the secret of the sphinx is not conveyed in words--the asterisk is an assumption that the secret is possesed [sic] by each of us and therefore need never be mentioned--the asterisk is the signal of a treasure which is not there" (7.190). The asterisk, or as Loy calls it elsewhere, "Lady Asterisk" (6.163), becomes the "signal" of her poetry's "unconsummated significance."
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