The Lost Lunar Baedeker Read Free

from a gesture of authority? Did she lead the avant-garde in adopting a guise of transgressive femininity as a masquerade? And the big questions, I suppose: Was she ever really at home in English? Was she an American poet? And how much control did she have over the publication of Lunar Baedeker? Some of these questions are addressed in the Notes, which present information on the way her work was originally published and perceived. Other questions are addressed by Loy herself in a newly discovered text “On Modern Poetry.”
    The publication of this book at four minutes to the millennium, so to speak, means that Loy has a chance to rise above neglect. But in order to read her, we not only have to get past neglect; we have to get past legend. And this may prove more difficult, for legend has a way of insinuating itself upon neglect. I first edited Loy’s work in 1982. At the time, publishing her work felt more like a cause than an editorial occasion. The Last Lunar Baedeker circulated like a secret handshake, and has since become part of the Loy myth. That myth takes its shape from many sources, some of Loy’s own making: the diaries of a rebellious young woman, raised in a Victorian English household, who defected to French bohemian intellectual life and Italian Futurism; the memories of contemporaries who described an opinionated, intransigent, witty seductress who left two children with a nurse in Florence to come to New York, and who returned, two years later, pregnant by a missing husband, only to leave again; the deaths of two children; the images of her passionate affair with a poet-boxer who later became a patron saint of the Dadaists, and her search for him in Mexican morgues and prisons; the stories of a lonely widow practicing Christian Science and holding séances in a Bowery rooming house; the exhibition organized by her old friend Marcel Duchamp in 1959, featuring beatific visions of bums fashioned from trash. These stories should neither elevate nor diminish Loy’s stature as a poet. She should first be apprehended at poem-level.
    Mina Loy is not for everyone. It is not by accident that her work has been misplaced. “Difficult” is the word that has been most often used to describe her. Difficult as a poet and difficult as a person. And certainly difficult to place. Her work has never attracted casual readers. It is easiest simply to ignore her. Until now, the determination required to find her poems, let alone the perspicacity required to read them, has served as a qualifying experience. But her readers, if small in number, have also been large in commitment. Once discovered, if her poems do not immediately repel, they possess. Her work is far more likely to be a toxic or a tonic—quickly sworn off or gradually acquired as a lifelong habit—than a passing interest. In my own experience, and that of many people with whom I have shared her work over the past twenty years, her poems either embed themselves deeply within the imagination or they alienate. With Loy, there is no in between. She is not an academic poet, but her poems are of the intellect. In order to read her with profit, you need at least four things: patience, intelligence, experience, and a dictionary.
    One generally takes Loy—or does not—as one takes a vow. She tends to be accepted or avoided. No one considers her “decent.” She is contrary, she is antimetric, and certainly she is in decent. Her first readers found her so, and most contemporary readers still do. You become either a sworn believer or a fast enemy. Loy’s poetry has gradually fostered community among scholars, but it has also helped to define the sides of a poetry war which is quite real. In recent years her poetry has begun to register with a critical valence for the first time since the 1920s; this is new. But there will always remain those who don’t subscribe. She forces us to take sides, and the easiest side to take