Mina Loy (1882–1966)
Autor/a de The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy
Sobre l'autor
Crèdit de la imatge: poets.org
Obres de Mina Loy
“Love Songs” 1 exemplars
Loy, Mina Archive 1 exemplars
“Songs to Joannes” 1 exemplars
“The Sacred Prostitute” 1 exemplars
Lunar Baedecker 1 exemplars
Obres associades
American Poetry: The Twentieth Century, Volume One: Henry Adams to Dorothy Parker (2000) — Col·laborador — 438 exemplars
Masquerade: Queer Poetry in America to the End of World War II (2004) — Col·laborador — 19 exemplars
Contact collection of contemporary writers — Col·laborador — 1 exemplars
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Altres noms
- Löwry, Mina Gertrude (birth name)
- Data de naixement
- 1882-12-27
- Data de defunció
- 1966-09-25
- Lloc d'enterrament
- Aspen, Colorado, USA
- Gènere
- female
- Nacionalitat
- USA
UK (birth) - Lloc de naixement
- London, England, UK
- Lloc de defunció
- Aspen, Colorado, USA
- Llocs de residència
- New, York, New York, USA
Paris, France
Munich, Germany
Florence, Italy
Mexico City, Mexico - Educació
- Académie Colarossi, France
- Professions
- artist
poet
playwright
novelist
designer
Membres
Ressenyes
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 19
- També de
- 9
- Membres
- 576
- Popularitat
- #43,502
- Valoració
- 4.0
- Ressenyes
- 5
- ISBN
- 24
- Llengües
- 5
- Preferit
- 11
I should preface this section by saying that I am a huge admirer of Mina Loy's poetry; in fact, I think she is one of the finest modernist female poets, deservedly in the company of figures like Djuna Barnes, H.D., and Gertrude Stein. The Last Lunar Baedeker may well be the best collection of modernist poetry ever, surpassing even William Carlos Williams's Spring and All or Eliot's The Waste Land. (I don't include Eliot's Four Quartets given its publication date is after the Second World War, and thus after the modernist period proper.)
Who else can write such terse verses like these, packed with metaphysical inquiries, ruminations on gender, philosophy, truth, and subjectivity? All of the female modernist writers I mentioned above—Barnes, H.D., and Stein—were also equally proficient and talented in prose, especially narrative prose. Barnes's Nightwood might in all reality be the best example of the modernist novel in English; H.D.'s HERmione (link to my Goodreads review) is one of the finest examples of the female Künstlerroman, not to mention a fascinating roman-à-clef that shows the egotistical influence Ezra Pound had on her life and her work; and, of course, Stein's Three Women and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and many other pieces that mingle poetics with prose, from prose poems to libretti, from novels to antinovels.
Insel is Loy's only novel, and it was never published during her lifetime. Unlike the compact, concise, and dagger-sharp precision found in all her verse, Insel lacks these qualities which make Loy's presence among the modernists, surrealists, Dadaists, cubists, and other bohemian art groups in the interwar period such a crucial presence. And Loy is indeed seminal to this period, both as a poet and as a curatorial presence to artistic figures as pivotal as Giacometti, Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray, and many others.
While there are moments of interesting scenes in cafés and clubs that bring to life the artistic world in Europe—and here, we are in an unnamed city in Germany—as well as tragicomical portraits of the surrealist painter Insel himself, Loy's prose meanders and is never sure of itself. At times, Loy is intent on relaying a tête-à-tête between the painter and the narrator, one Mrs. Jones, herself an artist (although very much ashamed of her output alongside more successful figures like Insel); at other times, Loy launches in philosophical comments about the meaning of art or the nature of place insofar as it informs subjectivity; still, in other sections, the growing camaraderie between Insel and Mrs. Jones results in an intriguing character sketch of what it might have been like to be a starving artist during this specific period in history.
But these sections have no flow to them—and, if you look at my favorite book shelf here, you'll see I actually prefer books without structure—and this is to Insel's detriment. Oddly enough, too, there are only a few passages where Loy's prose borders on poetic rumination: so this doesn't feel like "a poet's novel" (much as I hate to use that hackneyed phrase), but rather a poet's attempt to write narrative prose. And there are moments that succeed in doing just this, but far more that fail to cause Insel to be a complete fiction, standing on its own two feet. Rather, its importance to us now is as a social and historical document, which is something I consider in some depth below.
II.
Now, I should preface this section by saying how much I admire presses like Melville House who have just published Loy's Insel as part of their Neversink series. Without presses like Melville House, Dalkey Archive, New Directions, Archipelago, and NYRB, to name but a few, many books would never see the light of day, languishing under layers of dust in an archive somewhere with no readership to savor the succor many of these works afford. So Melville House should indeed be commended for publishing Insel, along with the "Visitation" fragment—which has never before seen the light of day—added in their volume as an appendix.
With that said, because as I stated above that Insel is a social and historical document—and that its import lies there, rather than its flawed attempt as a fictional experiment—I can't help but feel that the Melville House edition of Insel is one that falls flat of the requirements such a document necessitates. Sarah Hayden even addresses this in her introduction: Although Harding is speaking solely about her notes to the "Visitation" fragment, one can well imagine that her notes to Insel itself have also been excised due to these monolithic "exigencies." A social and historical document requires annotations throughout, not just an introductory or prefatory section, in order for readers to continually situate the text within its specific historical, social, and aesthetic contexts. For example, while many of the non-English terms—mostly German—are indeed translated at the end in yet another appendix, most of these annotations are Loy's own. Since Insel does not function solely in terms of fiction, as I have said repeatedly, it requires a contextualization and grounding for which Melville House's "exigencies" do not allow—and, sadly, the dearth of such materials can cause the text to be further isolated from a contemporary reader's experience of the bohemian art world it dramatizes.
I know that many readers have issues with academic presses, largely due to the costs of their products; however, I think that the only proper way to do Insel justice is to have the excised notes (and whatever other materials Hayden possessed and which were not placed on Melville House's website, which they have done in the case of Hayden's as far as "Visitation" goes). It is only with recourse to them that the world in Insel can come to life. Would an academic press have done a better job with the text? While I can't answer that question, I can almost assuredly say that they probably would have.
When reading fiction, minimal notes are always best so as to not detract from readers' experiences of the text. (I recall, for instance, a friend's experience reading several of Woolf's novels in the Harcourt editions, failing to realize there were notes toward the back as Harcourt chose not to "blemish" the main text with any indication—superscript, asterisk, or otherwise—that there were annotations.) But Insel is not fiction to be enjoyed: its whole raison d'être should and must be as a social and historical document: one requiring the laborious and sometimes cumbersome footnotes and annotations of academic work. Only then can this text be properly placed within its context; as it stands now, in this edition, the context is lost, thus making Loy's only flawed (failed?) attempt at fiction all the more glaringly futile when taken solely on its own terms.… (més)