by Mina Loy
It seems just to give ML the last word in this particular chapter of her literary struggles on the hom(m)e front:
“Now dear Carlo—If you like you can say that Marinetti influenced me—merely by waking me up—I am in no way considered a Futurist by futurists—& as for Papini he has in no way influenced——my work!! so don’t say a word about it—he’s very passatist—really” (ML to CVV, 1914; CVVP).
II. Songs to Joannes (1917)
15. SONGS TO JOANNES. By early 1917 ML had completed this sequence. She had drafted most of it by August 1915, and made frequent references to the work-in-progress in letters she wrote to CVV that year. Initially, she expressed hesitation about the work (“… no interest to the public … for your eyes only”) and concern about circulating it at all: “I feel my family on top of me—they want to read some of my pretty poems!.… one friend … has dubbed my work pure pornography—”. When SH warned her that she was ruining her reputation by writing as she did, she was annoyed and discouraged. But as the year and sequence matured, it was clear that the poem had introjected itself deeply within her psyche: “If this book of mine is no good it settles me—I am the book and I have that esoteric sensation of creating!” By the time she had completed the project, she could hardly contain her eagerness to make it public: “I send herewith—the second part of Songs to Joannes—the best since Sappho—they are interesting.… If you wanted me to be a happy woman for five minutes or more, you would get [them] published.… My book is wonderful—it frightens me.”
In July 1915, the first four sections of what was eventually to become a thirty-four-song cycle appeared under the title “Love Songs” in the inaugural issue of Others: A Magazine of the New Verse (1:1, July 1915, pp. 6–8). The scandal created by the debut of Others quickly earned the magazine “a reputation bordering on infamy,” AK recalled two decades later in Troubadour: An Autobiography (New York: Liveright, 1925). He proudly described the “small-sized riot” that broke out when Others first hit the stands. ML’s “Love Songs” were the favorite victim of the attacks: “Detractors shuddered at Mina Loy’s subject-matter and derided her elimination of punctuation marks and the audacious spacing of her lines,” not to mention her explicit examination of intercourse, orgasm, bodily function, and sexual desire. Although she was yet to make her first trip to America, ML had already secured her reputation in the New York avant-garde literary community. In his famous survey of American poetry, Our Singing Strength (New York: Coward-McCann, 1929), AK again described the “violent sensation” that ML’s “Love Songs” created: her “clinical frankness [and] sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation grammar, syntax and punctuation … drove our critics into furious despair.… The utter nonchalance in revealing the secrets of sex was denounced as nothing less than lewd. It took a strong digestive apparatus to read Mina Loy.… To reduce eroticism to the sty was an outrage, and to do so without verbs, sentence structure … [was] even more offensive.” AK was referring to the sty of the limicolous “Pig Cupid” in ML’s all-business opening stanza to “Love Songs,” the most famous of all her lines.
In recalling the outrage of “the average critic … here in enlightened Manhattan” toward “Love Songs” in general and its first stanza in particular, AK also made reference to lineal qualities of another nature. He described the poet as the “exotic and beautiful … English Jewess, Mina Loy, an artist as well as a poet,” then described her avant-garde credentials: “She imbibed the precepts of Apollinaire and Marinetti and became a Futurist with all the earnestness and irony of a woman possessed and obsessed with the sense of human experience and disillusion.” AK was the first writer to explicitly acknowledge ML’s debt to FTM’s Futurist manifestos, or to comment directly on her syntax and subject matter in terms of Futurist technique. Her replacement of “the foolish pauses made by commas and periods” with the more intuitional blank spaces and dashes, her mixing of upper- and lower-case letters, her early use of collage and disjunction, and the charged sexual energy of her poems reflect the influence of FTM and are consistent with the principles he advocated in his manifesto “The Destruction of Syntax” (1913). That ML used these techniques in service of aims directly anathematical to FTM’s makes the cultural impact of her appropriation all the more significant. When her lover became the “other,” she turned his tools into her weapons.
“Had a man written these poems,” AK recalled of “Love Songs,” they might have been tolerated. “But a woman wrote them, a woman who dressed like a lady and painted charming lamp-shades.” Her title promised romance. But her songs delivered unmelodic sex. Chansons sans chanson.
