Mina Loy Painting

Later in life, if the date given was right (1951).

Loy is one of the most interesting members of the avant-garde in the early twentieth century, for sure.

Her brief manifestos are wonderful. Her poetry even more so.

Her poetry is so stylized it shouldn't even work. Yet it does.

I bet she influenced Barbara Guest nearly as much as H.D. did.

Loy's aesthetic is actually closer to Guest's than H.D.'s, but Guest clearly valorized H.D. Perhaps because H.D. was seen as the major poet and Loy the minor. And knowing the work of both, I can't disagree with that assessment. But what a fascinating minor poet Loy is!

Sometimes you have a major poet whose work is so individualistic or so particular to its author's zeitgeist, that it leads nowhere, it shines resplendent in isolation. Like a glacier. I think T.S. Eliot is a perfect example of this.

And then sometimes you have a minor poet whose work might not have fully developed in his or her lifetime, but which grants huge permission to future artists, yields stellar inspiration. I think Mina Loy is an example of this. I might have argued the same about Hart Crane a few decades ago, but he seems to have gracefully transitioned from minor to major in that same period, probably precisely because of the influence he had on so many poets (poets as diverse as Ginsberg, Robert Creeley and even L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets).

This makes sense. One can imagine a contemporary poet citing Loy or Crane as seminal influences. It seems preposterous to conceive of a contemporary poet saying the same thing about Eliot. One can hugely admire Eliot. But to be influenced by his poetry would be harder. I suppose if The Wasteland were one's first experience with disjunctive poetry, poetic collage, simultaneism, etc., it could be possible. But those qualities are even more pronounced in other poets who specialized in these plasticities (Tzara, Pound, Crane, Apollinaire, Russian or Italian Futurists).

Barbara Guest chose to spend five years writing a celebrated biography of H.D. H.D. was destined to move upwards in the canon, a deserved move, and Guest was prescient in choosing to write that labor-intensive book.

I loved that biography and what I found most fascinating is how keenly Guest analyzed H.D.'s personality, and how unsparing she was when examining H.D.'s weaknesses and her pronounced dependencies on others.

In the end, she limned a portrait of H.D. as someone who never really escaped childhood, even as her hair turned to snow and her bones broke.

When it wasn't Bryher keeping her going, it was someone else. Financially, spiritually, emotionally.

But I guess that could be said of most of us. We have reliances. Except for the eagle types. Lone wolves.

But it's not really in doubt while reading the book that at times H.D.'s biographer sees the poet as exploitive, skittish, even false.

Guest manages to reckon H.D.'s bisexuality without coyness. If anything, she sees through the bisexuality to the deeper meaning (or lack thereof) of each of H.D.'s romantic relationships.

Loy fell into poverty and her art into neglect. H.D. managed to retain her reputation in the right quarters and solicit the right assistance to the end.

Both H.D. and Loy wanted to resituate or reconfigure our recognition of gender with their poetry and (I would argue) both were successful at this.

Barbara Guest strikes me as more allied stylistically to Loy than to H.D. And not just because they're both Mannerists. H.D. and Loy are much more about catachresis.*

H.D. was a Classicist but never a Mannerist.

The stylized deformations and similar process (ekphrasis is major nutrition to both Guest and Loy) remind me of artists like Pontormo.

I mean if we're going to compare 20th century apples and 16th century oranges.

There's a similar sense of the humanist agenda deliciously warped for the sake of an eros of imagery (Pontormo) and an eros of language (Loy, Guest).







*catachresis in American poetry, a partial list (Whitman--Dickinson--Crane--Loy--Coolidge--Guest--many L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets)