[In the following essay, Kouidis discusses Loy's involvement with feminism, futurism, French metaphysics, and the free verse movement through a reading of several of her major works.]

Although British by birth, Mina Loy (1882-1966) has been considered an American modernist poet since her arrival in New York in 1916. One of the European expatriates from World War I, she shared the glamour and notoriety accompanying this group's pursuit of artistic and personal freedom, and her exceptional beauty, cerebral disposition, and cosmopolitan background distinguished her among the artists surrounding avant garde impresarios Alfred Stieglitz, Walter Conrad Arensberg, and Alfred Kreymborg. This milieu provided a sympathetic audience for her daringly innovative poetry, and to its writers' experiments in word, line, and image she contributed her firsthand knowledge of European modernism. The American little magazines were her publishers. Even before she arrived in the States her poems (and experimental plays) had appeared in Camera Work, The Trend, The International, Rogue, and Others; and in the late 1910s she moved with the experimentalists to The Little Review and The Dial.

Mina Loy's seminal place in the American poetry revolution is suggested by the appreciations of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. Pound crowed from London in 1918: "Mi credo, Masters, Frost, Lindsay are out of the Wild Young American gaze already. Williams, Loy, Moore, and the worser phenomena of Others … are much more in the 'news.'" A more subdued letter to Marianne Moore (1921) made the same point: "entre nooz: is there anyone in America except you, Bill and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse" [The Letters of Ezra Pound, 1950]. In the Prologue to Kora in Hell (1920) Williams established Mina Loy and Marianne Moore as the polarities of the avant garde landscape. Marianne Moore, carefully avoiding everything she "detests," represented the North; Mina Loy and her associates on The Blind Man, tolerating, Williams implied, experiment tinged with the absurd, the obscene, the nihilistic, represented the South.

Following the lead of Williams and Pound, literary history remembers Mina Loy—when it has bothered to remember—as an American modernist. But readers have generally overlooked her contributions to poetry, partly because she did not sustain the quality or quantity of her early work. She wrote most of her poetry from 1913-1925 with a small second effort in the 1940s. Significantly, the gradual recovery of her poetry begun by Kenneth Rexroth's "Les Lauriers Sont Coupés" (1944) coincides with the emergence of the postmodern poets of the 1950s and 1960s. In Rexroth's initial estimation, "She is tough, forthright, very witty, atypical, anti-rhetorical, devoid of chi-chi," an erotic poet who is "elegiac and satirical" rather than lyric [Circle, 1944]. Thirty years later [in his American Poetry in the Twentieth Century, 1971] Rexroth distinguishes Mina Loy from the "classic American modernists," placing her among the "American representatives of the international avant-garde" (Gertrude Stein, Arensberg, Laura Riding, Eugene Jolas). Other of her postmodern admirers include Jonathan Williams (her publisher), Denise Levertov, and Jerome Rothenberg. Rothenberg's recognition, especially, clarifies Mina Loy's significance. Like Rexroth he praises her vigorous defense and practice of artistic freedom and deplores her submergence by the reactionary modernism of mid-century. He situates her among the first, "circa 1914," to awaken to the "revolution in consciousness" and subsequently to explore "the relationship between consciousness, language & poetic structure: what is seen, said & made." Rothenberg joins the few critics, historians, and anthologists who have discovered in Mina Loy's oeuvre many individually exciting poems and a body of poetry important to an understanding of the modernist vortex. Her poetry aligns itself with that of Stein-Pound-Williams to form a "counter-poetics" that by generating postmodern poetry is emerging as the most vital force in twentieth-century American poetry.

Pursuing these appreciations, this [essay] will attempt to place Mina Loy in her cultural and literary milieu and, most important, to suggest the achievement of her poetry.

I

Mina Loy's modernist education began with an interest in painting. Raised in an English middle-class Victorian family which did not consider it necessary to prepare women for living by a formal education, she was nevertheless encouraged in her artistic talent by an indulgent father. Studies with Augustus John in England and Angelo Jank in Munich preceded her convergence with her generation in Paris, where she and her first husband, Englishman Stephen Haweis, exhibited in the Autumn Salon for 1906 (a reviewer described her painting as a combination of Guys, Rops, and Beardsley; his as "pur whistlérien"). Her Paris sojourn ended in 1907 when she, her husband, and a daughter (the Haweises had two other children, one of whom died in infancy) moved to Florence.

During the Florence years (1907-1916) Mina Loy seems to have begun to write poetry. The reason for the new interest can only be conjectured; the failure of her marriage and her disillusion with woman's traditional roles are probably significant. Certainly her muse is "Pig Cupid," the grotesque god who presides over the Loves Songs, or Songs to Joannes (1915-1917), a thirty-four poem-collage of the failure of romantic, religious, and sexual love. Pig Cupid embodies male carelessness and arrogance (the irresponsibility of Don Juan, or Joannes), as well as female disillusion and guilt. A product of the subconscious, he has destroyed the dreams of youth and swills the wastage of his victim's "star-topped" aspirations:

Spawn   of   Fantasies
Silting the appraisable
Pig Cupid   his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
"Once upon a time"
Pulls a weed   white and star-topped
Among wild oats   sewn in mucous-membrane

To convey despair and the shocked recognition of the body-mind interdependence, Mina Loy employs an imagery that looks back to the blasphemies of her Decadent heritage and forward to the grotesque psychic disfigurations of Surrealism. Such is poem III:

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
We might have given birth to a butterfly
With the daily-news
Printed in blood on its wings.

What in its time seemed excessive attention to sexuality sprang from Mina Loy's belief that to be modern was to open this "proscribed psychic area" so carefully avoided by her English ancestors and contemporaries. She characterized this first period of her writing as a working through of the sexual problem so that she could "develop some other vision of things." On a personal level she was attacking her Victorian heritage which calculated the marriage value of women according to their purity and ignorance, and imprisoned their spiritual vitality in busks as rigid as those which molded and suppressed their bodies. Artistically she was fighting the failure of literature to treat life honestly.

Mina Loy's familiarity with the artistic circles of London, Munich, and Paris suggests that she early had exceptional opportunities to break her ties to the past. However, letters and poems indicate that liberation from restrictive expectations for women awaited her friendship with the Futurists. In 1914, writing with skepticism as to the outcome, she says that she is being converted to Futurism. Later she writes that she was not a Futurist nor considered one by them, although she credits F. T. Marinetti, their leader, with "waking me up." Futurism seems to have awakened Mina Loy to the potentialities of the self, the need to reject the strictures of the past, and the availability of new poetic forms for discovering and expressing her freedom; thus it joins female self-consciousness as the wellspring of her poetry.

Florence also brought friendships with Mabel Dodge and her guest at the Villa Curonia, Carl Van Vechten. Returned to New York in 1913, they served as agents for Mina Loy's poetry and confirmed her desire to visit America. She arrived late in 1916, hoping to market her skills as a designer of clothing and to have her children, left with a nurse in Florence, join her as soon as she was settled. As an artist, she saw herself a Columbus drawn to the emerging center of the present, like him to be discovered by America. '"No one,'" she told an Evening Sun reporter in 1917, '"who has not lived in New York has lived in the Modern world.'"

Mina Loy's expectations were not disappointed. While New York did not bring prosperity, it did supply a community of like-minded artists and a moment of personal happiness. Among the city's expatriates she met Arthur Cravan, world vagabond and forerunner of Dada, who defied convention in a thoroughgoing manner that Mina Loy admired but could not emulate. The athletic, handsome Cravan, whose nonconformist bravado masked extreme sensitivity, became the great love of Mina Loy's life and they were married in Mexico in January 1918. They lived for a while in Mexico City where Cravan ran a boxing school and lectured on Egyptian art. Then, ten months after the marriage, Cravan, intending to join Mina Loy who had preceded him to Buenos Aires, vanished. The United States Department of State eventually reported that his body, beaten and robbed, [had] been found in the Mexican desert.

After Cravan's disappearance and the birth of their daughter, Mina Loy searched for her missing husband in Europe and America, briefly joining the Greenwich Village scene of the early 1920s. She settled in Paris in 1923, at the center of the American and European artists who shaped the legendary post-war era. The Twenties brought Lunar Baedeker (1923), her first volume of poetry, published by Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions, and the semi-autobiographical Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose, published in The Little Review (1923-1924) and in McAlmon's Contact Collection of Contemporary Writers (1925). In the next decade little of Mina Loy's work appeared, and by 1936 when she followed her daughters to New York she had faded into obscurity. But she wrote poetry and prose at least into the 1950s, and her work occasionally appeared in the little magazines until 1962. A second volume of poetry, Lunar Baedeker & Time-Tables (1958), went unnoticed. She continued to paint and was honored in 1959 by an exhibit of her collages, titled "Constructions," at New York's Bodley Gallery, and by the receipt of the Copley Foundation Award for her painting. However, when she died in Aspen, Colorado, where she had lived with her daughters since 1954, her poetry and painting were largely forgotten.

II

Mina Loy incorporated much of this exceptional biography in her poetry. Her first poems, examinations of the injustices of woman's life, are rooted in her effort to break with her repressive Victorian heritage; and the child-heroine Ova of Anglo-Mongrels enacts the femaleartist's search for self-and-world understanding. Poems on art and artists are drawn from Mina Loy's friendships with the Decadents, the Futurists, James Joyce, Constantin Brancusi, and Jules Pascin. Her many poems on society's misfits—bums, the physically deformed, the poor—issue from the lifelong fascination with failure that drew her into the Bowery to live from 1951 to 1954. But the dominant biographical influence is Mina Loy's metaphysical (her label) preoccupation with the self, "a covered entrance to infinity / Choked with the tatters of tradition" ("O Hell," 1920). The basis of her metaphysics is the "Aphorisms on Futurism" (1914), fifty-one prescriptions for selfhood that were among the first modernist credentials she sent to America. The "Aphorisms" dismiss the past—"DIE in the Past / Live in the Future," and proclaim the individual's ability to shape the universe after a self-image—"NOT to be a cipher in your ambient, / But to color your ambient with your preferences." Central is the call to awakening—"TODAY is the crisis in consciousness."

In answer to the challenge of the "Aphorisms" Mina Loy analyzes the self-world relationship and explores obstacles to self-fulfilment. If her poetry emits a cerebral chill, the reason is that she perceives the struggle and failure of her subjects not so much as personal suffering, but as illustrations of her metaphysics. The cosmos she constructs is chaotic, purposeless, and indifferent to humanity. At its center burns the life-giving sun of reality that illuminates life's beauty and harshness without bias. Within this vast indifference the self, symbolized by the eye, affirms its humanity by a relentless probing of time's shifting images for clues to elusive cosmic purpose: as "Ephemerid" (1946) explains, "The Eternal is sustained by serial metamorphosis."

Emblematic of the spiritual atrophy that accompanies the failure to exercise vision is the war-blinded youth of "Der Blinde Junge" (1923). Descendant of Charles Baudelaire's "Les Aveugles" and Théophile Gautier's "L'Aveugle," he is a victim of war and fate:

The dam Bellona
littered
her eyeless offspring
Kriegsopfer
upon the pavements of Vienna

This slow blind face
pushing
its virginal nonentity
against the light

Void and extinct
this planet of the soul
strains from the craving throat
in static flight upslanting

Most of Mina Loy's subjects bear greater responsibility for their blindness. Desiring to escape the challenge of a constantly changing world, they seek a blissful Nirvana, also called Elysium and Ecstasia, beyond the painful processes of life. That is, they flee vision-in-time for the false refuge of a static absolute.

In the later poetry Mina Loy mostly records acts of failed vision. But at the outset of her metaphysical exploration she involves the I-narrator in a struggle for clear vision that is embodied in word, line, and image: the depiction, as Rothenberg says, of "the relationship between consciousness, language & poetic structure." The results, along with a proto-existentialist insistence on unremitting effort, place Mina Loy among the optimists of poetic modernism who, seeking better to comprehend and express the human situation, leave the individual open to discovery and growth.

III

Mina Loy bases her depiction of consciousness on the word. As her contribution to the "generation of the word," seeking in Europe and America to rejuvenate desiccated poetic language, she developed a sound-vibrant, sharpedged diction that often saves her metaphysics from the mists of speculation or the sloughs of free verse exercise. When language becomes the word, not just the repetition of old visions, it liberates consciousness. This accomplishment, Mina Loy explains, is Gertrude Stein's:

As for the technique Mina Loy used to implement her theory of the word, Ezra Pound's early explanation is still useful. In Pound's view Mina Loy writes "logopoeia or poetry that is akin to nothing but language, which is a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modification of ideas and characters." He cites Jules Laforgue as the forerunner and singles out Marianne Moore and T. S. Eliot as other practitioners of the mode. Pound elaborates his definition by distinguishing logopoeia from melapoeia, "poetry which moves by its music" and from imagism (later phanopoeia), poetry dependent on the image [Little Review, No. 4, 1918]. Logopoeia, he says, "employs words not only for their direct meaning, but it takes count in a special way of habits of usage, of the context we expect to find with the word, its usual concomitants, of its known acceptances, and of ironical play" [How to Read, 1931].

