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?

Genevieve Kaplan, (aviary)

The pattern of their beating wings

the instinct is to hurry as the light fades

which is the pattern of their bearing

the pattern (the arc) left behind by its beating

its proud head. it watches and it’s shunned (it leaps

but can’t fly) (footsteps and they all flew). one poses

on each branch, one keeps

its feet

Southern California poet Genevieve Kaplan’s latest is the full-length poetry collection (aviary) (El Paso TX: Veliz Books, 2020), following her full-length debut, In the ice house (Red Hen Press, 2011), as well as the chapbooks In an aviary (Grey Book Press, 2016), travelogue (Dancing Girl, 2016), and settings for these scenes (Convulsive Editions, 2013). Composed amid parenthesis, Kaplan’s (aviary) writes in and around the margins of containment, from imprisonment to safekeeping, wrapped around a consideration of both birds and women as requiring protection, unable to do more than preen, pose and sing. All of this, of course, takes on new and further meanings, given the current state of affairs via the global Covid-19 pandemic. “it is the undeveloped (dead) / the lost there,” she writes, as part of “I’m the moment it begins,” continuing: “the desire / against the fence, beneath / the tree. we were all struggling / we were looking for something / together. an evening, a holding /a tree top, a vantage point / (to better understand the workings / of the system).” Kaplan writes on birds and the garden, writing out both in great detail, constructed from a process of rebuilding upon the work of American poet Mina Loy (1882-1966), as she writes in the endnote to her collection, “PROCESS NOTE”:

Early on in my process of conceptualizing these poems, Mina Loy’s short prose poem “Ladies in an Aviary” leapt onto my desk to suggest itself as an organizing principle, a happy coincidence, a difficult imagination, a devastating image. Loy’s description of women whose “breasts are pouting” (line 1), posing as prize birds inside a cage, watched by onlookers, and waiting for men to select and adorn them, as “love…’tis a woman’s whole existence” (line 12), resonated with the themes of enclosure and identification with the natural world already echoing through my work. As gardens and natural enclosures—the location of the poems in my series—are often considered feminine or feminized spaces, I appreciated that Loy’s poem, with its “sugar of fictitious values” (line 5) and its “nasty sweep of feathers” (line 16), added both recognition and scathing assessment of such a space.

I found Loy’s prose poem compelling, engaging, and strange. In Loy’s words I also discovered possibilities for extending my own language. I use two main methods to incorporate language from her “Ladies in an Aviary.” The first is akin to collage: erasing, alphabetizing, re-arranging, and otherwise permutating Loy’s language to create new poems. My poem “(ladies in an aviary)” is composed by alphabetizing all the words in Loy’s “Ladies…,” making four columns of the alphabetized language, and creating a new poem by reading across those columns. A latter poem, “(vary),” uses a similar permutation, working through Loy’s language alphabetically—and selectively—beginning with “aviary” and ending with “sugar.” These processes highlight elements of Loy’s composition, like the repeated use of the word “sugar,” or the distinctiveness of certain letters and sounds. When Loy’s “man who / brings sugar to the cage” (lines 3-4) becomes my “man, man, massive” (line 17), the man takes on figurative weight, becomes imposing, and in juxtaposition with the previous line “love, lovely, lump” (16), sexual. In other Loy-languaged poems in this series I continue using methods of repetition and variation, curated omission, and visual erasure procedures.

(aviary) is a suite of poems constructed in bursts and fragment, recombination and allusion, and the shape of her book-length suite is reminiscent of how American poet Deborah Poe has also shaped some of her own poetry collections: from the allusive, the fragment and the lyric burst, stretching across a sequence of lines that reach out, turn, continue. As she writes to end the poem “Of the tree in the path”: “the last gasp of the trail / the path, the number of women here, that you / couldn’t help but know. act, drag, the casting / of the wind (too delicate, dear) to rustle much / of such a tree [.]”

m a n y _ g e n d e r e d _ m o t h e r s : f o u r _ r e c e n t _ e s s a y s

many gendered mothers is a project on literary influence featuring short essays by writers (of any/all genders) on the women, femme, trans, and non-binary writers who have influenced them, as a direct or indirect literary forebear.

This project is directly inspired by the American website Literary Mothers, created by editor Nadxieli Nieto and managing editor Nina Puro. While we hope that Literary Mothers might eventually return to posting new pieces, our site was created as an extension and furthering of their project (in homage, if you will), and not meant as any kind of replacement.

We've now eight essays posted! Our most recent include:

Susan Rudy on Nicole Brossard

Emily Izsak on Mina Loy

Evelyn Deshane on Angela Carter

Laura Mars on Daphne Marlatt

Please check out our submissions page for more information.

