Rob Sheffield Mina Loy in Too Much Too Soon: Poetry / Celebrity / Sexuality / Modernity In the summer of 1915, Mina Loy was the most candalous poet in America. She was a star, a glam 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 fa mous of the New York poets, attacked in tabloid papers and literary jour- nals. 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 coun- try. ‘These days, Mina Loy is famous again. That’s a good thing. Fame be- comes her. [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 re- publish. 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. ‘Afterireading “Love Songs,” | looked for her name everywhere in the maga- zine. 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 con- stantly, 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ROB SHEFFIELD 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 actu- ally 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 626ROB SHEFFIELD friends hot to read her, it wasn’t as though they could just go into a book- store or library and find any of her poetry. I spent $800 I didn’t have ona 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 fora non-collector to keep around in:a dank Virginia basement apart- ment—but it was her book. | 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, 1 had to scrounge my way up to New Haven and sleep ‘on a friend’s couch; | 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 four- teen 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 dtama-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. Sometimes, when you flip for something obscure, and it becomes fa- mous, you feel a sense of loss. Your private obsession isn’t just yours any more. You know—Combat Rock Syndrome, But I can’t imagine anyone feeling that way about Mina Loy. She loved being famous. And she’s even more fun to read now that she’s a star again. I can walk into a new friend’s room and see Mina Loy on the bookshelf, something I always dreamed of being able to do. I even meet people who know much more about Loy than Ido, and as time goes on, I will meet more of them. She keeps getting big- ger—by now she’s more famous than poor Myrna Loy—and all the different eyes on her just make her work richer. Nowadays, I can read articles about her that begin with the word “interdiscursivity,” and I don’t even gag, She 627ROB SHEFFIELD belongs to that world, too. She belongs to a lot of worlds. She's a person- ality crisis. Mina Loy was a star in the punk rock style, someone who crossed the line from fan to performer. The first thing she ever published, “Aphorisms On Futurism,” was something she wrote while she was just an understimulated, underexposed, overmarried English painter named Ducie Haweis, bored out of her skull in Florence. (Her birth name had been “Mina Lowy”; by the end of her life, she was signing her name “Mina Lloyd.”) She had met the Italian Futurists, Fillipo Tommaso Marinetti and Giovanni Papini, pursued affairs with them, and begun her sexual and literary awak- ening. The dissatisfied bride Ducie Haweis reinvented herself as the cosmopolitan writer Mina Loy, and wrote a manifesto on Futurism, even though she was already rebelling against Marinetti and Papini the way they had inspired her to rebel against her married life. It was a bluff, but it worked; “Aphorisms On Futurism” got published in Camera Work in January 1914, and suddenly Ducie Haweis was Mina Loy, a writer, with an audience. Loy was thirty-two before she published for the first time; she'd kept herself a secret for so long that she was ready to explode and make the world listen. She had crossed the fan/performer boundary, left her hus- band, broken her silence. Now, in classic punk rock style, after fighting her way to the microphone, she suddenly had to figure out on the spot what she wanted to say into it. As Greil Marcus has put it, the originary punk rock gesture is “finding your own voice and making the act of listening to it worth someone else’s time.” And now that Mina Loy had bluffed her way to an audience, she had to find a voice that could live up to that audience. You gotta have a crowd if you wanna have a show, and Loy wanted to have a show. By the time she finally moved to New York in October 1916, her fame as a poet had preceded her. But it’s no stretch at all to say that her fame as a poet preceded her poetry. She was a starfucker who became an even bigger star than Marinetti or Papini ever were, a femme fatale in love with fame, fame, fatal fame. Loy put it another way in one of her unpublished manuscripts, revising the Miltonic trope of “darkness visible”: “The rub- bish of centuries crashes into words as the volume of all women’s silence, 628ROB SHEFFIELD become audible, rolls upon us.” Mina Loy had many friends, admirers, co-conspirators in New York who were also poets, and who had been fans of hers before they were friends. Now forgotten, they were once famous too: Donald Evans, Allen Norton, Louise Norton, Alfred Kreymborg, Robert Carleton Brown, Mary Carolyn Davies, so many others. They will probably never be as famous as Mina Loy. But maybe they will get more famous than they are now. They deserve it. Their admiration made Mina Loy what she was. Her admiration of them— and her willingness to be admired by them—made all of them greater. They were the dandy highwaymen who rebelled against the tight-assed institu- tion modernism had already become by 1913. ‘They are still inspiring and exciting to read; they still make you think, “you can just do this?” The Rogue/Others scene had no use for Ezra Pound and all his “we desire the words of poetry to follow the natural order” business. They didn’t believe in natural orders. They believed in Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, accesso- ries, trinkets, infamy, gossip, cities, feminism, freedom. Rogue billed itself as “the cigarette of literature.” They saw themselves as stars before they saw themselves as poets, and that gave them the freedom to move as poets. Richard Hell once said of the New York Dolls, the greatest punk band ever, that they were the first band to conceive of themselves as rock stars before they had any fans at all. The Rogue poets were the same way; they invented themselves as starlets, and Mina Loy was the most glittery starlet of them all. Mina Loy was to Ezra Pound what the New York Dolls were to Eric Clapton. The New York magazine poets were important players in the battle to define modernism, at a time when Amy Lowell was still hatching plans to copyright the term “free verse.” They began to get together in 1913, in- spired by the Armory Show, and they were the first American beachhead for the cult of Gertrude Stein. (It was Donald Evans whose Claire Marie Press gave Tender Buttons its first American printing.) Unfortunately, Pound won the battle, and the Rogue/Others scene has been pretty much written out of history. That will change in time. But meanwhile, Mina Loy is fa- mous. By 1915, she had waited a long time to be famous, and by all accounts 629ROB SHEFFIELD she had a blast while it lasted. In one of the poems she published in Rogue, “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” she wrote about female sexual frus- tration, about the desperate whispers of virgins whose sexuality gets repressed until it explodes. For Loy, the whole point of the poem is telling a secret and making “noise” out of it. The poem happens in the moment when a woman stops keeping herself a secret and stops hiding, the moment when “A secret well kept / Makes the noise of the world.” After Mina Loy wrote her first hit, “Aphorisms On Futurism,” she passed it on to her friend Carl Van Vechten at Mabel Dodge’s house in Florence. Van Vechten sent it to Alfred Stieglitz, who ran it in Camera Work. It became a sensation, the first major English-language manifesto of Italian Futurism, and it made Loy the last word on the hottest subject in New York. She found herself a buzz name in the New York artistic circles she had been dreaming about from afar, and given the chance to exploit her own buzz, she promptly became a poet. “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. “Topay 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 disper- sion 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. 630ROB SHEFFIELD 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 Ar mory 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,” “Café 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 fa- mously, 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 Mar- riage,” 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 exe s 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, eatchphrases that, if 'm not mistaken, really don’t mean anything atall. Even her most straight- forward 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 63)ROB SHEFFIELD marked all over its surface, wearing the scars of its initiation into the world. It’s poetry that is thoroughly and visibly fucked with. 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 froma 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 social- istic 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 po- etry that Pound and all his fans would find repulsive; they succeeded. While Pound was working hard to rescue poetry from “the softness of the ‘nine- ties,” 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 mod- ernists, 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 rewrit- ten by Gertrude Stein.” 632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 hip- pie 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 coher- ent lyric voice. Wallace Stevens later declared that poetry makes the visible alittle 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. Mina Loy was on this audience like geavy 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 imagina- tion. “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. 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 633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 dis- misses 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 an- other 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 un- consummated 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 men- tioned—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.” ‘The emotional content of her poetry is all there in that image: the secret smuggled into the world, disguised asa harmless toy. Under the protection of Lady Asterisk, Loy looked for ways to smuggle her secrets into the world, and to make them part of the world. Her secrets, as expressed in her poetry, were dangerous, often obscene, sometimes merely eccentric, sometimes actually illegal. She looked for ways to make these secrets visible—no, not only visible, but seen. Her voice came out on the page as the secret that turns into “the noise of the world.” While she was in the world, she was the noise of the world. Forty years after her death, Mina Loy is still making noise. 634ROS SHEFFIELD Works Cited Djuna Barnes. “Becoming Intimate With The Bohemians,” New York Morning Telegraph Sunday Magazine, November 19, 1916, reprinted in New York, ed. Alyce Barry. Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1989. Carolyn Burke. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Robert Christgau. “New York Dolls,” in Stranded, ed. Greil Marcus. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979. Roger L. Conover. Introduction to The Last Lunar Baedeker, ed. Roger L. Conover. Highlands, North Carolina: Jargon Society, 1982, S. Foster Damon. Amy Lowell: A Chronicle with Extracts from Her Correspondence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1935. Virginia M. Kouidis. Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet. Baton Rouge: Loui- siana State University Press, 1980. Alfred Kreymborg. Troubadour: An Autobiography. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1925. Mina Loy Papers in the Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Baedcker, ed. Roger L. Conover. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996. —. Lunar Baedecker [sic]. Paris: Contact Publishing Co., 1923. —. “Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots,” Rogwe 2 (August 15, 1915). Aphorisms on Futurism,” Camera Work 45 (January 1914). —. “To You,” Others 3 (July 1916). Greil Marcus. “The Au Pairs in Their Time,” in Ranters & Crowd Pleasers: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-92. New York: Doubleday, 1993. New York Dolls, New York Dolls in Too Much Too Soon. Mercury Records, 1974. Ezra Pound. “Lionel Johnson,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound. New York: New Directions, 1954. —. The Letters of Correspondence, eds. Thomas L.. Scott and Melvin J. Friedman. New York: New Directions, 1988. Louis Untermeyer. The New Eva in American Poetry. New York: Henry Holt ia Pound to Margaret Anderson: The Little Review and Company, 1919. Steven Watson. Strange Bedfellows: The First American Avant-Garde. New York: Abbeville Press, 1991. 635Copyright © 2003 EBSCO Publishing