Mina Loy

Mina Loy Poems

A silver Lucifer
serves
cocaine in cornucopia
...

Face of the skies
preside
over our wonder.
...

The present implies presence
thus
unauthorized by the present
these letters are left authorless --
...

I.

Spawn of Fantasies
Silting the appraisable
...

Curie
of the laboratory
of vocabulary
...

The past has come apart
events are vagueing
the future is a seedless pod
the present pain.
...

Ostracized as we are with God
The watchers of the civilized wastes
reverse their signals on our track
...

This misalliance
follows the custom
for female children
To adhere to maternal practices
...

Mina Loy Biography

Mina Loy born Mina Gertrude Lowy (December 27, 1882 – September 25, 1966) was an artist, poet, playwright, novelist, Futurist, actress, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps and bohemian extraordinaire. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia and Yvor Winters, among others. Loy's extremely original poems started to frequent smaller magazines such as Rogue, attracting the attention of the New York avant-garde. Once her work started to gain momentum, she began to publish poems and articles in more significant New York publications. In 1914, "Aphorisms on Futurism" was published in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work. "Parturition", her graphic depiction of childbirth, was printed in Trend. In July 1915, Loy began to write what would be later known as "Songs to Joannes" [1]"(originally "Love songs"), a collection of modernist, avant-garde love poetry about her disenchantment with Giovanni Papini, another founding Futurist with whom Loy had been in a romantic relationship with in Florence. First readers of "Songs to Joannes" were shocked by Loy's forward expressions of human sexuality, particularly the grotesque and uncensored depictions of erotic desire and bodily functions. However, beyond the surface, Loy exposed the inequities and hypocrisies of male dominated society, and the resulting damage suffered by women physically and emotionally. She also unleashed criticism against supposedly superior theories held by fellows artists.)

The Best Poem Of Mina Loy

Lunar Baedeker

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 oxidized 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----

Mina Loy Comments

Kirsten Tona 05 January 2014

What do you think she meant by the watchers of the civilized wastes? Did she mean those without genius who pay attention to the works of those with?

1 1 Reply
Steve Vigo 04 February 2010

Is 'The Dead' written about Arthur Cravan? It seems so.

1 0 Reply

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