The Lost Lunar Baedeker

by Mina Loy

  17. THE DEAD, ca. 1919. NOMS. First published in Others for 1919: An Anthology of the New Verse (New York: Nicholas L. Brown, 1920, pp. 112–114). This text is based on the first published appearance.

  3: shrivable] shrivvable

  30: Of] of

  43: Has] has

  Editor’s Note: A year after the appearance of AK’s 1919 anthology, John Rodker wrote an opinion piece in The Little Review 7:3 (pp. 53–56), consisting largely of sarcastic remarks about the writing of the “Others” group. Of ML’s contribution Rodker quipped, “It is painful to notice that since the last ‘Others’ she appears to have lost her grip.” ML responds thrust for thrust in the same issue. The exchange continues in the next issue (LR 7:4). Harriet Monroe, reviewing this anthology in Poetry (17:3 [December 1920, pp. 150–158]) calls ML “an extreme otherist, as innocent of all innocences as of commas, periods, sentences. A knowing one, but we would rather have some other other’s polish our stars.”

  Twenty-five years later, Kenneth Rexroth reprinted this poem in full in the second of his “recovery” essays on neglected poets (Circle 1:4 [1944, pp. 69–72]). ML had not been published anywhere for thirteen years, and he wanted something done about it: “It is hard to say why she has been ignored. Perhaps it is due to her extreme exceptionalism. Erotic poetry is usually lyric. Hers is elegiac and satirical. It is usually fast-paced. Hers is slow and deliberately twisting.” Rexroth went on to observe that she “has been singularly isolated historically, with few ancestors and less influence.” He named Herondas, Menander, Lucretius, Lucian, Maximinian, Marston, Donne, Jonson, and Rochester as possible precursors; he then listed Jack Wheelwright, Laura Riding, Carl Rakosi, Louis Zukofsky, and Harry Roskolenko as possible heirs. According to Rexroth, that was the complete genealogy of influence. At least, he concluded, “no others occur to me.”

  18. MEXICAN DESERT, ca. 1919–1920. First published in The Dial 70: 6 (June 1921, p. 672). There are two MSS of this poem at YCAL. This version follows the first published text, which in turn follows the MSS in all substantives.

  Editor’s Note: This poem is a collaged recollection of ML’s traverse of the parched Mexican desert in 1918 with her second husband, AC (né Fabian Avenarius Lloyd, 1887–?). It was also her first poem to appear in The Dial, although her anti-Futurist play, The Pamperers, had inaugurated its “Modern Forms” section the year before (69:1, July 1920, pp. 65–78). Some of ML’s artwork was also published in The Dial as Two Watercolours (70:4, April 1921, n.p.) and Baby’s Head (72:2, February 1922, n.p.).

  The Dial during this period was nominally edited by Scofield Thayer and Gilbert Seldes, but Scofield’s co-owner, Sibley Watson, and his foreign editor, Ezra Pound, were both more editorially influential than Seldes. It is likely that Pound directed ML’s first work to The Dial. Thayer first met ML in New York. When he encountered her again in Vienna, he recognized how valuable her knowledge of the contemporary European art scene could be to the development of the “International Art Portfolio,” a project that was never fully realized but led to the publication of Living Art (1923). In a letter dated March 5, 1922, to Sibley Watson, Thayer referred to ML as his “assistant” in the portfolio project, thereby associating her with one of The Dial’s most ambitious projects (Walter Sutton, ed., Pound, Thayer, Watson & The Dial: A Story in Letters [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994], p. 234).

  The Dial was one of the most prominent literary magazines ever published in the United States. Its championing of modern artistic movements was a potent factor in shaping American taste during the 1920s. In its sponsorship of avant-garde work, it was decades ahead of popular taste. It was also one of the few solvent periodicals of its time, and one of the few which paid its contributors.

  19. PERLUN, ca. July 1921. NOMS. First published in The Dial 71: 2 (August 1921, p. 142). This text follows the first publication.

