Why Mina Loy

I noticed that IG Agent 18 had been on a Mina Loy kick lately and I wanted to know why. These are the notes that came out of that conversation, somewhat tidied but pretty accurate.

Notes On Modernist Poets and Sexuality

There were a lot of poets from the early years of the last century in the English language.

I think the male who has aged best out of them all is W.B Yeats, and the reason I think is sex.

Elliott it would have been reasonable to speculate if he were a virgin, Pound got laid but he resented women for it.

Since Ezra Pound is a stupid prick — a digression

Think about the Poems of Pound from that time —

Portrait d’une Femme By Ezra Pound

Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea, London has swept about you this score years And bright ships left you this or that in fee: Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things, Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price. Great minds have sought you — lacking someone else. You have been second always. Tragical? No. You preferred it to the usual thing: One dull man, dulling and uxorious, One average mind — with one thought less, each year. Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit Hours, where something might have floated up. And now you pay one. Yes, you richly pay. You are a person of some interest, one comes to you And takes strange gain away: Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion; Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale for two, Pregnant with mandrakes, or with something else That might prove useful and yet never proves, That never fits a corner or shows use, Or finds its hour upon the loom of days: The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work; Idols and ambergris and rare inlays, These are your riches, your great store; and yet For all this sea-hoard of deciduous things, Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff: In the slow float of differing light and deep, No! there is nothing! In the whole and all, Nothing that’s quite your own. Yet this is you.

Ladies

By Ezra Pound

Agathas

Four and forty lovers had Agathas in the old days,

All of whom she refused;

And now she turns to me seeking love,

And her hair also is turning.

Young Lady

I have fed your lar with poppies,

I have adored you for three full years;

And now you grumble because your dress does not fit

And because I happen to say so.

Lesbia Illa

Memnon, Memnon, that lady

Who used to walk about amongst us

With such gracious uncertainty,

Is now wedded

To a British householder.

Lugete, Veneres! Lugete, Cupidinesque!

Passing

Flawless as Aphrodite,

Thoroughly beautiful,

Brainless,

The faint odor of your patchouli,

Faint, almost, as the lines of cruelty about your chin,

Assails me, and concerns me almost as little.

Shop Girl

by Ezra Pound

For a moment she rested against me Like a swallow half blown to the wall, And they talk of Swinburne’s women, And the shepherdess meeting with Guido. And the harlots of Baudelaire.

That last one is probably the nicest thing Ezra Pound ever said about a woman, that she was like a harlot of Baudelaire.

Ok, being facetious here, but really he seems like a guy who had sex with women and hated every woman he had sex with.

To paraphrase Clarke, and create a new dictum: “Any Sufficiently advanced form of hatred is indistinguishable from stupidity” and Pound was probably the stupidest person to ever be applauded for the quality of their verse.

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!

Elliot’s status as the most annoyingly asexual old spinster in the Anglican church is pretty well known, even this century later.

To be polite — Elliot seems like a guy who disliked women because he didn’t know how to relate to them sexually. I know this is not the case, exactly, because he evidently had sex, but the usual perception of him is of someone relatively inhibited.

Just like the hair styles and slang of the past can seem ridiculous these poets have a very 1920s sound when it comes to femininity and sex, and in a world with widespread and liberal sexuality both blushing and aggression are disagreeable.

It can be annoying to read Elliot and suddenly he gets turned on by something and you get a vision of his sitting in room watching the women come and go, red cheeked and huffing a bit in excitement.

So unfortunately the attitudes of the poets here mean that they cannot be taken easily in, in the same way that Wordsworth getting ecstatic for hours about hiking on some hills seems tedious.

Of the the major poets of that time writing important poetry in English, who liked and respected women and could write about them in. sexual manner was Yeats, sure he lived in a misogynistic society and so he had some attitudes but you could hear it in the things he said that he knew women he considered his equals.

That he liked having sex with women, and he liked the women he had sex with (generally)

So from the standpoint of Sex Pound and Elliot are no longer tolerable, they are greatly diminished in the respect afforded them as a consequence, while Yeats is still, I think, quite worth the effort.

Mina Loy and Sex

To quote from her poem “Love Songs” also known as Songs to Joannes.

We might have coupled

In the bed-ridden monopoly of a moment

Or broken flesh with one another

At the profane communion table

Where wine is spill’t on promiscuous lips

We might have given birth to a butterfly

With the daily-news

Printed in blood on its wings

So — the thing I like about Mina Loy is — there’s another person from that time who is writing in English, doing interesting work, and isn’t a total idiot when in comes to sex.

This article was submitted by IG Agent 31, based on notes from conversation with IG Agent 18.

There were some extra parts regarding Epic poetry and how much of a jerk Ezra Pound was that are perhaps to be used in another article.

Other relevant articles