In a 1921 letter Ezra Pound, that entrepreneur of modernism, asked Marianne Moore, "P.S. Entre nooz, is there anyone in America besides you, Bill [W. C. Williams], and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?" [The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger L. Conover, 1982]. Both he and Eliot considered Loy "the most radical of the radical set whose work began appearing" in avant-garde literary magazines of the period. In 1926 Yvor Winters, writing in The Dial, asked, "Who will poets of my generation look back to as the ablest master of the Experimental Generation?" His answer: William Carlos Williams and Mina Loy. Winters repeated this assessment in a 1930 article, and again in 1967. Writing to Loy in 1931, Kay Boyle characterized her work as "glorious, sharp, miraculous," and went on to "wonder if you know how terribly much your writing matters to us." In 1944 Kenneth Rexroth, comparing Loy's work with that of Marianne Moore, found "her material … self-evidently more important … and treated with great earnestness …" and the poetry "tough, forthright, very witty, atypical, antirhetorical, devoid of chi-chi." As Denise Levertov noted in 1958, Loy's poems contain "something of great value that had been needed and mislaid…. The value is—indivis ibly—technical and moral."

That Loy's poems have been "mislaid," there can be no doubt. Despite the esteem of illustrious colleagues and Winters's conviction that she was one of "the two living poets who have the most … to offer the younger gener ation of American writers," her book, Lunar Baedeker (published by Contact Press in 1923), was not reprinted until 1958, her individual poems were rarely anthologized, and Loy's place in the development of modernism and feminism nearly forgotten. Thus that influence on future generations Winters predicted for her work was severely curtailed. Loy has indeed been so thoroughly mislaid, that nothing of hers was included in the recent massive and otherwise excellent Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Nevertheless, a poet whose work was so radical in form deserves consideration in the history of modernism. And a poet whose work was, and in my opinion remains, so radical in content deserves a place in the history of feminist thought.

If Loy—and how many others?—could disappear so completely from the history of this century's creative endeavor, then the history we know remains subtly falsified, not yet true, not yet our own. Loy's career, and the circumstances of her life as she struggled to live both as an artist and as a woman, can teach us much about our own circumstances as writers, painters, scholars, and women. "Those who do not remember their history," as Santayana remarked, and as has been intoned so often since, "are doomed to repeat it." I would like, therefore, to contribute to the project of making his/story also her/story, our story, a glimpse of some of the influences that shaped Loy as a person and as an artist, and how these contributed both to the nature of her work and to its having been mislaid.

Born Mina Gertrude Lowy in 1882 to a fairly prosperous London family, Loy's mother was English, her father the son of immigrant Hungarian Jews. Her unpublished autobiographical writings show her to have been a thoughtful, willful, and highly imaginative child, a rebel from the outset, embroiled early in a war against her parents' restrictive and Victorian attitudes. The ideas she expressed as a child elicited consternation; "the insane logic of my infant mind," she recalled, "… made chaos of their cosmos." Gifted both as a writer and a painter, young Mina spent much of her time reading, drawing, and writing, pursuits her very conventional parents found alarming in a girl. At the birth of a sister, Loy's mother, "already convinced [Mina's] unladylike urge toward occupation constituted a social menace … would lock the nursery door against [her] 'coming near her' …," shutting Mina out to peer at the door "from the limitless hell of a mishandled childhood…." Home was unbearable, outside contact severely restricted. She and her sisters were forbidden "to … set foot outside the house," and Loy recalls her father pacing before his daughters, "dropping in his heat, watch words from his restricted ideation to be our safeguard through the dangerous day." Girls who went about freely "became 'bad women.'" With characteristic brio, Loy answered back, thoroughly scandalizing her father. On the contrary, she said, it was "Our present outrageous social system [that made] the poor wretched prostitute inevitable." Loy fought not only these restrictions, but also those imposed on her intellectual and artistic development, waging an intense campaign to convince her parents to send her and her sisters to a more progressive school. As she noted,

As sometimes neglected illness will put an end to itself, at intervals the sheer desperation of my being alive abated, clearing the way for spells of apparently rootless courage; when they occurred I became indiscriminately militant on behalf of myself or my sisters who seemed quite contented as they were.