Forthcoming essays include: Robin Richardson on Anne Frank, Elee Kraljii Gardiner on Betsy Warland, Jane Eaton Hamilton on Ntozake Shange, Jennifer LoveGrove on Libby Scheier and Ian Whistle on Judith Copithorne.

Ongoing notes: the dusie kollektiv,

Between the mail strike, my massive move, and the slow trickle of whatever chapbooks remain of the ninety-some to eventually appear, it has been a while since I've gone through another small stack of dusie chapbooks. 

Here are three of the most recent to appear, in one of my various mailboxes over the past few weeks.

Portland, OR: Jared Hayes' into the furrows (2011) describes itself as “an experimental collage,” merging texts by Paul Celan and Hélène Cixous, and “structures: by Jacques Lacan, John Cage, Alice Notley and Louis Zukofsky.

(I will begin with) its

youngest leaf (writing changes languages)

from its crumb (you will

have recognized it) probe for

(the line that makes them

vibrate) into the furrows (perhaps

you were going) the roof

over us (I write) there

(in addition to this) wrote

(how could I not be)

According to a bio online, Hayes previously particiated in dusie with a “chapbook homage to Ted Berrigan,” his RecollecTed (2006), suggestion an ongoing relationship with recombinating texts by established wrters, and I would be interested in seeing, perhaps, Hayes' work in a larger context, whether a larger project or some kind of poetic statement by the author. The structure is interesting, a variation of which has also been worked by a number of other writers including Margaret Christakos, Gregory Betts and Pearl Pirie, but I would like to see something more.

(there to the) astralflute from

(otherwise) fire the deep (beneath

this book had lived) remembrance

too (I could imagine) blue

black memory (I could imagine)

past start throw-dives (the commonplace)

a delusion (I escape myself

death) an unnamed up which

(back to life) dredge up

after (I am telling you)

Palo Alto, CA: Between Palo Alto, California and Bloomington, Indiana come Bronwen Tate and Ming Holden's the loss letters (2011), a call-and-response collaboration, responding to forms, other writers, each other and their daily situations. As the colophon writes, “These poems were written and emailed (mostly in Palo Alto, California and Bloomington, Indiana) on the dates that accompany them in compliance (mostly) with the following guidelines: Follow the order of forms. Reply within 48 hours. No non-poem communication. The poem is the message.”

Pantoum of Waiting for a Heartbeat [BT. 11.04.10]

There's nothing I can do

and I am doing it.

I eat brown rice,

pretend to sip my wine.

And I am doing it,

trying not to count days.

Pretend to sip my wine,

walk three miles each morning.

Trying not to count days,

I still think five weeks tomorrow.

Walk three miles each morning,

write the dissertation.

I still think five weeks tomorrow.

I eat brown rice,

write the dissertation.

There's nothing I can do.

There is some magnificent interplay between the poems, each piece taking a lead from the one before, two poets engaged in a real conversation that allows space for sestinas, pantoums, ghazals, sonnets and villanelles, and Mina Loy, Gertrude Stein, Orlando and Buddha. Not every piece might entirely work, but the highlights make the entire journey worthwhile, and this small publication a compelling sequence of correspondence between two poets.

I am always wary of presuming overtly what is merely suggested, as far as the lives of the authors are concerned. There is a loss here, losses writ about, but unclear where the poems begin and the biographies end, especially when Tate's biography ends with the line, “If you miscarry or have miscarried and walk to talk to someone, you can email her at dormiveglia@gmail.com.”

Sonnet for You [MH. 1.3.11]

I wonder who it is that listens in

When skies inside our skulls fill up with rain.

Thudding to the ground, a severed fin,

A rosebud falls before it blooms again.

Who is it that would give us wings, then clip them?

By accident or malice, it still burns.

Torn out of us by someone who would rip them,

Our dreams take form then drop like stones by turns.

Sister, you need not have strength, faith, or hope.

To breathe is all I ask of you tonight.

You can lie still while thoughts of velvet rope

Binds you to the bed of nothing right.

But as you have for me, know that I'm listening.

That's the orb remaining, certain, glistening.

Berkeley CA: There is something magnificent about the play in Catherine Meng's long poem, I'M NOT WRITING PURE WAR THIS IS A GROCERY LIST (2011), writing across the page in a way that is difficult to replicate in such a post, writing: “the company name / a shore / a shoe a shoehorn / an octopus / exterior filtered through our liver / our lungs / our hung dog faces / our rag rugs / our place mats / our places.”

There are too few poets who really understand how to use space across the page, or how to work a political poem without ranting or becoming pedantic, but Meng manages to be compelling on both fronts, wrapping her poem across the full page in a way that probably sounds magnificent at a reading, as she writes: “he put the whole world / in his mouth / not long after / poetry left the page / where it was to begin / not either/or / but and/or / I put the whole world / in my mouth & / coughitbackup.”