Karla Kelsey, Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy

 

Mina Loy. Not her birth name Mina Gertrude Lowy, or Löwy, depending on the scholar, or the flourish. Not her married name, Mrs. Stephen Haweis, or her nickname, Dusie, but “Loy”—the name she’d chosen to exhibit under since her first public success as an artist in the 1904 Salon d’Automne. The name under which her first published writing, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” will appear in Alfred Stieglitz’s journal, Camera Work, in 1914.

Photographs of Mina Loy are Mina Loy, have become Mina Loy. Glossy black-and-white inserts of Haweis’s photos—a touch of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, James McNeill Whistler, and Edward Burne-Jones—are joined by those taken by Man Ray, Berenice Abbott, and Lee Miller in Carolyn Burke’s Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy, published in hardcover by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 1996. And then paperback by the University of California Press in 1997. Stacked at the front of bookstores and years later appointed the best place among the remainders, Loy looks out from the cover as she leans toward the small bronze statue she cradles in her left hand, eyes catching Haweis’s camera sidelong. A pleasant blouse, hair pulled softly back. Also in 1996, The Lost Lunar Baedecker, selected poems edited by Rober L. Conover, is published by FSG, and for the first time Loy’s poetry reaches a wide audience. Here she poses for Man Ray in profile. A thermometer she’s fashioned into an earring dangles from her ear. Eyes closed, she tilts her head toward the light.

I’d been curious about this recently-published self-described fiction/biography by American writer and editor Karla Kelsey [see my review here of one her poetry titles], her Transcendental Factory: For Mina Loy (Winter Editions, 2024), a book that offers this further description on the back cover: “Combining experimental biography with fiction and fact, poet Karla Kelsey’s lyric-documentary rendezvous with iconoclastic writer and visual artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) creates a resonating space for the lost and undocumented.” Through her detailed exploration and excavation of the legendary, almost mythical, figure of Mina Loy, Kelsey is clearly aware of how portraits are shaped, prepared, and made, framed and crafted, her own narrative swirling around an impossible centre that suggests itself too evasive to properly capture. Structured across eleven chapters, each of which is titled a different year from 1886 to 1965, Kelsey composes her biography out-of-sequence, focusing on moments in time and their interplay, allowing the story to almost unfold as ripples out from a single moment. The book opens with a chapter titled “1905,” that has Loy in a photography studio: “Twenty-three-year-old Mina Loy poses as Mrs. Stephen Haweis, the artist’s artistic wife. She sits before an easel wearing a print dress, black belt, and straw hat she’d bedecked with enormous rosebuds.” Kelsey begins with an image of Loy that is crafted, curated, by another, with the full participation of Loy herself; one that allows for a shimmering effect, far more performative than documentary in purpose. From this moment of artifice, Kelsey begins. Two paragraphs later:

A third photograph captures Loy from the bust up. She’s pinned her paisley-patterrned robe to make of her bare chest a white diamond while artfully covering her breasts. She looks in sharp profile to the right, hair Athena-coiled atop her head and tied with a floral scarf. Budapest means British Empire. Elegant, bohemian, so “Loy (Mlle Mina), née à Hampstead (Àngle-terre), Anglaise”—as she’s listed in the catalogue for the 1905 Salon d’Automne above the titles of the four portraits she exhibits. Found on a Weebly site, someone’s school project on Loy, with tarot cards and a map of the Arno, this photo is my favorite, but—unattributed and without citation—it might not be of Loy at all.

I would argue slightly with the description of the book, as Kelsey’s approach to the whole project is reminiscent of other titles also blending non-fiction research with a kind of lyric memoir, specifically Ottawa writer Elizabeth Hay’s Captivity Tales: Canadians in New York (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 1993) and Montreal writer Gail Scott’s Furniture Music: A Northern in Manhattan: Poets/Politics [2008-2012] (Seattle/New York: Wave Books, 2023) [see my piece on such here]. While someone, whether publisher or author, might suggest Kelsey’s work sits under “Fiction/Biography,” Transcendental Factory reads firmly set within the genre of creative non-fiction, a genre in which the author is not a distant narrator, separate from the action, but one deeply engaged within the narrative of the story. Early in the fifth chapter, “1925,” Kelsey writes:

I don my faux Turkish fox over an unseasonably thin dress to create a Mina Loy—or Myrna Loy—type woman. Psychically I’m all Hannah Höch collage, machine arms stuck to a Siren’s body. While the interior remains private, for the outfit to work does it matter whether I style myself as Mina Loy, born December 27, 1882, with the name Mina Gertrude Lowy in a North London suburb or as Myrna Loy, born August 2, 1905, as Myrna Adele Williams in Helena, Montana? In her early twenties Williams changed her last name to Loy at the suggestion of a wild Russian writer who’d found his way to Hollywood. This man, let us call him Sasha, let us give him a shock of white hair and sand-colored eyes, could have been Mina Loy’s lover when, after a summer in Vienna, 1922—sketching Freud’s portrait as he read some of her prose—she moves to Berlin and stays there until relocating to Paris in spring of 1923.

