The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy

"A flock of dreams,Browse on Necropolis". Mina Loy, poet, painter, designer of clothes and lampshades,and glass ware and the friend of many of the artists and writers of the early and late modernist art movement [1880 to 1950] has been described as a Futurist,[die in the past live in the future...from her Manifesto] a Dadaist and even a Surrealist and most importantly as a Feminist.Her radical behavior shone out at the center of several avant-garde circles. While she aligned herself with the visual arts it was her writing that aroused the public's attention. When you recall those women writers who experimented, with modernism and transgressed sexual limits, names like Gertrude Stein, Leonora Carrington, Unica Zurn, Djuna Barnes,Florine Stettheimer and Anais Nin come to mind. But this list leaves out one of the most radical figures of that literary world, a woman whose talent and life have been neglected for 80 years.The extravagantly beautiful, poet painter Mina Loy. Mina Loy was forgotten,Kenneth Rexroth thought because her poems were unlike any other woman poet. They defied the demands of the male canon and they defied any prevalent category of the times,trying to annex her style. Subordinating lyricism to wit, irony and a radical sense of justice she forced readers to think whether they liked it or not. She used very little punctuation if any and made up her own words and grammar. Now, when poetry reflects concerns with sexual difference and gender as well as the relations between language and meaning and perception of that language as a part of the reactionary ideology of the time, she seems decades ahead of her times. With the publishing of The Lost Lunar Baedeker,[first published in 1923 then forgotten] her first book of poems, we can finally fill in a major gap in the development and contributions woman poets and artists made to the move towards the modernist position and to inspire much of the writing of the not yet arrived post modernism. One wonders whether Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath read her work. Mina Loys prose and poems see art,love,sex,and childbirth [she had four children] from the perspective of the new woman that she represented. In some ways Mina Loy put poems together as she might assemble one of her found art constructions. She loved reflective materials of all kinds. In them she saw an animate presence at play in matter. "all the virgin eyes in the world are made of glass. they alone have the effrontery to stare thru the human soul seeing nothing". Her vision of fulfilment is also suggested in the many poetic strategies and images assembled from fragments: a method of construction that gave body to the developing universal modern consciousness while carrying private meanings at once expressing a new vision of the erotic, spiritual, aesthetic, and critical paradigms in a creative world dominated by men. But as her title Lunar Baedeker suggests[a Baedeker is a travel guide] Mina Loy saw herself as explorer, a translator, of the imagination, a travel guide to the Universe of the human emotional network. This book of poems and prose,documents in verse her voyages of many kinds both geographical and aesthetic and her tumultuous relationships. Tracing her development from a repressive English childhood then a flight to Paris to study art to Italy and a passionate affair with the Futurist Marinitti which inspired her Futurist Manifesto. Loy, a writer known for her frank embrace of female sexuality and feminist politics, joined the futurist movement in 1913, but she quickly encountered conflict regarding the movement's perception of women. Her manifesto addresses those conflicts within a context of support for the movement's forward-looking vision. Loy sees the female body as a site of resistance, and advocates affirmation and growth rather than destruction. She gravitated towards New York and the days of dada and she had a close relationship with Duchamp. Her husband at the time Arthur Cravan, needed to travel to Mexico to escape the draft and a spur of the moment decision to sail to Argentina led to his disappearance lost at sea. Mina searched the hospitals and Asylums up and down the South American continent. "Craven colossal absentee ...Seared by the flames of sound the widowed urn holds impotently your murdered laughter Husband how secretly you cuckold me with death' and Loy was shattered. She returned to New York where she spent the rest of her life. Her creative transits followed the celestial maps in which she sort inspiration. She spent much of her time working on her autobiography and criticising the values of art for art sake. Writing a feminist Manifesto, anticipating the Surrealists fascinations with objects trouves Mina gave her lowly cast off discoveries new life in the form of lamps and collages and constructions. Mina Loys life is also a story of a souls progress. Mina speaks to us now in the era of the post modern because of the multiplicity of paths she explored and did not try to produce a unified body of work. Mina Loy remained a poets poet until the 1970s when she was rediscovered within the context of feminist reading. Her life was preoccupied with an enduring project: to become Modern. To stay that way and live with the reactions of her contemporary creative peer group. Minas life resonates with the lives of many modern women as does Plath and Sexton who while engaging in illuminated the position of oppressed woman in the creative field did so without the same experimental syntax of Loy. So what happened to Loy?.Her work went out of fashion in the light of poetry of social content. And she was out of print and much of her work remains unpublished and in manuscript form. She had children to raise and she had to make some kind of money.She took on many ventures but was always poor. Loy tends to be accepted or avoided. This is a absolutely unique poet and prose writer. Her manifestos are as relevant today as when she wrote them. There is no version of the 20th Century canon that includes Mina Loys original work. No body considers her decent,she is contrary she is antimetric. "A silver Lucifer serves cocaine in cornucopia to some somnambulists of adolescent thigh draped in satirical draperies". Mina Loy cared little about being accepted. She forces us to take sides. She is not an academic poet but an intellectual one. One thing I cannot present is the eccentric way Mina arranges the lines of her poems. With extensive notes on the poems and many mysterious aspects explained if that is possible, the reader of this book will find their life and thought confronted by a rare insight into the perilous life of Mina Loy.The reality is that the more closely the history of modern art is examined, the more evident it becomes that women like Mina Loy were its primary creators.

I first read portions of this poetry collection in grad school, but I’ve been drawn to it ever since. Loy wrote primarily in the first half of the 20th century, and while some of her work might seem a bit hokey by today’s standards, her imagery is magical. Her metaphors are radioactive. Something about my brain just syncs perfectly with her brain—I’ve written multiple flash fiction stories using images from her poems as inspiration. So I couldn’t help reading it again—I’m drawn to it. If there’s one downside to Mina Loy, it’s that her particular brand of feminism irrevocably links womanhood with motherhood. Nevertheless, she was a remarkable woman and poet.Please note that this review was originally published on my blog.

The poems just aren't that good. I can't agree that she's an overlooked genius. Everything I've read so far has been intriguing at best, but not as good as I'd hoped.

These are poems that one would think so far in the past as to be out-dated -- but they are far beyond the most contemporary poems being written today. They are edgy, innovative, clever, bright, and poetically inspired. They are in many ways the opposite of the kind of poems now being written by Mary Oliver and other "popular poets" -- but Loy is a poet who should be brought back to the forefront for those wanting something wildly original and creatively distinctive.

Nicely assembled, good works.

Not always an easy poet to read but one even harder to ignore. There is something exuberant, grim, quirky, delighted in these poems from one of the most interesting figures to come out of the Moderns. Really lovely, all in all.

I am lucky to have this book.

This book was hard to find. It's one of my favorite collection of poems so I was heart-broken when a thief stole a box of my books. So glad to find it on Amazon. It was in perfect condition. =)

Excellent

great

重要な作品に激しく書き込みがあった。中身をよくチェックしてから売りに出してほしい。