Mina Loy does write a poetry of ideas that makes the reader exceptionally aware of individual words. She likes the shocking sexual-scientific words of Laforgue as well as his exoticisms and dry abstractions, colloquialisms and puns. A diction compressed to the point of fragmentation is common, and juxtaposition and typographical fragmentation add visual and tactile dimensions to the word's referential power. But the use of sound dominates these means of emphasizing the word and setting it to the dance of ideas or, more accurately, the dance of consciousness. Always the poetry reverberates with sound, often to underscore satire, sometimes to delineate an image. Usually sound patterns replace meter as the regulating device of the poetry. Denise Levertov's appreciation focuses on the importance of sound: "An appetite for sounds—for words as sounds—which results in a scintillating precision. And it's this that makes for—IS—the close reasoning: it's there IN the words! Here's a virtue! There in words, which are sounds, which once were made up experimentally by our forebears—don't we live in a daily forgetting of that?"

IV

For the movement of words within the line and image Mina Loy drew upon French philosopher Henri Bergson, with whom she shares the theme of self-liberation, and Bergson's belligerent disciples the Futurists. She substantiates her familiarity with Bergson in a two-part article on Gertrude Stein. Of Stein's "Galeries Lafayette" (1915) she says, "This was when Bergson was in the air, and his beads of Time strung on the continuous flux of Being, seemed to have found a literary conclusion in the austere verity of Gertrude Stein's theme—'Being' as the absolute occupation" [Transatlantic Review, 2, No. 3, 1924].

Mina Loy also strives to incorporate the Bergsonian flux of Being (or consciousness) in language but her means differ. Stein abandons traditional syntax and employs repetition to record the subtle alteration, from moment to moment, in the object observed and the consciousness observing it. Mina Loy describes the result: "by the intervaried rhythm of this monotone mechanism she uses for inducing a continuity of awareness of her subject, I was connected up with the very pulse of duration. // The core of a 'Being' was revealed to me with uninterrupted insistence. // The plastic static of the ultimate presence of an entity." Consciousness as Mina Loy shapes it is more dynamic. She structures its movement as the alternation of the Bergsonian states of intellect and intuition, interdependent aspects of consciousness that she embodies in abstraction and image. In the abstractions the mind comprehends the external forms of existence, whereas images plunge to the essence of existence and—if not intuitions themselves—carry the speaker to the brink of intuition. "No image," says Bergson, "will replace the intuition of duration, but many different images, taken from a quite different order of things, will be able, through the convergence of their action, to direct the consciousness to the precise point where there is a certain intuition to seize on" [in Introduction to Metaphysics, 1961]. Mina Loy alternates abstraction and image to depict the movement of consciousness inward to discover the essence of self and outward to place the self in cosmic becoming. She desires to transcend the fragmentations of earthly time and merge with Bergsonian durée: a "pure duration … in which the past, always moving on, is swelling unceasingly with a present that is absolutely new" [Creative Evolution, 1944].

This movement of consciousness shapes "Parturition" (1914), a poem alternating abstraction and image to convey the metaphysical quest of a woman in childbirth. Within this alternation irregular line length and internal spacing embody mental fluctuations and intuitional pauses, and are extensions of the spasms of pain. Typically, the self—cut off from unity with the "bland sun" of reality—strives to break its boundaries and merge with cosmic becoming:

Interspersed among these abstractions are vivid naturalistic images:

Have I not
Somewhere
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered moth
Laying eggs?
Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life—stir
I am that cat

Rises from the subconscious
Impression of small animal carcass
Covered with blue-bottles

On this flux of image and abstraction the speaker attains the desired intuitive identification with cosmic becoming. Although her intuition is not all she hoped it would be—her Being is one with "evolutionary processes," she briefly transcends earthly time:

Mother I am
Identical
With infinite Maternity

The final image, however, returns the speaker to the meager but necessary consolations of humanity:

The next morning
Each woman-of-the-people
Tip-toeing the red pile of the carpet
Doing hushed service
Each woman-of-the-people
Wearing a halo
A ludicrous little halo
Of which she is sublimely unaware

In experimenting with structures of consciousness Mina Loy elsewhere combines the alternation of abstraction and image with series of vivid, disconnected, and sometimes fragmented images. Bergson's theory of the image as a means to intuition is relevant, but the Futurists are probably the more direct influence. Marinetti called for a poetry that is "an entire freedom of images and analogies, expressed by disjointed words and without the connecting wires of syntax…. Poetry must be an uninterrupted sequence of new images" [Poetry & Drama, 1913]. He wished to express the dynamism of the technological age, and these fragmented images were intended to carry the reader to an intuition of the essence of dehumanized matter.

Unconcerned with technology, Mina Loy adapted the aggressive tone and the technical innovations of the Futurist painters and poets to the purpose of depicting consciousness. These adaptations account for her classification as a genuinely radical, hence still instructive, modernist. She used the Futurist collage structure (Bergson and Marinetti's series of disconnected images) and typographical fragmentation, a corollary of collage. In collage the sequential relation of images and words is diminished in favor of spatialization: a simultaneous rather than linear arrangement of parts resembling the abandonment of three-dimensionality in modern painting.

Mina Loy most successfully implements Futurist techniques in "The Costa San Giorgio" (1914), an evocation of the dynamism of Italian street life. As part of her metaphysics the poem implies that ideal selfhood would balance excessive refinement, here associated with the English tourists, with the unreflective vitality of the Italians. The poem also links the poetry of Mina Loy and William Carlos Williams. In "The Costa San Giorgio" she strives as he does in "Spring Strains" to turn the poem into the two-dimensional plane of a modernist canvas. Her poem addresses Williams' theme of the necessary "contact" between the soul of a people and the soil of their habitation:

We English make a tepid blot
On the messiness
Of the passionate Italian life-traffic

Throbbing the street up steep
Up  up  to the porta
culminating
In the stained fresco of the dragon-slayer

The hips of women sway
Among the crawling children they produce
And the church hits the barracks
Where
The greyness of marching men
Falls through the greyness of stone

Oranges half-rotten are sold at a reduction
Hoarsely advertised as broken heads
BROKEN HEADS  and the barber
Has an imitation mirror
And Mary preserve our mistresses from seeing us as we see ourselves
Shaving
ICE CREAM
Licking is larger than mouths
Boots than feet
Slip    Slap   and the string dragging
And the angle of the sun
Cuts the whole lot in half

And warms the folded hands
Of a consumptive
Left outside her chair is broken
And she wonders how we feel
For we walk very quickly
The noonday cannon
Having scattered the neighbour's pigeons

The smell of small cooking
From luckier houses
Is cruel to the maimed cat
Hiding
Among carpenter's shavings
From three boys
—One holding a bar—
Who nevertheless
Born of human parents
Cry when locked in the dark

Fluidic blots of sky
Shift among roofs
Between bandy legs
Jerk patches of street
Interrupted by clacking
Of all the green shutters
From which
Bits of bodies
Variously leaning
Mingle eyes with the commotion

For there is little to do
The false pillow-spreads
Hugely initialed
Already adjusted
On matrimonial beds
And the glint on the china virgin
Consummately dusted

Having been thrown
Anything or something
That might have contaminated intimacy
OUT
Onto the middle of the street

The heading Italian Pictures under which "The Costa San Giorgio" appears suggests the poem's painterly aspirations. Mina Loy's goal is not the superficially realistic reproduction of one scene at one moment, but the creation of the vibrant movement of the street and thereby of the energy of life. She has adopted the Futurist imperative "THAT UNIVERSAL DYNAMISM MUST BE RENDERED AS DYNAMIC SENSATION…."