I’m charmed by the music, the lyric, of Kelsey’s prose, all highly deliberate through such luscious sweep and gesture; the prose is reminiscent of how Isaac Jarnot originally worked chapters of their biography of Robert Duncan, well before the multiple-year peer-reviewed process appeared to smooth over the remarkable music to land as Robert Duncan, The Ambassador from Venus: A Biography (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2012). “Loy’s Jemima,” Kelsey writes, “thought to be a self-portrait and shown in London at the New English Art Club’s 1910 summer exhibition, will be lost. Also from circa 1910, Ladies at Tea is lost, Ladies Watching a Ballet is lost, Ladies Fishing is lost, Heart Shop is lost, The Little Carnival is lost, Voyageurs is lost. Lost, lost— [.]” Kelsey offers a biography of depictions and smoke, often articulating a particular lack of archival information by detailing all that surrounds it, offering details and surrounding context so fine that the contours of Loy’s story can’t help but find definition. She digs deep into all that there is to uncover and decipher, but there is still, as Kelsey suggests, so much of Loy’s narrative that is missing; too much of Loy’s image defined by the works and depictions of those that surrounded her, certain of which remains incomplete, contradictory and even incorrect (including the portrait on the book’s cover, long attributed to be of Loy but actually, as Kelsey learns through her research, of American actress Evelyn Brent, circa 1920). Kelsey works through such wonderful prose across research, informed speculation, conjecture and intricate wanderings across and around her subject, providing paragraphs of context around what else was happening during those same years as Loy, as important to her story as those bare facts of her life, of which there are too few. Early in chapter “1965,” for example, she offers one of a number of passages that provide a broader context from which Loy can’t help but exist in the world alongside and within, whether directly or indirectly. As the passage begins:

In 1965 the US increases military forces in South Vietnam and begins Operation Rolling Thunder, an aerial bombardment campaign over North Vietnam which will last until 1968, killing more than fifty-two thousand people. In 1965 most of Congress and much of the US support the war, although tens of thousands attend the antiwar teach-in at the University of California at Berkeley. Half the population of the US is under twenty-five. Eva Hesse is awarded a year-long fellowship in an abandoned textile factory in Germany and begins to move into the three-dimensional space of found objects and papier-mâché. By the end of her residency, she will consider herself a sculptor. Carolee Schneemann teaches herself how to make films.

The publication of Transcendental Factory follows close on the heels of Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy, edited by Karla Kelsey (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 2024), a pairing that offers an echo to Ianthe Brautigan’s memoir of her late father, Richard Brautigan, You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoir (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001) alongside the posthumous appearance of Richard Brautigan’s final novel, An Unfortunate Woman (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2001), two years after a third title, Brautigan’s long-lost volume, The Edna Webster Collection of Undiscovered Writings (Mariner Books, 1999). For best effect, one might suppose, these titles appear in clusters, to catch the attention. Are you paying attention?

Karla Kelsey, A Conjoined Book

Trumpet vine to maple branch lashed. Finch following finch aft the stone wall. The granite statuette stowed away & the wooden door scrapes closed. & I

                                                                                                was your Rose, your Lily, your Loralie dying over & over with the slow pause of an early silver screen, grass gone nickel, skin gone glycerin.

                               & in the corner the shotgun & the emptied urn, rusted urn, the lifting stone where pillbugs curl & hide as heavy in wet wool you leave the scene through the garden door.

                     Under the rubric of excuse is the story in which I was last in a lineage of hunters, the once-seasonal rain that wouldn’t go.

*

Now it was autumn & the end of the year mistaken for mineraled dirt, the time of departure become worn. From the moon’s quarter to its half, rains had fallen & all the hill streams ran in flood. As the piano performs scale after scale the piano becomes exception. (|Insterstitial Weather Remnant:”)

American poet Karla Kelsey’s third trade poetry collection, A Conjoined Book (Omnidawn, 2014), is a conversation between two texts, two poetry collections separately composed that she brought together in a single volume. As she writes in the interview that accompanies the press release:

When, in 2006, I moved to Central Pennsylvania, I never had lived so far east, nor had I—a native of Southern California—ever lived in such a rural area. What struck me first was the enormous beauty of the landscape: all trees and river, I felt I was living inside an emerald. Then I began to learn the environmental trauma the landscape had suffered, and still suffers, from the legacies and traditions of mining, lumbering, and now fracking. Also: there are contradictions in such places where the wide, slow Susquehanna runs idyllically along small farms—but between river and farm container trucks zoom past both Amish horse and buggies and adult bookstores. At one point near Harrisburg the road crests through rounded green hills to a view of Three Mile Island. The first book, AFTERMATH, seeps in this landscape, foregrounding the embodied experience of beauty and rend. There is catastrophe under-tremmoring the book, but it remained unnamed.

After writing AFTERMATH I thought: what if the catastrophe were to be named? What, then, would happen to the language that I have on the page? How would it curve to an “aboutness?” The Grimm brothers’ tale, “The Juniper Tree”—wherein a stepmother kills her step-son and allows her daughter to take the blame—intrigued me because of its savageness, because of its questions of guilt and responsibility. Also, the boy’s bones, buried under the same juniper tree that shades his birth-mother’s grave, transform into a bird that avenges his death—an intriguing metamorphosis of innocence into the agency of the natural.

I re-worked AFTERMATH around this tale with the intention of revision, but in the end I found that I had written a second book, Become Tree, Become Bird. A handful of friends were kind enough to read the two different books and to offer their opinion on which book was stronger. G.C. Waldrep, who shares this Central Pennsylvania landscape, suggested that I put them together. Instantly I loved this idea, for it would foreground what happens when narrative is introduced to landscape and embodied experience. The project became A Conjoined Book.

One can see the resulting texts as a pair of accumulations, a rush of sketched-out notes built in a couplet of books set together in a binary axis (in this case, a binding). How do “AFTERMATH” and “Become Tree, Become Bird” interrelate, and how are they separate enough that they are required to be seen as stand-alone projects? Both projects work and weave their way through a lyric collage of retelling fables and fairy tales, providing physical descriptions and observations of the natural world, and the way memory affects the ways in which we actually remember. The differences, one might suggest, between the two volumes are razor-thin: as the first focuses on perspective/vantages and a series of fables, the second is composed around birds, weather and a series of afterimages. Given that she has titled the first work “AFTERMATH,” and the second section includes a poem such as “Afterimages:” and the series of poems titled “Interstitial Weather Remnant:,” it is as though Kelsey focuses her gaze throughout the two works on what remains after a particular event, whether a trauma, devastation or storm. She writes out the remnants themselves, using the scattered, disparate pieces to shape together into something coherent, complex and remarkably solid. It becomes curious to see Kelsey’s A Conjoined Book adding to an increasing list of recent poetry titles, a number of which have appeared through Omnidawn, dealing with environmental matters, such as Barbara Tomash’s Arboreal (Berkeley CA: Apogee Press, 2014) [see my review of such here], Julie Joosten’s Light Light (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2013) [see my review of such here], Robin Clarke’s Lines the Quarry (Richmond CA: Omnidawn, 2013) [see my review of such here], Brian Teare’s Companion Grasses (Omnidawn, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Ken Belford’s Internodes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2013) [see my review of such here]. As Kelsey writes in “AFTERMATH”:

A collection of wounded

nexuses, antecedents, hollows

for hallowed arms. & the red

torn from my dress from the

trees. & the blue torn from

the wind as a banner as a singular

moment stalled in yellow

banks covered over

with the lightest

of frost. & so gone

to the river & able

for this moment

to have been what was lost.

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Karla Kelsey

Karla Kelsey’s first book, Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary was selected by Carolyn Forché for the 2005 Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize. Iteration Nets, her second book, was published by Ahsahta in 2010. A Conjoined Book is just out from Omnidawn. She edits & writes for The Constant Critic, &, with Aaron McCollough, co-directs SplitLevel Texts.

1 - How did your first book change your life?
Having a book in the world ends up the equivalent of having part of myself in the world in a way that, while being very otherwise than my me, my I, is nevertheless a singular, visceral intensity. I didn’t expect this or, more precisely, I didn’t expect to feel in the world a sort of flesh-made-book, particularly because while my books are of me they are not about me. My first book, Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary, led me to experience that this would be how it is for me.