  26: I’m] i’m

  Editor’s Note: The date of composition is conjectural, but the references to Dempsey and Carpentier suggest that this poem was probably written around the time of the much-publicized first million-dollar prizefight in the history of boxing. On July 21, 1921, Jack Dempsey (1895–1983) of the United States defeated Georges Carpentier (1894–1975) of France for the world heavyweight title. “Perlun” shares a number of qualities with another boxer, the eternal adolescent and heavyweight legend AC, poet-pugilist-provocateur. AC vaporized, drowned, or otherwise disappeared in Mexico in 1918, but his “pert blond spirit” seems to resurface here. Perlun’s “immaculate arms,” his traffic with sailors and vamps, his parasitic life-style, his detestation of the idle rich, and his instinctual, rebellious, challenging nature all call to mind AC, who as a teenage runaway worked his way aboard freighters and trains from Europe to Australia to California, where he rode boxcars with hoboes and picked lemons with migrant laborers. In an unpublished prose memoir, ML eulogized AC as “Colossus,” identified in Greek mythology with Helios, brother of Selene, goddess of the moon. Elsewhere she identified him with Mercury, Roman god of eloquence, thievery, and travel. Excerpts of her memoir appear in Roger L. Conover’s “Mina Loy’s Colossus: Arthur Cravan Undressed,” Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ed., New York Dada ([New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986], pp. 102–19). Selections of AC’s writings appear in Four Dada Suicides ([London: Atlas Press, 1995], pp. 33–88).

  Alternatively, the mysteriously named title figure of this poem may come to us per luna. Or he may be named for one of his habits; like AC, who boasted that he was a thief, Perlun purloins.

  A final note: Francis Picabia printed a doctored portrait of boxer Georges Carpentier on the cover of 391 (October 1924), deliberately passing it off as a portrait of Marcel Duchamp, to whom Carpentier bore a striking resemblance. Thus Carpentier shares with AC the distinction of being the only boxers featured in Dada’s most international and adventuresome journal.

  20. POE. Composition date unknown, but in all likelihood this poem postdates AC’s disappearance in 1918. NOMS. First published in The Dial 1:4 (October 1921, p. 406). Reprinted in LB (“1921–1922”) without changes. This text follows the first publication.

  9: “ilix” is an uncommon but accepted (OED) spelling of “ilex,” the evergreen shrub, or holm oak.

  21. APOLOGY OF GENIUS, ca. 1922. First published in The Dial 73 (July 1922, pp. 73–74). Reprinted in LB without changes. No MS has been located, but a fragmentary draft of a sequel, “Apology of Genius II,” dated 1930, is among ML’s papers at YCAL. Reprinted in LB without substantive changes. The text of this frequently anthologized poem follows the first published version, except for the following emendations:

  13: fools’] fool’s

  37: immortelles] immortels

  (According to the OED, “immortelles” are various composite flowers of papery texture which retain their color and shape after being cut and dried. Immortelles are commonly used to adorn gravestones and tombs. ML wore them in her hats. Here she evokes them in praise of artistic genius.)

  Editor’s Note: This was one of two works by ML which YW felt “need, in [his] judgment, yield ground to no one.” The other was “Der Blinde Junge” (see n. 24). YW’s essay is one of the first significant attempts to come to terms with ML’s work, both on its own terms and in relation to that of her contemporaries; the only significant prior attempt was EP’s review of the 1917 Others anthology in which he first took up ML and MM (n. 9). Winters concluded that ML had more to offer than Moore and Stevens, and is “one of the two living poets who have the most … to offer the younger American writers.” WCW was the other. Of the four poets, YW found ML’s achievement “by all odds the most astounding. Using an unexciting method, and writing of the drabbest of material, 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 … a beauty that is unspeakably moving and profound.” Of all the modernists, he declared WCW and ML the two who “present us with a solid foundation in place of Whitman’s badly ali
gned corner-stones, a foundation which is likely to be employed, I suspect, by a generation or two.… If it materializes, Emily Dickinson will have been its only forerunner.” YW’s essay bears reading in its entirety (Yvor Winters, “Mina Loy,” The Dial 70, June 1926, pp. 496–99). His assessment stands in sharp counterpoint to Harriet Monroe’s review of LB:

  Mostly, her utterance is a condescension from a spirit too burdened with experience to relax the ironic tension of her grasp upon it. The load being too heavy to talk about, she carries it as she may … making gay little satiric moues as she passes, and giving forth sardonic little cries.

  (Poetry 23:2 [November 1923], pp. 100–3)

  “Apology of Genius” was ML’s first poem translated into French. NCB was so moved by ML’s May 6, 1927, reading at her 20, rue Jacob salon that she later translated this poem and published it in her memoirs (Aventures de l’Esprit [Paris: Editions Emile-Paul Frères, 1929], pp. 213–16), along with an account of the poet reading it:

  Her beauty has withdrawn into itself. She offers us this “apology of genius,” and an entire prismatic poetry which, thanks to some perception of a fourth destiny, she escapes.

