With subjects ranging from pigeons to painting to pregnancy and a poetic lexicon bristling with performative words like “cymophanous”, “etiolate”, “sere”, and “footle”, it is sometimes difficult to establish where to begin with the work of poet Mina Loy. Her oeuvre is small—just one novel, one collection of poetry, and a handful of photographs and paintings—but polarizing. The publication of Loy’s “Love Songs” in Others magazine so horrified Amy Lowell that she refused to submit further work. The contributing community of Others and sister publication Rebel, usually a supportive crowd, was torn over her poetry. Ezra Pound supported her, suggesting as late as 1933 that “MINA LOY [sic] holds her position in Anglo-American poetry of my decade, perhaps the most spontaneous, perhaps the most original.” Conrad Aiken on the other hand advised serious readers to “pass lightly over the [her] tenticular quiverings” in favor of the “manly metres” of T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens. William Carlos Williams and Gertrude Stein were admirers, along with a slew of lesser-known poets of the New York scene; Yvor Winters in 1926 suggested that Loy’s work was so original that she could only count Emily Dickinson as a potential forerunner, even as Alfred Kreymborg lamented that “if Loy could dress like a lady, why couldn’t she just write like one”?

Lists frequently open critical essays on Loy, as if Loy’s readers are attempting to acknowledge that no single lens will ever fully be able to capture her nuanced and often inconsistent aesthetic. Her life is as difficult to interpret as her poetry: born in England in 1882, and born again as a writer in New York after her move in 1916, she spent time in London, Paris, Munich, and Florence, and dabbled in so many different movements that one is hard-pressed to place her in any one save perhaps under a vague and all-encompassing umbrella of the modernist avant-garde. She was a hater and a lover of both man and machine seemingly at whim; a Fauvist, a Futurist, a Dadaist, a Surrealist, emphasizing different aspects of each movement when convenient for collaborations or confrontations—and often conflating different aspects of them. She was a woman who advocated for the ultimate equality of women yet was supported by men all her life. She worked as a painter, a poet, a hat-maker, a lampshade-designer, an inventor, a theorist, a mother of two, and a lover of many, including infamous affairs with American poet-boxer Arthur Cravan, and prominent Italian Futurists F. T. Marinetti and Giovanni Papini.

Contemporary critics made Loy out to be perpetual pretender, too heterosexual for the burgeoning lesbian salon scene of Gertrude Stein, Alice Toklas, Djuna Barnes, and Natalie Barney; too masculine in her verse for the heterosexual poetic scene; too cerebral to be a true compatriot of her many fellow Dada poetesses who championed a more practical feminism. Yet any potential offenses were mitigated by her beauty—more specifically, by her body, glorified by her contemporaries even as her artistic body was fetishized and repressed by editors and censors. Loy’s frequent cameos in the autobiographies of her contemporaries, including those by Djuna Barnes, Constantin Brancusi, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Marianne Moore, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, Alfred Steiglitz, and William Carlos Williams, portray her as a mere body flashing in and out in various costumes of the bedrooms and salons of equally variegated poets, never with a voice of her own.

Loy’s works were undertaken during and directly reflect upon a period when gender relations were changing immensely. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the image of the “New Woman”—sometimes called the “American woman”—was spreading rapidly throughout Europe. Although there were many pushbacks against the New Woman and only a small minority of women conformed to the new image, the widespread display of images of the New Women in fashion magazines granted her a certain “cultural prestige”. At the same time, the Neo-Malthusian movement, linked with the discovery of female ovulation, encouraged women to take control of their bodies in new ways.

One of the concerns that faces the growing movement of Loy criticism is the question of whether Loy and her poetics can be called ‘feminist’, given their stunted engagement with more prolific individual feminist movements. Loy did not participate in political protests, and was not involved in the birth control, or suffrage, three common causes to which early twentieth-century feminists devoted themselves, and never overtly expressed an interest in women’s equality; in fact, she states in her “Feminist Manifesto” that women should occupy a position higher than, not equal to, that of men. Her position is further complicated by her choice to not publish the “Feminist Manifesto” in her lifetime.

One way to begin to place Loy and her work is to consider the ways in which she conformed to and protested the modern condition and perception of the body. Many modernist artists saw the body in a new light—in a literal sense, through the advent of electricity, but also metaphorically, as the body became something to be understood better, that was changeable, and could be otherwise extended through new scientific knowledge and technology. Many early male modernists co-opted technology and scientific language to promote their artistic values, which were usually aligned with traditional gender roles. Loy challenged societal rules and roles through her views of the malleable body, and through her poetry used language as a means of rewriting the body and reforming its cultural place.

The marginalized body and the body in exile both proved to be forms that provided an entry point for Loy’s comment upon contemporary social life and gender roles. These exiled bodies were unencumbered by societal expectations, and possessed an expanded plasticity, which made them ideal experimental subjects for Loy’s art. Her portrayals of the female body verge on subversive for their time—they are, at the very least, a far cry from the sexiness that so interested other poets. In fact, they drip, droop, and drag in decidedly un-sexual ways: her “wild oats”, for example, are sown in “mucous-membranes”, her “rivers run no fresher/Than a trickle of saliva”; her breasts are “skin-sacks”; she possesses “promiscuous lips” and “bird-like abortions”; giving birth, she notes that “the gurgling of a crucified wild beast/Comes from so far away/And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth/Is no part of myself”. Loy stresses the body as a malleable object that can expand, delete, and engender. Her work aimed to expose truths behind natural and social systems, and to lay it out for the public, aestheticizing the fringes, boundaries, and taboos from which it shied away.

In addition to her posthumous collected poetic works and essays, The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996), Loy wrote one novel, Insel (1937, published posthumously in 1991).

-Francesca Violich Kennedy