How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

Preoccupations of perception and form—questions of subjectivity and source: all of these span from Knowledge, Forms, the Aviary to Iteration Nets to A Conjoined Book. So much so that I consider this a trilogy refracting through different formal/project lenses. A Conjoined Book differs in that it overtly works with narrative…the narrative of the Grimm Brothers’ tale The Juniper Tree and narrative as a question.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
This has to do with sound, wind, and dance; being outside and the trees in the same furious fit as the soul, the body used to move essence and emotion into form becomes the poem transmitting these elements as wordy flesh. I have always been acutely aware of a disjunction between narrative and visceral experience and find writing mainly in the space that begins in embodied experience and extends towards—but does not crystallize into—narrative.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
Creative language has little traction for me outside of the context of a project and so whenever I am writing I am writing either from the center of a project or towards such a center. But at the same time I do not begin with a project idea. This confluence has less to do with time than it has to do with shape, form, idea, research, texture. Language comes quickly but finding traction/context for language and training it, as one might espalier a tree, takes focus. Seeing where to cut loose the branch from its form and having the courage to do so requires inspiration and courage.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
In the beginning of a project I am working both angles at once. I can’t imagine thinking of a full project without having language units in the making to guide it. At the same time, short pieces don’t have maximum traction for me until they are placed in the context of a larger whole.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
I feel readings to be essential not only to creative energy, but also to the book. Without public performance the books have a more shadowy experience of being alive in the world. In terms of creative process, I have gotten wonderful ideas from people I encounter at readings…perhaps the ideas are not necessarily for poems, but for teaching, or for thinking about writing and being in a fresh way. While exhausting, going out to give readings always energizes me much, much more than it take a toll.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
My questions include: How can one speak from and out of  and within rather than about? How does language register the affective and cognitive experience of being? What modes of being might be cultivated through poetic processes? –But I don’t know that I am trying to answer these questions. Rather, feel I am trying to exist them more fully.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I try to stay away from “shoulds” as I think they are fairly poisonous to freedom. It is important for there to be many different types of writers who inhabit different kinds of roles. To my mind one of the most important type/role is that of the writer who is passionately engaged with art-making regardless of whether or not culture thinks his/her form of art-making is useful. Such art allows me to question the entrenchment of practicality and to create new forms of thinking and feeling. To do so one has to be willing to be outside of the commerce of usefulness—both as reader/viewer and as writer/artist.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I’ve had two extremely positive experiences with two different editors. Janet Holmes published my first 2 books without many changes and found a way to typeset them in a way that didn’t require compromising the work—which was quite a task. I imagine most editors would have asked me to change the poems to fit the standard size of the book, or to make the typesetting less difficult, and I have always been so enormously grateful that Janet’s approach for these books was to fulfill their visions by giving them the printed form that they required.

For A Conjoined Book Rusty Morrison gave me wonderful editorial feedback on the manuscript and read and responded to the multiple drafts I created in revision. Rusty truly helped me to work the book into the form that it needed to be. Without her input the book would not have ever reached its potential. In working with her I have grown so much as a writer.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
A view of what it might be to work towards inhabiting the possible and the impossible both. At the same time.

10 - How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to critical prose)? What do you see as the appeal?
Critical prose is a struggle and I often think up reasons why I don’t need to write it anymore. Whereas poetry, even when difficult, is a deep, pulsing pleasure and when I am not working on something I am very sad. I suppose critical prose is supposed to be difficult, at least it is supposed to be difficult for me, which is one of its goods in the end: to override the impulse to only do what pleases me. Critical prose is meaningful to me as a way to participate in the larger conversation that ranges around poetry. It is also a way for me to know the books that I write about on a deep-tissue level. Generally, I believe in difficulty as an essential component to a life fully inhabited.

11 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
Writing in the early morning is best—both to keep the writing going and for me to feel more sane as I go about my day. I have often wanted to find ways of carrying writing through the day: little processes or procedures, but these unfortunately usually only last 1 or 2 days at the most when I invent them. Also essential is physical exercise and reading: these activities can’t be separated from my writing life.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I imagine myself to be a sculptor making a series of new forms. What do I need: clay, process, shape. Translated into writing: form, process, and language as a material are the places I turn in a stall.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
Jacaranda trees and a library permeated with salt air. Ginkgo trees—their sex and death—and the must of 19th century houses. Metallic wind off the Danube, wet limestone.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
Place/space greatly influences my work. Whether that space is familiar territory or travel, both natural and architected aspects of the environment are artistically and intellectually formative, stimulating, necessary. Also: music, visual art, performance art, and film are deeply important along with feeling myself to be physically of the world.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Philosophers, theorists, writers who work on reading the architected and natural environment: all of these are essential. Right now I read Wittgenstein on certainty, WJT Mitchell on icons, Costica Bradatan on the intellectual/political history of Russia and Eastern Europe.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Take the train from Moscow to Vladivostok. Absolutely. 

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
I would like to have been a modern dancer and choreographer á la Pina Bausch

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Something else failed and writing delivered me to my particular form of life-making.

19 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
The Spoils of Poynton by Henry James; Au hazard Balthazar by Robert Bresson.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;