The Lost Lunar Baedeker (25 page)

Prose

“Colossus” (memoir). Roger L. Conover, “Mina Loy's Colossus: Arthur Cravan Undressed,” in
Dada/Surrealism
14 (1985); reprinted in Rudolf E. Kuenzli, ed.,
New York Dada
(New York: Willis Locker & Owens, 1986), pp. 102–19.

“Gertrude Stein” (essay).
transatlantic review
2:3 (October 1924), pp. 305–9; and
transatlantic review
2:4 (November 1924), pp. 427–30.

“In … Formation” (polemic).
Blind Man
1 (April 10, 1917), p. 7.

Insel
(novel). Elizabeth Arnold, ed., with foreword by Roger L. Conover (Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1991).

“John Rodker's Frog” (response).
The Little Review
7:3 (September-December 1920), pp. 56–57.

“Notes on Religion” (essay fragments). Edited and introduced by Keith Tuma,
Sulfur
27 (Fall 1990), pp. 13–16.

“O Marcel—otherwise I Also Have Been to Louise's” (vignette).
The Blind Man
2 (May 1917), pp. 11–12. Reprinted in
View
5:1 (March 1945), p. 35, as “O Marcel: or I Too Have Been to Louise's,” with an autobiographical note by ML.

“The Pamperers” (drama).
The Dial
69:1 (July 1920), pp. 65–88.

“Pas de Commentaires! Louis M. Eilshemius” (profile).
The Blind Man
2 (May 1917), pp. 11–12.

“Phenomenon in American Art” (review). LLB82, pp. 300–2.

Psycho-Democracy
(pamphlet). Florence: Tipografia Peri & Rossi, 1920. Reprinted in
The Little Review
12 (Autumn 1921), pp. 14–19.

“Questionnaire” (interview).
The Little Review
12:2 (May 1929), p. 46.

“Street Sister” (fiction). Bronte Adams and Trudi Tate, eds.,
That Kind of Woman
(London: Virago Press, 1991), pp. 41–42.

“Summer Night in a Florentine Slum” (vignette).
Contact
1 (December 1920), pp. 6–7.

“Towards the Unknown” (questionnaire).
View
1 (February/March 1942), p. 10.

Two Plays
[“Collision” and “Cittabapini”] (drama).
Rogue
1:6 (June 15, 1915), pp. 15–16.

Tables of Contents

LUNAR BAEDEKER

(Paris: Contact Publishing Co., 1923)

 

Poems 1921–1922

Lunar Baedecker

Apology of Genius

Joyce's Ulysses

English Rose
*

Crab-Angel

Der Blinde Junge

Ignoramus

Poe

Brancusi's Golden Bird

“The Starry Sky” of Wyndam Lewis

O Hell

 

Poems 1914–1915

Love Songs (I–XIII)

Café du Néant

Magasins du Louvre

Italian Pictures

July in Vallombrosa

The Costa San Giorgio

Costa Magic

Sketch of a Man on a Platform

Parturition

LUNAR BAEDEKER AND TIME-TABLES

(Highlands, N.C.: Jonathan Williams Publisher [Jargon 23], 1958)

 

I. Poems from
LUNAR BAEDEKER
(1923)

Lunar Baedeker

Apology of Genius

Joyce's Ulysses

Ignoramus

Brancusi's Golden Bird

Crab-Angel

Love Songs (I–XIII)

Three Italian Pictures

I. The Costa San Giorgio

II. July in Vallombrosa

III. Costa Magic

Parturition

 

II.
*
Poems from
CONTACT COLLECTION OF CONTEMPORARY WRITERS
(1925)

The Anglo-Mystics of the Rose

Enter Esau

Ova Begins to take Notice

Ova has Governesses

Christ's Regrettable Reticence

Religious Instruction

 

III. Later Poems

Revelation

Omen of Victory

On Third Avenue: Part 2

Stravinski's Flute

Transformation Scene

The Song of the Nightingale is Like the Scent of Syringa

Jules Pascin

Acknowledgments

This work is indebted to all Loy scholarship, past and present. My gain from studying Loy criticism has been immense, and I hope that debt will continue to deepen as Loy scholarship develops and matures. There are several scholars whose contributions have been particularly important. I first want to acknowledge the importance of Marisa Januzzi's work to my own. In many respects, this edition is the result of a collaboration unlike any I have known. Had Marisa not been so generous in sharing her research with me, and so able in arguing points with me, this work would lack much of the integrity I hope it has. The work of Carolyn Burke, Loy's biographer and steadfast critic, has also mattered to me for many years. I began my work on Loy twenty years ago, at about the same time that Carolyn began hers. She not only understands, but shares my dedication to this poet. I feel a unique bond with her. From my work with both these scholars, community has grown.

I thank the many graduate students who have written to me about their research on Loy, and the many professors who are now assigning Loy in their classes. They are now too many to mention, but this book was prepared largely with them in mind. Kenneth Fields and Virginia Kouidis wrote their dissertations on Loy at a time when it was even more courageous to do so than it is now. Kouidis's monograph on Mina Loy was the first book published on the poet and remains a useful introduction to the life and work. I have learned from Rachel Blau DuPlessis's criticism on Loy. More recently, Marjorie Perloff has been writing about Loy; her attention is not only noticed but needed.

No words can express the value I place on my friendships with Mina Loy's daughters, Joella Bayer and Fabienne Benedict, nor could my work on Loy have begun or continued in as satisfying a way without them. I miss their husbands, Herbert Bayer and Fritz Benedict, who were always present during our early meetings and who had wonderful stories to relate about “Mama Mina.”

In the late 1970s I approached Jonathan Williams with a proposal for putting together a centennial edition of Mina Loy's poems, aware that, twenty years earlier, he was the only publisher in America astute or brave enough to bring out a book of her poems. She was still alive at the time and encouraged him not to be depressed when the book didn't get the attention he thought it deserved. Without those editions, this one would not exist. Jonathan deserves a medal for his support of lost voices and poetic causes. I hope he sees the publication of this book as a validation of his efforts.

I would like to thank my editors at Farrar Straus Giroux—Jonathan Galassi, Paul Elie, and Lynn Warshow. I have been in the editing business a long time, but I have learned something new from each of them.

Poet Thom Gunn is perhaps Mina Loy's most able reader. I realized this only when we gave a reading together in New York last year. I thank him for his generous suggestions and corrections, and for his own poetry. Jim Powell I have never met, but he is also among the poets, after Kenneth Rexroth and Gunn, who have most consistently advocated for Mina Loy, and among the critics whose readings and e-mail messages I have most benefited from. Jerome Rothenberg and Eliot Weinberger are two others whose support of Loy has made a difference.

Francis Naumann and Terry Keller know how much they have done to help me in the fine-tuning of this edition. I am extremely grateful to both of them, Terry for her unparalleled vocabulary and Francis for his archive and memory. Michael Barson provided me with answers to several nocturnal questions I could have addressed to no one else. Cita Scott, Martica Sawin, Thomas Redshaw, Joseph Rykwert, Robert Bertholf, and Steven Watson did the same. My interest in and knowlege of poetry owes much to Harry George, who elects to remain an unknown poet but who I hope will one day choose to publish his work, or to produce an edition of the work of Louis Coxe, who taught him. Laurence Cohen solved a number of editorial riddles for me, and Thomas Clayton provided some. I thank them both. Keith Tuma supplied a comment that was most important when I was almost ready to give up on the notes. I have also profited from his writing on Loy. Lisa Jacobs made some unexpected discoveries pertaining to Mina Loy along the way.

Virginia Conover, John Unterecker, and Donald Hendrie, Jr., are now gone, but will always be in the background of anything I write, as will my sister and brothers, and father, all of whom I treasure. It helped, when I wondered who would be listening, to imagine certain friends reading this book: Sabina Engel, Serge Fauchereau, Kurt Forster, Lyman Gilmore, George Hersey, John Irving, Damon Krukowski, Alberto Perez-Gomez, Irma Romero, Cristina Sanmartin. It also helped to know that other friends would still be there whether I ever finished editing or not, like Kenn Guimond, Jim Sterling, Jack Montgomery, and Krzysztof Wodiczko.

Suzanne Tise knows her contribution.

Without the cooperation of Patricia Willis, curator of the Yale Collection of American Literature at Yale's Beinecke Library, and her predecessor, Donald Gallup, neither this edition nor my many visits to that fabulous resource would have been as rich.

*   *   *

Now for the magic part. My two sons, Case and Strand, are the deep poetry of my life, and have forgiven me more weekend ski passes and morning soccer practices than I would like to acknowledge in order to complete this book. I hope they know I would rather have been with them. The other magic part: Anna Ginn has been this book's longest and closest companion. She knows everything about the other woman—Mina Loy—who shares our house, and has participated in the intimate details of this project more than anyone else. She has also been a better editor, critic, fact checker, and proofreader than any I have ever paid. And in much larger ways than these, she has made the completion of this book possible. The simplest words are saved for last, and said with the most love: Thank you, Anna. Thank you, boys.

R.L.C.

 

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Introduction and edition copyright © 1996 by Roger L. Conover

Works of Mina Loy copyright © 1996 by the Estate of Mina Loy

All rights reserved

Published in 1996 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First paperback edition, 1997

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Paperback ISBN-13: 978-0-374-52507-1

Paperback ISBN-10: 0-374-52507-2

www.fsgbooks.com

FRONTISPIECE

Mina Loy, 1909. Stephen Haweis photograph

eISBN 9781466890046

First eBook edition: December 2014