AK’s comment was the first to acknowledge a deeply gendered, largely unspoken bias on the part of the critical establishment’s initial reaction to these transgressive lyrics. AK recalled that the early reviews of “Love Songs” puzzled ML as much as they injured her. This was also true of the early rejections, which ML referred to in a letter addressed to CVV (n.d., 1915). CVV had been encouraging her to write “something without a sexual undercurrent.” Her response: “I know nothing but life—and that is generally reducible to sex.… Apro-po of Joannes Songs—why won’t the pubs publish [?]. This is very sad. And why did Amy Lowell hate my things?… Dear Carlo, I’m trying to think of a subject that’s not sexy to write about … & I can’t in life.”
By 1920, free love was the toast of free verse; E. E. Cummings and Edna St. Vincent Millay were considered the ultra-sexual poets of the hour. ML’s experiments had helped clear a path for both, but she was already being trimmed out of modern poetry’s body as if she was a premature growth.
If critics reacted quickly to the publication of “Love Songs,” ML did, too. Within weeks, she wrote to CVV that she liked “the tendency of ‘Others’ and the way it look[ed but was] rather sorry that some words were misprinted such as … ‘Sitting the appraisable’ [l. I.2] instead of silting the appraisable—and ‘there are’ instead of ‘these are suspect places’ [l. I.13].” Comparing the 1915 Others text to the only known MS of this poem (a signed and dated [1915] HV of I–IV), it is evident that the errors she referred to were not present in the handwritten text (CVVP). But it is also possible to see how the words in question could be misread by less than astute surveyors of her casual cursive script. Fragmentary drafts of other “Love Songs” exist at YCAL, but not in sufficiently whole or finished states to serve as copy-texts.
Two years later the complete sequence appeared, taking up an entire issue of Others (3:6, April 1917, pp. 3–20). The above-mentioned errors had been corrected, but certain other changes inconsistent with the HV and the 1915 printing were introduced. Some of them clearly bore ML’s signature. For example, the last four lines of IV in 1915:
For I had guessed mine
That if I should find YOU
And bring you with me
The brood would be swept clean out
became two in 1917:
Before I guessed
—Sweeping the brood clean out
Other changes were more questionable (e.g., “white and star-topped” replaced “white star-topped” in l. I.6; “sewn” replaced “sown” in l. I.7; “spill’t” replaced “spilled” in l. III.5). ML had not indicated that these lines contained errors in her 1915 complaint. More important, she reverted to the original HV of lines I.6 and I.7 when she reformulated the sequence in 1923 (LB), seemingly confirming her original textual intent.
But LB preserved other changes made in 1917, such as the ending of IV. At this remove, in the absence of proofs bearing her corrections, it is impossible to distinguish printer’s errors from editorial changes from ML’s own alterations or to know what “repairs” she might have made in 1917, then reconsidered in 1923. My assumption, finally, is that the 1917 rendering of l. I. 6–7 is either non-authorial or an authorial revision that was later recanted; that it does not stand. The only evidence that I have ever found indicating that proofs of LB existed is RM’s casual statement quot
ed in Robert E. Knoll, ed., McAlmon and the Lost Generation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1962, p. 226), where he mentions checking proofs of LB in Rapallo, Italy, en route from Spain to France.
For the 1917 publication, ML made sure to correct the errors that bothered her most in 1915, substituting “silting” for “sitting” (l. I.2) and “These” for “There” (l. I.13) in the opening section. Beyond that, she made a few new revisions (e.g., the ending of IV) before publishing the sequence in Others. The surprising appearance of “sifting” (l. I.2) in LB in place of what had been wrongly printed as “sitting” (1915) and corrected to “silting” (HV, 1917) is a possible late revision, but more likely a printer’s error. Or, as Januzzi has suggested, this could reflect ML’s attempt to rectify what she knew had been a problematic line in 1915—having forgotten her earlier solution.
I do not view the LB rendition of “Love Songs” as an attempt to put the 1917 cycle into final order but rather as a separate narrative involving many of the same strategies. The result is an altogether different—and arguably less successful—effort. Therefore I present the LB version in Appendix D.
The text of “Songs to Joannes” presented here necessarily relies on the 1917 Others version as its copy-text, and varies from it in relatively few instances. The 1917 text, after all, is the source for thirty of the thirty-four original parts. I rely on ML’s letters, and variants in the earlier (HV) and later (LB) versions, only to mediate discrepancies in I–IV, as mentioned above. In most instances, first and final intentions converge. Where they do not, the copy-text or editorial judgment prevails.
In the present edition, I have not prefaced this sequence with the dedicatory poem, “To You” (Others [July 1916, pp. 27–28]), as I did in LLB82. Januzzi has persuaded me that despite ML’s plea to CVV [(n.d., 1915) to “get Songs for Joannes published for me—all together—printed on one side of each page only—& a large round in the middle of each page—& one whole entirely blank page with nothing on it between the first and second parts—(pause in between moods)—the dedication—‘TO YOU’”)], I may have taken this request too literally in LLB82. I believe her caution is correct. I now find it difficult to read “To You” as a prelude to “Songs to Joannes,” either thematically or structurally. It has therefore been left out of the present edition altogether.
I explain these issues in detail for several reasons. This is among the most frequently discussed, excerpted, and anthologized of ML’s poems; “Love Songs” and its often forgotten predecessor, “Songs to Joannes,” have a particularly complicated textual and editorial history; certain lines, especially in the opening section which I have just been discussing, have been the subject of more speculation and uncertainty than any other lines she produced. My decisions should be subject to question, but my reasons should not.
I have made the following emendations to the 1917 text, and refrained from making others, as explained below. Dashes here (— — — —) correspond to dashes in Loy’s 1917 text, and are counted as lines of type when they occupy a complete line, for example XXX.5. This is important only for the purpose of cross-referencing lines with emendations below. The LLB96 version is to the left of the ]. The 1917 Others version is to the right:
I.6: white star-topped (following HV, LB)] white and star-topped)
(Editor’s Note: The HV version reads “white star-topped,” as does the first appearance in 1915 Others and later printings, including LB.)
I.7: sown (following HV, LB)] sewn
(Editor’s Note: The HV reads “sown,” as does 1915 Others and later printings, including LB.)
I.8: Bengal (following HV and OED)] bengal
(Editor’s Note: A Bengal light, in nineteenth-century usage, was a firework or flare used for signals, producing a steady and vivid blue light.)
III.5: spill’d (following HV and OED)] spill’t
(Editor’s Note: In 1993, Angela Coon adapted this section (III) for performance by the spoken-word band Bloodfest [San Francisco].)
III.7: daily news (following HV)] daily-news
IV.11: sarsenet] sarsanet
V. 14: don’t] dont
IX.6: spermatozoa] spermatazoa
X.1: (Editor’s Note: “shuttlecock and battledore” would be the correct OED spellings, but I assume that ML is deliberately punning here. Her spelling stands.)
XIX.3: (Editor’s Note: “QHU” remains the most successful poser in ML’s entire lexicon. Its meaning, if any, has so far resisted extraction. I once suspected it was an acronym, or a pun disguised as one, along the lines of Marcel Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1920). But no appositive word or translation has yet occurred that convincingly deconstructs the anagram, homograph, or rune that stands behind the upper-case construction. “QHU” may allude to an enchoric name or retronym that was once familiar but has since passed from currency. If so, perhaps some future reader will one day open the lettre de cachet and report its contents. Until then, it remains pure vocable or sonant, a precarious precursor of Lettrisme.
We can also imagine it as an unbroken cryptogram or enciphered message to Joannes or one of his representatives. In this case, we can only hope that GP grasped its esoteric meaning. It is also possible, more prosaically, that QHU was a printer’s error, the first half of an uncorrected etaoin shrdlu [sic], or an ersatz euphemism designed to escape the censor’s scythe. This pre-digital encryption recently attained electronic status. In 1995 “QHU” was posted as a query to the poetry café of the Internet community. As of now, QHU remains simply an unsolved metaplasm. The virtual café remains open to any latecomers bearing solutions: [email protected].)
XXVIII. 18: cymophanous] cymophonous
XXIX. 11: caressive] carressive
XXIX.28: (Editor’s Note: The correct spelling would be “incognitos,” but I have chosen not to emend in favor of Januzzi’s enchanting suggestion that this may echo the “philosophers toes” passage in another poem featuring GP [see n. 8]. It is also possible that a pun is intended here; i.e., a low-down, toe-to-toe orgasm.)
XXX.6: archetypal] architypal
XXXIV.1: litterateur (following OED] literateur
Page breaks in 1917 Others occur at these lines, sometimes making stanza breaks ambiguous. Based on sense, HV, and LB, I have decided that 1917 page breaks do not always coincide with stanza breaks, but do in these instances (marked by *), and have lineated the present text accordingly:
II:5/6 (man / To)
*IV:8/9 (hair / One)
XIII: 25/26: (me / Or)
XVIII: 2/3: (hill / The)
*XIX: 22/23: (light / You)
XXII: 4/5: (revival / Upon)
XXIV: 6/7: (lies / Muddled)
XXVI: 2/3: (eyes / We)
XXVIII: 4/5: (Forever / Coloured)
*XXIX: 4/5: (Similitude / Unnatural)
*XXIX: 29/30: (orgasm / For)
XXXI: 2/3: (busy-body / Longing)
In imaginative terms “Joannes” is probably a figure collaged out of ML’s failed relationships with several male lovers. In biographical terms he is most closely patterned after one—GP (“Joannes” translates to “Giovanni” in Italian). Following her fallout with GP (see n. 8) after an enthrallment that lasted over a year, ML confessed to CVV [n.d., 1915] that “love has calmed down to the thing that exists—‘Joannes’ is the most astounding creature that ever lived—in the light of my imagination.… I believe he’s really tried to forgive me … & I think he’s a little jealous of Songs to Joannes—an unexpected effect—”.
The last page of the HV (1915) contains a note to CVV indicating that “Love Songs” (I–IV) may also have been written with an earlier lover in mind: “My dear Carlo these … are subconscious impressions of 8 years ago … associated with my weeping willow man.” This speculation is supported by her indication elsewhere (CVVP) that “Love Songs” (I–IV) were begun in a state of dysthemia (“the first were written in red-hot agony”).
In 1907, eight years before ML wrote this letter to CVV, she gave birth to her s
econd child. Burke’s biography (Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy [New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996]) contains important information on SH and the filiation of this child. Its patrilineage may explain ML’s agony and disillusion with GP.
Recent ML scholarship has greatly enhanced both the textual and contextual reading of this poem. See especially the work of Burke, Linda Kennahan, Kouidis, and Rachel Blau DuPlessis cited in Januzzi’s bibliography of ML in Mina Loy: Woman and Poet (Maeera Schreiber and Keith Tuma, eds. [Orono, ME: National Poetry Foundation, 1996]).
III. Corpses and Geniuses (Poems 1919–1930)
16. O HELL, ca. 1919. First published in Contact 1 (December 1920, p. 7). Reprinted in LB, with one substantive change: “the dusts of a tradition” replaces “the tatters of tradition” (l. 7). The present text follows the first published appearance, which in turn follows the only surviving MS (YCAL) in all substantives. I have made one emendation to the Contact appearance:
9: Caress] Carress
Editor’s Note: When this poem was published in Contact, edited by RM and WCW, it marked the third time (following appearances in Rogue and Others) that ML’s work had appeared in the inaugural issue of an American magazine dedicated to experimental writing. Following the demise of Others in 1919, WCW launched Contact in order to continue the fight that AK’s magazine had begun. WCW sought work that could not be published elsewhere, that was not derivative, and that was not trying to appeal to good taste or win posthumous praise: “We wish above all things to speak for the present.” The first issue contained two contributions by ML: “O Hell” and a prose vignette (“Summer Night in a Florentine Slum”). The prose contribution is not included in this edition (but was reprinted in LLB82). A variation of l. 6 (“our person is a covered entrance to infinity”) occurred in ML’s pamphlet Psycho-Democracy (Florence: Tipografia Peri & Rossi, 1920) as “‘Self’ is the covered entrance to Infinity.” This prose answer to FTM’s War, the World’s Only Hygiene and renunciation of Futurism’s militant tenets was later reprinted in The Little Review 7 (Autumn 1921), pp. 14–19.