  (Translation by John Spalding Gatton, ed., NCB: Adventures of the Mind [New York: NYU Press, 1992], pp. 100–3)

  22. BRANCUSI’S GOLDEN BIRD, 1922. First published in the The Dial 73 (November 1922, pp. 507–8), opposite CB’s studio photograph of the Golden Bird. The same image had previously been reproduced in the “Brancusi” number of The Little Review 8 (Autumn 1921, pl. 17) accompanying EP’s essay on CB. A typescript in WAA appears to be a copy of the Dial text transcribed by Arensberg. Reprinted in LB (“1921–1922”). This text follows the first published version, to which I have made one correction:

  28: aggressive] agressive

  Editor’s Note: This is one of two works by ML featuring CB (1876–1957). The other, a pencil portrait of the sculptor’s head, is reproduced in LLB82 (pl. 18). Although ML and CB would later become friends in Paris, and appear in photographs with Jane Heap, Margaret Anderson, and Tristan Tzara, “when she wrote this poem she had never met the Rumanian genius of sculpture … the poem represents a real intuitional appreciation” (Eugene Jolas, Paris Tribune, July 24, 1924). ML’s poem is among the first “American” appreciations of CB’s work. Along with Henry McBride, she was the first writer to champion Brancusi in The Dial.

  ML’s sixth and final contribution to The Dial appeared in the magazine’s famous Waste Land issue. The magazine quickly sold out its sixteen thousand copies and prompted a vituperative exchange between Scofield Thayer and his managing editor, Gilbert Seldes. Thayer objected to the reproduction of CB’s photograph on the grounds that it had “no aesthetic value whatever” and was “commercially suicidal.” Seldes shot back that it was ML’s poem, not CB’s photograph, that caused “the only row … in that connection.” These events preceded by several years the legal dispute over whether CB’s Bird in Space should be allowed to pass through customs duty-free (as art) or should be considered a piece of metalwork and therefore be subject to import tax as an object of manufacture. This controversy (decided by the Customs Court in CB’s favor) preceded by only one year the dispute over whether ML’s first book (LB) should be able to pass through customs at all, and may partially explain the radical revisions she made to “Songs to Joannes” between its first periodical appearance and its reconstitution in book form as “Love Songs” (n. 15).

  Many CB scholars have cited this poem, and it has been reprinted in several books and catalogues on CB, including the historically significant catalogue for his first major one-person show in New York (Brummer Gallery, 1926). All CB literature to date has identified the Golden Bird of ML’s title as the celebrated 1919 bronze sculpture purchased by lawyer, patron, and collector John Quinn (1870–1924), now owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. This claim was most recently made by Margherita Androeotti in her essay “Brancusi’s Golden Bird: A New Species of Modern Sculpture” (Art Institute of Chicago, Museum Studies, 19:3, pp. 134–52). Androeotti is correct in speculating that ML could easily have seen the sculpture in either the home of Quinn or at the exhibition “Contemporary French Art” (Sculptors’ Gallery, New York, 1922). These circumstances, coupled with the photograph of the canonical Golden Bird which accompanied the first appearance of the poem, make a convenient case to support this theory. But they do not take into account another fact: that there was a second Golden Bird produced at roughly the same time (1919–20), which was nearly identical to the first in size, form, and materials. Both are listed in Friedrich Teja Bach’s definitive catalogue raisonné, Constantin Brancusi (Dumont: Cologne, 1987) under the French heading l’Oiseau d’Or (cf. entries 155 and 156, pp. 456–57).

  The less known of the two (now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts) was originally purchased on December 16, 1921 (for 5,000 francs), by Mariette Mills, the expatriate American sculptor and former student of French sculptor Antoine [Emile] Bourdelle. In the summer of 1921, ML visited her close friends Mariette and Heyworth Mills in their home on rue Boissonnade, where she had an epiphanic encounter with the bronze sculpture. ML recorded her first reaction to the Golden Bird in her 1950 essay “Phenomenon in American Art” (YCAL/LLB82): “Years ago at wonderful Mariette Mills’ I came face to face, or rather face to flight with Brancusi’s Bird.” She then described the “long aesthetic itinerary from Brancusi’s Golden Bird to [Joseph] Cornell’s Aviary,” calling CB’s sculpture “the purest abstraction I have ever seen.” Given the resemblance of the two sculptures, ML could have been responding to either “aesthetic archetype.” But her written recollection strongly suggests that she was writing not about Quinn’s Golden Bird but rather about the less celebrated Golden Bird that she saw at the Millses’ (Bach 156).

