The Lost Lunar Baedeker (14 page)

TITLES: The titles used in this edition are those that Loy or her editors used when her poems first appeared in magazines or books. For previously unpublished poems, the titles are those found on the latest manuscript versions.

DATES AND ORDER OF POEMS: Unless otherwise stated in the notes, all poems are arranged in the order of composition within each section. The texts in Section V and the appendices are independently dated. Sections I, III, and IV correspond roughly to early, middle, and late stages of the poet's career. When Loy dated a manuscript herself, this is stated. When the date of composition is conjectural, this is indicated by the abbreviation
ca.,
for
circa
(e.g., ca. 1927). Conjectural dates are reasonable surmises based on internal references or external evidence, such as correspondence. Where neither conjectural nor actual dating is possible, the date of composition is “unknown” and the poem is placed according to the date of its first publication.

SELECTION OF POEMS: This book contains all but ten poems published during Mina Loy's lifetime, or about two-thirds of the poems she wrote—a more complete view of her work than readers ever had when she was alive. This selection includes all the poems which received any serious critical attention, with one exception, and many which did not. The publisher's parameters for this edition made it impossible to include Loy's longest poem, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose.” This mock-heroic autobiographical “epic” was first published serially between 1923 and 1925, and was collected for the first time in
The Last Lunar Baedeker
(1982). Jerome Rothenberg has referred to it as “one of the lost master-poems of the twentieth century.” Jim Powell considers it “a
major
contribution to the ‘High Modernist' effort to recapture social and social-psychological portraiture from the novel through the formal device of the poetic
sequence.
” Yet this poem remains little recognized. It is probably the single most important missing feature in the landscape of the modernist long poem, and deserves consideration alongside such canonical works as
The Waste Land, Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, A, The Bridge, Paterson, Briggflatts, The Comedian as the Letter C,
the
Cantos,
and
The Maximus Poems.

I am still not completely comfortable with its exclusion. But to have included “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” would have meant relinquishing half the poems presently included or sacrificing the notes; it would have transformed this edition from a generous selection into something altogether different:
Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose and Other Poems.
I considered excerpting some of its most arresting sections, such as “The Surprise,” “Illumination,” “Contraction,” and “Religious Introduction.” But this would have meant trading in the architecture for a few bricks. I decided instead to seek separate publication of the entire text.

BASIS OF TEXTS: The texts in this edition come primarily from three sources: the periodicals in which they first appeared; Mina Loy's first book,
Lunar Baedeker
(1923); and the manuscripts preserved in the Collection of American Literature at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. The notes indicate which source I have chosen as the copy-text for each poem. Because neither manuscripts nor printer's copies exist for so many indispensable texts that Loy or her agents committed to publication, both in magazine and book form, I have followed first published appearances in the case of almost all texts published during Loy's lifetime. In the cases of poems published posthumously or appearing here for the first time, I have gone back to the manuscript sources.

I include a number of texts which first appeared in periodicals for which manuscript texts do exist. While I have occasionally (e.g., “Parturition”) waived the printed text in favor of manuscript readings, I do so only if there is evidence of editorial mishandling, authorial preference, or authorial objection to a local word, punctuation, or line. Such changes are recorded as emendations in the notes.

All poems which appeared first in
Lunar Baedeker
(1923) are included in this edition, and their publication in that volume is noted. But they serve as copy-texts only if their appearance in
Lunar Baedeker
also marked their first print appearance. Some poems included in this edition are at variance with the versions printed in
Lunar Baedeker and Time Tables
(1958) and
The Last Lunar Baedeker
(1982). The texts of the present edition are the preferred ones in all such instances.

No reader in the 1990s can experience these poems as Loy's contemporaries did when they first encountered her bold dashes crackling like Morse code across the pages of little magazines in the years before World War I. Then they were shocking examples of a new species of verse written in the spirit of a new literary ethos. Now they are part of the historical free-verse movement. But we can come closer to imagining that sensation if we read the same texts. So even if we cannot say with certainty, given the archival gaps, that these are the poet's final versions of her texts, their authenticity is established by virtue of being the texts which gave the public its first vision of Loy.