At home, Loy's reading was censored, bookcases locked against her, and her room frequently searched by her mother, who destroyed the drawings and writings she found there. It is not surprising that Mina Lowy began early on to plan her escape from her family, from London, and from the way of life she knew there.

But how was she to achieve her freedom? Two ways presented themselves: the first traditional (marriage), and the second radically unconventional (art). After protracted struggle, Mina Lowy persuaded her parents to allow her to study art, and in 1900 she left London for Munich and then Paris, putting England and the nineteenth century firmly behind her. In 1903 she changed her name from Lowy to Loy, "forging her own passport to Bohemia," and by 1906 had achieved recognition and critical acclaim as an avant-garde painter, exhibiting work in the Salon d'Automn show at which Fauvism was born. Her friendships with Leo and Gertrude Stein date from this period, and it was through them that she met Apollinaire, Picasso, and Rousseau. Having chosen art as an escape route, Loy clinched her independence from her family by marriage to British painter Stephan Haweis in 1903.

In 1906 she and Haweis left Paris for Florence, where she spent the next ten years. There she became involved with a number of painters and writers, among them Futurists F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini. Although she disavowed the movement less than a year after aligning herself with it, Futurism was to have a profound influence on her work. While she continued her activities as a painter and a designer, from 1914 to 1925 Loy produced a quantity of important poems, and it was her contact with Futurism and Futurists that encouraged this new creative focus. Marinetti "is one of the most satisfying personalities I ever came in contact with," she wrote to her friend Mabel Luhan in 1914, and, later in the year, "I am indebted to [him] for twenty years added to my life from mere contact with his exuberant vitality."

The Futurist call, first articulated by Marinetti in his 1909 "Futurist Manifesto," "was for revolution—for a complete break with the past." "Obsess[ed] with the machine, with speed, dynamism and energy" it was the first movement "to have grasped … that our age, the age of big industry, of the large proletarian city and of intense and tumultuous life, … was in need of new forms of art, philosophy, behaviour and language." Marinetti exhorted poets "to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness." "Essential elements of … poetry" were to be "courage, audacity, and revolt." Literature of the past, he declared, had exalted "a pensive immobility, ecstasy and sleep. We intend to exalt aggressive action, a feverish insomnia, the racer's stride, the mortal leap, the punch and the slap," and he proposed a new aesthetic: "the beauty of speed." "A roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace."

"Love of danger," "energy and fearlessness," "courage, audacity and revolt," "aggressive action": these attributes had been Loy's from birth. Small wonder that she was attracted to Futurism. However, like so many women who have bitten eagerly into the alluring apple of revolution, Loy was immediately to discover the worm inside. The ninth tenet of Marinetti's 1909 Manifesto reads: "We will glorify war—the world's only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn of woman." It was not, however, Futurism's sexism but its militarism, culminating in its support of Fascism, with which Loy initially took issue. "I am in the throes of conversion to Futurism," she wrote Mabel Luhan in February, 1914: "… But I shall never convince myself—there is no hope in any system that 'combats le mal avec le mal'—(can't help it) and that is really Marinetti's philosophy." Sexism was, however, an equally alienating factor. As did many women in revolutionary movements before and after her, Loy discovered that the new freedoms advocated either were not applied at all or would be applied differently to women. Marinetti's formulation makes it clear that "woman" is other; that the category signified by woman is not included in the category designated "Futurist." As a woman, therefore, Loy must remain outside the circle. "I am so interested," she wrote Luhan in October, 1914, "to find I am a sort of pseudo Futurist."

Although rejected by and herself rejecting much of the Futurist social program, Loy nevertheless made selective use of Futurist literary techniques. Aware that the use of new, and newly rapid, means of communication and transportation in the early part of the century was altering the experience of space and time, giving those experiencing the change "the sense of being everywhere at once," Futurism promoted techniques of simultaneity, "spatial and temporal distortions" that "collapsefd] present and past," to reflect contemporary experience truthfully. "The simultaneousness of states of mind in the work of art," said Boccioni in his 1912 manifesto, "that is the intoxicating aim of our art." "In this context," notes Marjorie Perloff, "it is not surprising that simultaneity became a central theme as well as a formal and structured principle." Collage, which, by juxtaposing disparate elements, collapsed conventional contexts of meaning, was first suggested by Apollinaire and first executed by Futurist painter Severini in 1912. "The single most revolutionary formal innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century;" in collage, "each cited element breaks the continuity or linearity of the discourse and leads necessarily to a double reading; that of the fragment in relation to its text of origin; that of the same fragment as incorporated into a new whole."

Futurism called for other radical changes in written language as well. "How," Marinetti asked, "can traditional discourse with its complete sentences … convey this new language of telephones, phonographs, airplanes, the cinema, the great newspaper …? The 'old syntax' must be abolished," likewise, the adverb, which in Marinetti's words, "preserves the tedious unity of tone within a phrase," and "the foolish pauses made by commas and periods" which "suppress the continuity of a living style." Loy's syntax and punctuation were clearly affected by Marinetti's ideas. Her poems use typically Futurist orthographic elements, a mix of upper and lower case words and phrases, for example, and minimal punctuation, as well as concise, often brutally vivid images, disjunction, and variable line length and placement. Both Loy's style and subject matter demonstrate her concurrence with Marinetti's declaration that "Poetry demands violence and energy … a kind of 'fever' in which the life of the modern city merges with the exotic Other … the offbeat, the erotic, the populist." To be truly in accord with modern life, poetry, he said, must include the free and open expression of sexual energy and appetite.

In "Love Songs to Joannes" (written between 1915 and 1917, preceding Eliot's The Waste Land by at least four years) Loy was among the first, along with Apollinaire and Cendrars, to adapt collage to literature. Characteristically undetered by her status as "pseudo Futurist," and heedless of what the phrase, "scorn of woman," implied—namely that Futurist ideas were for men, not for women, to use—Loy took seriously this call for free and open expression of sexual energy and appetite. Her marriage's disintegration during these years and her emotional and sexual involvement with Futurists—two months with Marinetti, two years with Giovanni Papini—powerfully influenced her poetry's subject matter, and as powerfully provided the impetus for its expression. "Love Songs to Joannes," Loy's exploration of her relationship with Papini, is radical not only in form but in its attack on romantic love and in its depiction of sexuality. She was made to suffer, however, for her Futurist-female frankness.

In 1915, when poems 1 through 4 were published in New York's avant-garde Others, as Alfred Kreymbourg, its editor, recalled:

Detractors shuddered at … Loy's subject matter and derided her elimination of punctuation marks and the audacious spacing of her lines…. such sophistry, clinical frankness, sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax and punctuation horrified our gentry and drove our critics into furious despair. The nudity of emotion and thought … roused the worst disturbance, and the utter nonchalance in revealing the secrets of sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd…. Had a man written these poems, the town might have viewed them with comparative comfort.

Her husband, from whom she had separated, warned her she was "losing [her] good name writing as [she] did," as she told Carl Van Vechten, and threatened her custody of their children. Even Van Vechten, a longtime friend acting as her literary agent, drew back, asking that she write "something without a sexual undercurrent." Loy replied, "I know nothing but life—and that is generally reducible to sex!" "What I feel now are feminist politics." [According to Virginia M. Kouidis, in Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet, 1980]. The writing that resulted, however, was both Futurist and feminist, "distinctively feminine in its exploration of female oppression," as well as "Futurist inspired in its aggressive assertion of selfhood and in its structural experiment."

Never one to submit meekly to limitation or rejection, and stimulated by her quarrel with the Futurists, in 1914 Loy wrote her own "Feminist Manifesto," although, unlike Marinetti's, it remained unpublished until 1982. "The Feminist Movement as instituted at present," she declared, "is INADEQUATE…. The lies of centuries have got to be discarded….":

There is no half-measure, no scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition. Nothing short of Absolute Demolition will bring about reform. Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vicecrusades and uniform education…. Professional and commercial careers are opening up for you. Is that all you want?

"Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not," she exhorted. "Seek within yourselves to find out what you are. As conditions are at present constituted you have the choice between Parasitism, Prostitution, or Negation." "As protection against the manmade bogey of virtue," Loy advocated "unconditional surgical destruction of virginity" finally, and what a familiar ring this has in this boomtime of books on co-dependency: "Woman must destroy in herself the desire to be loved…. Honor, grief, sentimentality, pride, and consequent jealousy must be detached from sex."

Long concerned with women's issues, between 1914 and 1923 Loy wrote a number of poems analyzing and often satirizing the situation of women in and outside marriage. "Virgins Plus Curtains Minus Dots" gives voice to young women confined inside houses who can only '"Bore curtains with eyes'" (1:4):

Somebody who was never a virgin
Has bolted the door
Put curtains at our windows
See the men pass
They     are going somewhere
(1:43-47)

These "virgins," however, are not going anywhere, for they have no dowries.

In "The Effectual Marriage" Loy tackled the inequalities between men and women. The poem relates "the insipid narrative" of Gina and Miovanni, a couple who "In the evening [look] out of their two windows":

Miovanni out of his library window
Gina from the kitchen window
From among his pots and pans
Where he so kindly kept her
Where she so wisely busied herself
(1:11-16)

The assignment of rooms, the choice of pronouns and adverbs, tell the story behind the story. As a wife, Gina is all that a man might require:

Miovanni    Gina called
Would it be fitting for you to tell
The time for supper
Pooh    said Miovanni    I am
Outside time and space
Patience    said Gina    is an attribute
And she learned at any hour to offer
The dish    appropriately delectable
(1:42-49)

From her place in the kitchen Gina "suppose[s] that peeping" into the library "While Miovanni thought alone in the dark,"

While "Virgins Plus Curtains" allowed Loy to examine and satirize social restrictions placed on young women without dowries, and "The Effectual Marriage" allowed her a cool ironic look at marriage, a number of other poems provided her with a vehicle in which to present her case against the Futurists. In "Giovanni Franchi," for example, she creates a devastating portrait of Giovanni Papini, Marinetti's chief propagandist, and her "friendly enemy," as she called him. "His adolescence was all there was of him / Whatever was left was rather awkward" (11:11-12). In a scene that trenchantly foresees Fascist rallies to come, we see Franchi (Papini) "scuttl[ing] winsomely" to distribute pro-war leaflets.

His acolytian sincerity
The sensitive down among the freckles
Fell in with the patriotic souls of    flags
Red white and green flags fillipping piazzas
When the "National Idea" arrived on the Milan Express
(1:48-52)

Futurist misogyny is also targeted. Franchi, the acolyte devoted to Bapini (Marinetti), listens

at the elder's lips
That taught him of earthquakes and
of women—… And what he told
Giovanni Franchi
About these pernicious persons
was so extremely good for him
It entirely spoilt his first love-affair
To such an extent    it never came off
(1:100-13)

Loy's "Parturition," written in 1914, to my knowledge the first poem to depict the process of childbirth from the laboring woman's point of view, "is significant," too, as Virginia Kouidis notes, "because it details an area of femaleness rarely thought suitable for literature." Although Roger Conover, editor of The Last Lunar Baedeker, the recent, and indispensable collection of Loy's work, placed the poem among Loy's satires, the poem's satiric component is minor. Remarkable in its powerful enactment of labor, the poem combines the physical process with the consciousness of the woman giving birth, uniting her physical circumstances and sensations with her "spiritual and intellectual life." "In giving birth to the child, she gives birth to herself."

I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction
The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape

On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pin-point nucleus of being
(1:1-10)

Although the narrator is gripped by biological forces, she is far from being eclipsed by them; her language—crisp, spare, latinate—signals a mind that stands beyond the activities of her body, a self both highly conscious and strong.

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal
(1:24-26)

Momentarily, the narrator becomes aware of "a fashionable portrait-painter / running up-stairs to a woman's apartment" (Loy's husband was himself a painter), but the implied betrayal is secondary to the powerful process of which she is a part.

"Incidentally with the exhaustion of control," she reaches "the summit and gradually subside[s] into anticipation of / Repose / Which never comes / For another mountain is growing up / Which goaded by the unavoidable / I must traverse / Traversing myself (1:42-50) While her body struggles, her sense of self remains detached, intact, even enhanced.

Between contractions, the narrator reflects on her situation in the light of biological theory: "I should have been emptied of life / Giving life / For consciousness in crises races / Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes" (1:69-72). But the "stir of incipient life" does not reduce but expand the narrator's sense of self, "Precipitating into [her], / The contents of the universe" (1:96-98). "I am absorbed / Into / The was-is-ever-shall-be / Of cosmic reproductivity" (1:104-07). Through conscious participation in giving birth, she has learned much, even, as the line break suggests, become "knowing" itself:

And Loy ends the poem with a tribute to all women who participate in bringing human life into the world: "Each woman-of-the-people / Tiptoeing 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" (1:125-31).

"Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not. Seek within yourself to find out what you are," Loy had declared in her Feminist Manifesto. She took her own exhortation seriously: refusing to accept others' definitions, she created a body of work that defined herself and her situation as woman and artist on her own terms. Acutely aware of the connection between her own situation and that of all women, of the connection between the personal and the political, Loy chose daily life, viewed from her independent and feminist perspective, as her subject. In doing so, she pioneered in the exploration of the female self. "Intensely cerebral," as Yvor Winters noted,

her work ordinarily presents [a] broken, unemotional, and witty observation of undeniable facts…. she has written seven or eight of the most brilliant and unshakably solid satirical poems of our time, and at least two non-satirical pieces that possess for me a beauty that is unspeakably moving and profound.

"The essence of her style is its directness in which she is exceeded by no one," as William Carlos Williams remarked. It was to describe her poetry that Pound coined the word logopoeia, "poetry … akin to nothing but language, … a dance of the intelligence among words and ideas and modifications of ideas and characters." Loy deploys language brilliant and subtle, graphic and cerebral, which by its cerebrality and wit, by its linguistic play, refutes strictures patriarchal culture forces on women, to be voiceless vessels, obedient domestics, adoring groupies marginal to male activities. A buccaneer of diction, Loy appropriated for herself and for all women the vocabulary until then used only by classically educated men.

"The major reasons for her obscurity today," as Roger Conover observes in his introduction to Loy's collected works, "are self-imposed, the result of her own intransigence and intrepidness." Yet it is precisely these qualities that give her work its value. In her writings, she spoke as no woman in history had hitherto dared to speak, and of things long considered taboo. "Significantly," Virginia Kouidis remarks, "the gradual recovery of [Loy's] poetry began with the emergence of the post-modern poets of the 1950's and '60's." And, citing Jerome Rothenberg, she notes that

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 and poetic structure: what is seen, said and made." Rothenberg joins the few … who have discovered in Mina Loy's oeuvre … a body of poetry important to an understanding of the modernist vortex. Her poetry aligns itself with that of Stevens-Pound-Williams to form a "counter-poetics" that by generating postmodern poetry is emerging as the most vital force in 20th-century American poetry [Boundary 27, No. 3, 1980].