To structure "The Costa San Giorgio" as a dynamic twodimensional canvas Mina Loy employs Futurist techniques such as overlapping planes, juxtaposition, signs, and fractured images. The transformation from narrative to canvas begins in the first line. Linear narrative yields to a spatial composition as the speaker and her English fellows become a "tepid blot" on the messy Italian landscape, an abstract element of form, color, and motion compositionally related to "Fluidic blots of sky," "green shutters," "Bits of bodies," and "eyes." Blots of paint signifying the sky destroys the illusion of atmospheric depth. Similarly, the sun at the end of stanza three is reduced to a geometric angle, a frequent sign on Futurist canvases for atmospheric light which provides dynamic thrust and, like the light of the Impressionists, shapes reality. In stanza two Cézanne's technique of passage, "the running together of planes otherwise separated in space," is employed in "falls through" to make one dimension of the greyness of war, men, church, and stones—the extensions and opposites of the women-and-children. In stanza six the verbs "shift" and "jerk" energize the atmosphere into moving shapes on the poem-canvas. Pictorial realism is also distorted by the exaggeration of visual and auditory fragments so that they dominate the wholes to which they belong. "BROKEN HEADS," "ICE CREAM," and "OUT" balloon above the poem; and "shutters," "Bits of bodies," and "eyes" protrude surrealistically. As the speaker recedes to a minor compositional element in the opening line, she merges with the chaotic vitality of the street. The Futurists explained this shift in perspective: "Painters have always shown persons and objects as if arranged in front of us. We shall place the spectator in the centre of the painting."

To depict the dynamism of the scene Mina Loy juxtaposes activity and stasis, just as a Futurist might juxtapose a sphere and cone to "give the impression of a dynamic force beside a static force." Stanza three, for example, explodes with movement and sound: the selling of oranges, shaving, licking ice cream, the slip-slapping of shoes. In contrast, stanza four contains an immobile invalid whose sole activity is mental: she "wonders."

Dynamism does not cease with the tension between movement and stasis. Colloquial speech enlivens language and evokes the inner rhythms of the participants. Introduced in "We English," it continues throughout the poem and is punctuated by irregular line length, capitalization, and internal spacing. These devices also convey the rhythms of the street, just as in "Parturition" they echo the mental and physical rhythms of a woman in labor. Small scale juxtapositions reflect the movement of the eye and make visual puns. In stanza three syntax lapses as the eye jumps from the "BROKEN HEADS" of the orange vendor to heads shaved by the barber, and the shaving cream of the latter becomes "ICE CREAM"; the licking of "ICE CREAM" and the wearing of over-sized shoes are joined as disproportions between need and means that suggest the Italians are oblivious to the required symmetries of refinement.

Verbs also create movement. The present participle dominates the poem and surely "anything" and "something"—the troublesome vitality tossed into the street—were selected for their relation to the participle. Verbs and verb forms are positioned for emphasis; and the juxtaposition of movement and stasis continues in the contrast of present tense verbs and participles to past participles. The latter depict the finished, the hopeless, the non-vital: the fresco is "stained"; the consumptive sits with "folded" hands and she has been "left" in a "broken" chair, like the "maimed" cat she is defenseless; the boys cry when "locked" in the dark; and inside quiet homes pillow spreads are "initialed" and "adjusted," the china virgin "dusted."

The collage fragmentation Mina Loy learned from the Futurists becomes more complex in the Love Songs, a group of poems whose innovative structuring of consciousness merits consideration with Guillaume Apollinaire's Zone (1912), Stein's Tender Buttons (1913), Eliot's Prufrock (1915) and The Waste Land (1922), Williams' Kora in Hell (1920), Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley (1920), and Moore's "Marriage" (1923). The Love Songs are too long to consider in their entirety but poem I illustrates the shape of the whole:

Spawn of Fantasies
Silting the appraisable
Pig Cupid his rosy snout
Rooting erotic garbage
"Once upon a time"
Pulls a weed white and star-topped
Among wild oats sewn in mucous-membrane

I would an eye in a Bengal light
Eternity in a sky-rocket
Constellations in an ocean
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva

These are suspect places
I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of Experience
Coloured glass

