Mina Loy x Joseph Cornell. Detail of box assemblage by Tara Prescott, 2009 View Image

As she moved between London, Paris, Florence, Mexico, and New York in the early decades of the twentieth century, artist and poet Mina Loy cultivated lifelong relationships that colored her artistic and literary career. A multilingual, multicultural artist who resisted self-identifying as a poet, Loy worked on a large array of projects, from exquisite lampshades and found art assemblages to patented inventions and published poems. Her renowned beauty, bohemian lifestyle, and knotted, visceral poems were inspirations to many poets and artists, whose work in turn fueled Loy. These figures, including Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound, greatly affected Loy’s aesthetic and the ways in which she incorporated visual art in her poetry.

Mina Loy x Joseph Cornell. Detail of box assemblage by Tara Prescott, 2009. View Image

Publishing alongside hypercanonical works such as Joyce’s _Ulysses_ and T.S. Eliot’s _The Waste Land_, Loy was in incredible literary company. Yet Loy was often critiqued as being a _woman_ poet first and foremost. She was frequently compared to other female poets (especially Marianne Moore) rather than given the individual critical attention that her male peers received.

Although critics like Kenneth Rexroth, Carolyn Burke, Roger Conover, Cristanne Miller, and Marisa Januzzi have catalyzed Loy scholarship, there is still much work to be done. A few poems have received a comparatively large amount of critical attention, while many of Loy’s other works have very little scholarship. In particular, the connections between the art world and Loy’s writing need to be more deeply explored.

Loy is a vital figure within Modernism in many ways. An early and prominent proponent of the _vers libre_ movement, she published in the “little magazines” of the period, including _The Little Review_, _Others_, and _The Dial_. From the salons of Paris to the New York apartments of the Arensberg circle, Loy circulated amongst the foremost artists and writers of her time. Her lovers included Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, leader of the Futurists, and his rival, Giovanni Papini. She married Stephen Haweis, an early professional art photographer, and later married boxer-poet Arthur Cravan. She sketched Joyce and Freud, co-starred with William Carlos Williams on the stage, posed for photographs with Brancusi’s sculptures, danced all night long (and famously shared a group bed) with Marcel Duchamp, lived alongside Djuna Barnes, and helped her son-in-law, New York gallery owner Julien Levy, discover Salvador Dali. Taking into account the fact that Loy befriended iconic artists, writers, and intellectuals of her day—most of whom have since been canonized as vanguards of the Avant-Garde, Dadaism, Futurism, and High Modernism—it is surprising that Loy’s work slowly receded from the cultural consciousness over time. Yet, as Loy’s biographer Carolyn Burke notes, both Loy and her work “disappeared” in the thirties, and it has only been recently that critics have had the great challenge and surprise of recovering this astonishingly original poet.

Baedeker's Italy. 1909. View Image

In _The Gazer’s Spirit_, John Hollander provides the historical basis of “ekphrasis” as “a technical term used by classicists and historians of art to mean a verbal description of a work of art, of a scene as rendered in a work of art.” Hollander stresses that literary theorists, however, have appropriated the term to include “the ways in which space and time are involved in the various mutual figurations of actuality, text, and picture.”

This panel comprises three papers, each focusing on a particular key text in Loy’s oeuvre: the poem sequence “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” the poetry collection _Lunar Baedeker_, and the autobiographical novel _Insel_. In order to develop an understanding of Loy’s poetry in terms of its engagement with art and subjectivity, these papers incorporate biographical information, perform close readings, and analyze the poems using ekphrastic criticism to provide new insight about the work of this underappreciated poet.

The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger Conover. View Image

In the first paper,” Mina Loy’s Grotesque Sinthome in ‘Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,’” Nancy Gillespie considers how art and subjectivity are integral to Loy’s autobiographical poem sequence. Working from Lacan’s recently published seminar, _Le Sinthome_ XXIII, as well as Joyce’s _Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_, Gillespie argues that Loy’s poetry traces the formation of subjectivity in language and enacts a process of transference that is similar to the process of analysis for a neurotic subject. Gillespie explicates Loy’s disruptive poetics and the ways in which she creates a home for her self in language.

Bound galley for The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Edited by Roger Conover. View Image

Continuing the examination of Loy’s Joycean influences, Tara Prescott’s paper, “Mina Pure[L]oy: _Ulysses_ on the Moon,” speaks in franker terms than a 1917 _Evening Sun_ article which wryly noted that Mina Loy’s poems “would have puzzled Grandma.” Loy depicts cunnilingus and childbirth, maidenhead and menstruation, chucking aside lofty Eros to submerge Pig Cupid in mucus. Her fascination with the female body, freed from cultural restrictions and romantic platitudes, closely aligns Loy with Joyce, who she sketched, publicly defended, and greatly admired. This essay situates Loy’s ekphrastic poems, such as “Joyce’s Ulysses” and “Apology of Genius,” within the context of her interactions with Joyce, from demonstrating at the _Little Review_ hearing to socializing in Paris.

Insel. Edited by Elizabeth Arnold. View Image

Christina Walter’s paper, “An ‘anti-thesis of self expression’: Mina Loy’s Imagetexts and the Modern Observer” examines Loy’s Künstlerroman, _Insel_, in relation to impersonal subjectivity and the visual image. Walter argues that Loy engages with the contemporary science of vision, particularly its mapping of an unstable and mediated observer. The form of this expression is, according to Walter, an imagetext. Drawing on recent historical work on late nineteenth-century optical science (including after-images, floaters, and the camera obscura), Walter argues that Loy’s understanding of subjectivity is informed by her interest in science. Walter examines how technologies that developed in both visual art and optical science reflect on the limits of perceptual knowledge in Loy’s prose.

Each paper in this session takes as a starting point a distinct piece of Loy’s body of work. Together, they not only provide a more complete picture of how she used ekphrasis and subjectivity throughout her life’s work, but also provide broader implications for examining the role of art and subjectivity in Modernism and especially for female Modernists.