  23. LUNAR BAEDEKER. Date of composition unknown; LB “1921–1922” opens with this poem, marking its first appearance. NOMS. The present text follows the first published version.

  title: Lunar Baedeker] Lunar Baedecker

  8: In Persian mythology “peris” are fairies or elves descended from evil angels and barred from Paradise until they have served penance for their forebears’ sins.

  10: In Greek and Roman mythology, Lethe is the river of forgetfulness, flowing through Hades, whose water produced memory loss in those who drank it.

  15: Infusoria are microscopic organisms found in decayed organic matter.

  38: oxidized] oxidised

  Editor’s Note: All collected and selected editions of ML’s poems to date have been named after this corner-poem, the first by her choice, the rest in memory of her ill-starred first book, Lunar Baedecker [sic]. Whatever pleasure ML experienced upon seeing her first book published must have been immediately compromised when she realized that the title was misspelled, not only on the cover, but on the half-title page, title page, and first page of the book. Notwithstanding this lapse, publication by RM’s Contact Press placed ML in select expatriate company. Appearing under the same imprint were first or early books by Ernest Hemingway, WCW, GS, Marsden Hartley, Mary Butts, H.D., and Emanuel Carnevali.

  This poem was recently adapted by composer Sebastian Anthony Birch for a musical work entitled “Argentum” (Cleveland Museum of Art, 1994); it is also the first of ML’s poems to be released in CD-ROM format (Fiorella Terenzi, ed., The Invisible Universe [New York: Voyager Press, 1995]).

  24. DER BLINDE JUNGE, ca. 1922. NOMS. First published in LB (“1921–1922” section), immediately preceding “Ignoramus.” This text follows the LB version.

  title: “Der Blinde Junge” translates from German to “The Blind Youth.”

  1: In Roman mythology, “Bellona” is the goddess of war, sister of Mars.

  4: “Kreigsopfer” is a German compound noun meaning “war victim.”

  12: its] it’s

  18: lightning] lightening

  28: “Illuminati,” plural of “illuminato,” originally referred to certain religious sects, but in modern usage it re
fers to any persons claiming special knowledge or enlightenment. In its later sense, it is often used ironically (OED), as is the case here.

  Editor’s Note: This poem made an immediate and lasting impression on YW, who considered it among ML’s best poems when he first discussed her work in 1926 (n. 21). Some forty years later, he reaffirmed his early estimation of this poem. By this time ML’s work was all but forgotten, but YW was still convinced of its lasting value (Forms of Discovery [Chicago: Alan Swallow, 1967], n.d., n.p.). Between these first and last impressions, YW had issued a mid-career advisory that was less approving: “Mina Loy’s verse is usually so simplified, so denuded of secondary accent, as to be indistinguishable from prose” (Primitivism and Decadence [Arrow Editions, 1937]), a description surprisingly close to Monroe’s characterization of ML’s work as “descriptive, explanatory, philosophic—in short, prose, which no amount of radical empiricism, in the sound and exclamatory arrangement of words and lines, can transform, with prestidigitatorial magic, into the stuff of poetry” (Poetry, November 1923).

  Thom Gunn’s consideration of this poem, from which I quote only a brief passage, deserves to be read in its entirety:

  Loy is a tough writer, and sentiment in the usual sense is seldom present in her work. Her overt feeling in [“Der Blinde Junge”] is of contempt, turned upon the rest of us, the illuminati reading her poem, complacently assuming that we are heirs to culture.… She is hard, pure, unrelenting. The controlled anger and indignation of the poem make it the equal, to my mind, of the best of Pope or Swift.

  (“Three Hard Women: HD, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy,” in Vereen Bell and Laurence Lerner, eds., On Modern Poetry [Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1988])

  25. CRAB-ANGEL. Composition date unknown. NOMS. First published in LB (“1921–1922”). This text follows the LB version, except for the following emendations:

  8, 19: its] it’s