The juxtaposition of heterogeneous images forms a collage of biological, romantic, religious, and cosmological fragments, as well as past, present and future times, to depict the disintegration of an ordered, purposeful existence. Combined with these juxtapositions is a typographical breaking up of the poem that forecasts composition by field. The internal spaces reflect pauses of the intuition and leaps into the subconscious. The poem alludes to the Cupid and Psyche myth and the parable of the virgins (Matthew 25:1-13), and it borrows images from Bergson and Laforgue. As in "Parturition" the speaker merges with cosmic process; but in the dissipation of the skyrocket (Bergson's image of supra-consciousness, and a phallic symbol that complements the feminine ocean) to a trickle of saliva, the disillusioned speaker mocks the optimism of Bergson and the Futurists. The dissipation conveys the fall from ecstatic, orgasmic transcendence to a spatialized chaos where varieties of conscious and subconscious awareness are simultaneously present. The collage pattern is repeated in the overall structure of the thirty-four poems. Each poem is a kaleidoscopic reshifting of the fragments and colors of failed love. A vague narrative runs throughout and each poem is somewhat autonomous; however, poem I contains the entire narrative and subsequent poems, using an exaggerated self-reflexive imagery, merely complete the fragments introduced here.

Both "The Costa San Giorgio" and the Love Songs employ collage spatialization to step outside of time. In the former, abandonment of time progression involves an effort to experience the world in its rich immediacy. In the Love Songs, on the other hand, spatialization depicts a mental confusion that offers no escape into time and the healing processes of change and rational explanation. Seeking to transcend time in a Nirvana of romantic-sexual love, the I falls back not into time but into a negative space of unending torment. Poem XXXI images this condition as "Crucifixion / Wracked arms / Index extremities / In vacuum / To the unbroken fall." Thus the Love Songs fit the modern mold defined by Joseph Frank in "Spatial Form in Modern Literature." In disequilibrium with the cosmos, the modern, says Frank, escapes historical time through the creation of a non-naturalistic spatial composition that juxtaposes past and present to mythicize experience. Accordingly, in the Love Songs allusions to Cupid and Psyche, the fairy tale "'Once upon a time,"' and the Biblical virgins place this modern love story within the larger unchanging pattern of human experience wherein the self finds divinity through earthly love. Ironically, of course, the modern Psyche is unredeemed; the Love Songs are Mina Loy's flirtation with the modernism of despair associated with the early Eliot.

V

In Lunar Baedeker Mina Loy abandons radical fragmentation and collage in favor of series of vivid abstractconcrete images that unite intellect and intuition in a clearly crafted moment of vision. Short image-stanzas follow each other in a series that can be construed as a collage, even though a conventional syntax unites the images. Many of these poems praise the artist and, appropriately for this subject, consciousness is not depicted as a process but acts as form giver. The artist alone, in Mina Loy's metaphysics, possesses the vision to discover meaning in the flux of time. The tradition is Art for Art's Sake as it evolves from Gautier through Baudelaire, the Parnassians, and the fin de siècle. "Apology of Genius" (1922), a gloss of the tradition, equates the artist's form-giving genius to God's:

In the raw caverns of the Increate
We forge the dusk of Chaos
To that imperious jewelry of the Universe
–the Beautiful–

The same analogy informs "Brancusi's Golden Bird" (1922), a defense of abstract art and one of several poems on individual artists. Brancusi has penetrated the chaos of nature–of time–to fix an intuition of "the nucleus of flight":

The toy
become the aesthetic archetype

As if
some patient peasant God
had rubbed and rubbed
the Alpha and Omega
of Form
into a lump of metal

As Brancusi shaped in brass, so Mina Loy in the poems on art shapes and polishes language to achieve exquisite verbal sculptures. To a considerable extent these poems possess the economy and concreteness of the Imagist poem, except that Mina Loy remains too discursive to be an Imagist. Typically, an exotic vocabulary unites with sound to carve dazzling epigrammatic images. "Lunar Baedeker" epitomizes the technique. A satire of idealistic escapists, especially the Decadents, the poem creates a decor of Decadence using exotic words and images and lush patterns of sound. (The influence of Laforgue, evident in the irony, imagery, and logopoeia of other poems, is substantiated by this poem's borrowings from Laforgue's "Climat, Faune et Flore de la Lune.") In addition to the excessive opulence of word, image, and sound, the satire derives from the motif of death that is woven into the glittering lunar landscape. Each stanza is a meticulously constructed sound-unified image that is usually centered on a strategically located verb:

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia

To some somnambulists
of adolescent thighs
draped
in satirical draperies

Peris in livery
prepare
Lethe
for posthumous parvenues

Delirious Avenues
lit
with the chandelier souls
of infusoria
from Pharoah's tombstones

lead
to mercurial doomsdays
Odious oasis
in furrowed phosphorous——

The eye-white sky-light
white-light district
of lunar lusts

——Stellectric signs
"Wing shows on Starway"
"Zodiac carrousel"

Cyclones
of ecstatic dust
and ashes whirl

crusaders
from hallucinatory citadels
of shattered glass
into evacuate craters

A flock of dreams
browse on Necropolis

From the shores
of oval oceans
in the oxidised Orient

Onyx-eyed Odalisques
and ornithologists
observe
the flight
of Eros obsolete

And "Immortality"
mildews

in the museums of the moon

"nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
——
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes

VI

This satire of the dishonest artist who seeks through art to escape the responsibility of vision-in-time provides Mina Loy's critique of absolutes: they are death to the self. Even the legitimate transcendence of time offered by the beautiful forms of exemplary artists like Brancusi are tentative and temporary; they are meaningful orderings of life but not substitutes for it. The "Aphorisms" early reject absolutes—"THERE are no excrescences on the absolute, to which man may pin his faith"; and several poems are equally didactic. "The Black Virginity" (1918) satirizes religious absolutes, using priestly novitiates who have entombed their souls in the 2000-year-old Christian vision:

Baby Priests
On green sward
Yew-closed
Scuttle to sunbeams
Silk Beaver
Rhythm of redemption
Fluttering of Breviaries

Fluted black silk cloaks
Hung square from shoulders
Truncated juvenility
Uniform segregation
Union in severity
Modulation
Intimidation

Pride of misapprehended preparation
Ebony statues training for immobility
Anaemic jawed
Wise saw to one another

Similarly, "Human Cylinders" (1917) instructs us that to accept an absolute is to "Destroy the Universe/With a solution."

The importance for Mina Loy of this tension between doubt and certainty, between time and space, is reflected in the fact that she makes an awareness of it a formative experience for her fictional surrogate, the child Ova in Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose. Having been unjustly punished by her parents, Ova flees to the garden where she has an "illumination":

The high—skies
have come gently upon her
and all their
steadfast light is shining out of her
She is conscious
not through her body but through space

Because Ova is human her bliss is short-lived: a chicken egg breaks on the garden path, "a horrible / aborted contour / a yellow murder / in a viscous pool." Ova does not comprehend the broken egg, but she feels a "contraction" to the "uneasiness" of the world's processes. Henceforth, Ova and the mature narrator of Mina Loy's poems involve themselves in the Sisyphean struggle for clear vision. The long Ova poem depicts the growth of the child's consciousness, and the poems of 1931-1962 are devoted to the need for clear vision and to the flight of most individuals from this responsibility.

But while these later poems remain loyal to the original metaphysics—an assertion of human responsibility amidst cosmic chaos, they lack the structural innovations that distinguish the early poetry. Among the first to respond to the "crisis in consciousness" of the new century, Mina Loy lacked the discipline, or desire, to carry her innovations much beyond their culmination in Lunar Baedeker. Later poems do not break through to new means of conveying the I-eye's relation to existence; in fact, they abandon some early achievements. Rather than depicting the process of vision, the poem is usually a vignette of failed vision. Imagery is less vibrant, although sometimes possessed of a delicate loveliness. Diction is less vigorous, and sound interplays tend to be hackneyed. Abstraction and image separate without the vigorous alternation of earlier poems. Forceful satire gives way to a more reflective and discursive tone, the cynical wordly wisdom of an observer remarking the persistence of humanity's evasions.

However, the lessened vigor of the late poems should not obscure Mina Loy's significant contributions to the modernist sources that feed the present of American poetry. While her proto-existentialist theme parallels one strain of contemporary literature, her early experiments in depicting consciousness and her insistence on poetic honesty are probably her more important contributions to the poetic present. The connection she forges in her imagery between (female) sexuality and consciousness looks to Surrealist, confessional, and feminist poetry. Her use of collage, fragmentation, and free verse anticipates the composition by field proposed in Charles Olson's "Projective Verse"; and although she usually deifies the self, "The Costa San Giorgio" anticipates the Projectivist depiction of a world in flux with the I become part of the world's thingness. Most important, her use of language fulfills the poet's responsibility, as she defines it, to make the world a radioactive particle that penetrates and shatters the clichés of experience.