EMENDATIONS, SPELLING, AND MECHANICS: All editorial changes apart from inconsequential typographical usage deriving from an original publication's house style (such as final periods in titles or ornamental devices between stanzas) have been recorded as emendations in the notes. Unless it is apparent that inconsistencies in spelling, punctuation, or capitalization derive from oversight or unauthorized editorial intervention, I have let the poet's preferences stand. Emendations are described in the notes or simply listed. In such cases, the symbol ] separates the emendation (left of ]) from the replaced text (right of ]), usually the first published version.

Loy left England at seventeen and never resumed her formal education. In a series of revealing letters written to her son-in-law, Julien Levy, in the 1930s, she referred to her lack of grammatical training as both a limitation and a defining advantage of her style: “I don't know what a participle is for instance—how can I find out?… Having no knowledge of rules to go by—I feel there's something wrong—& at the same time something right—I can't see it yet from the other side—the reader's side.” By that time she was a competent speaker of English, French, German, and Italian, and could get by in Spanish. She described herself as thinking in “a subconscious muddle of foreign languages” and confessed to having “no notion of what pure English is—although I am intensely aiming at pure language.” British, American, French, German, Italian, and Latin spellings, names, and usages mingle throughout her work, often in the same stanza.

“Colorless” and “odour” appear five lines apart in “Songs to Joannes,” where “coloured” also appears. Elsewhere in that poem, “Forever” and “for ever” occur within the same stanza. These are but a few examples of the many inconsistent spellings I have let stand; I consider them not so much irregularities as essential voiceprints of her citizenship in the planet Language, or, as she described them, vestiges of her “anglo-mongrel” heritage.

Just as she drew upon foreign words, she also favored uncommon words and spellings, loan words, macaronic spellings, etonyms, and slang. It is impossible to read her without a dictionary, or to come away from her poems without wondering where she encountered some of the exotic curios in her lexical cabinet. Words like glumes, benison, baldachin, scholiums, ilix, slaked, froward, gravid, phthisis, cymophanous, sialagogues, agamogenesis, filliping, Peris. Her poetic vocabulary contains many words not found in modern dictionaries; others can be found there, but are designated as archaic, “rare.” Likewise, her spellings are often archaic or have a pseudo-archaic ring: exstacy, quotidienly, frescoe, viscuous, shew, changeant, minnikin, vengence, carrousel.

Loy once told Levy that she had a “subconscious obsession that [she] was being dishonest if [she] ever used a combination of words that had been used before.” She continued: “I was trying to make a foreign language—Because English had already been used by
some
other people.” In the same letter (n.d., 1934?) she explained her “fear of the inner censor condemning me if I ever used the word that
is
in use.” Throughout her career she made deft use of good words that were out of use, and when she couldn't find the word she needed, she created one. Many of her coinages are puns, often used in service of satire: peninsular, bewilderness. Some are of onomatopoetic origin: blurr. Others are nonce words enhancing syllabic occasions, slight variations of recognizable forms or Anglo-French constructions: loquent, exhilarance, pendulence, adjacence. They all stand. Following the copy-texts, I have also allowed nonstandard hyphenation to remain, whenever it is of possible visual or linguistic consequence: to-gether, over-growth.

Finally, I have tried to reproduce the graphic effects of blank spaces, dashes, indentations and inflected capitalizations as found in Loy's publications and manuscripts. Some holograph sources bear indeterminate cursive flicks which do not always have typographic equivalents. The transition from holograph to type or from one house style to another tends to destroy evidence of this sort, and forces the appearance of blank space, the character of letters, and the thickness of dashes to conform to the availability of fonts and the exigencies of a publisher's or printer's typographic methods or in-house conventions. The dash—one of Loy's preferred marks of punctuation—is imprecise and variable in cursive form. In this edition, dashes are generally expressed as em-dashes, unless it is clear that another mark was intended. More details of this nature are reported in Marisa Januzzi's dissertation,
Reconstru[ing] Scar[s]: Mina Loy and the Matter of Modernist Poetics
(Columbia University, forthcoming).

Notes on the Text

The following abbreviations are used in the Notes: