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New Explorations of Mina Loy's Ekphrastic Poetry

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New Explorations of Mina Loy's Ekphrastic Poetry New Explorations of Mina Loy’s Ekphrastic Poetry by Sara Dunton BA Honours English, UNB, 2009 A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of MA In the Graduate Academic Unit of English Supervisor: Demetres Tryphonopoulos, PhD (English) Examining Board: Mary Rimmer, PhD (English) Anthony Tremblay, PhD (English) Theodore Christou, PhD (Education) This thesis is accepted by the Dean of Graduate Studies THE UNIVERSITY OF NEW BRUNSWICK July, 2011 © Sara Dunton, 2011 Library and Archives Bibliotheque et Canada Archives Canada Published Heritage Direction du 1+1Branch Patrimoine de I'edition 395 Wellington Street 395, rue Wellington Ottawa ON K1A0N4 Ottawa ON K1A 0N4 Canada Canada Your file Votre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-91814-2 Our file Notre reference ISBN: 978-0-494-91814-2 NOTICE: AVIS: The author has granted a non­ L'auteur a accorde une licence non exclusive exclusive license allowing Library and permettant a la Bibliotheque et Archives Archives Canada to reproduce, Canada de reproduire, publier, archiver, publish, archive, preserve, conserve, sauvegarder, conserver, transmettre au public communicate to the public by par telecommunication ou par I'lnternet, preter, telecommunication or on the Internet, distribuer et vendre des theses partout dans le loan, distrbute and sell theses monde, a des fins commerciales ou autres, sur worldwide, for commercial or non­ support microforme, papier, electronique et/ou commercial purposes, in microform, autres formats. paper, electronic and/or any other formats. The author retains copyright L'auteur conserve la propriete du droit d'auteur ownership and moral rights in this et des droits moraux qui protege cette these. Ni thesis. Neither the thesis nor la these ni des extraits substantiels de celle-ci substantial extracts from it may be ne doivent etre imprimes ou autrement printed or otherwise reproduced reproduits sans son autorisation. without the author's permission. In compliance with the Canadian Conformement a la loi canadienne sur la Privacy Act some supporting forms protection de la vie privee, quelques may have been removed from this formulaires secondaires ont ete enleves de thesis. cette these. While these forms may be included Bien que ces formulaires aient inclus dans in the document page count, their la pagination, il n'y aura aucun contenu removal does not represent any loss manquant. of content from the thesis. Canada Abstract These explorations of Mina Loy’s ekphrastic work include close readings of three poems, written in the early 1920s, juxtaposed with images of the art objects they describe. The framework of reference for this examination is built upon the cultural contexts of Anglo-American modernism, particularly the contents of the “little magazines” that thrived during the 1910s and 1920s and featured leading visual artists, writers and theorists. Loy’s controversial contributions to those publications, her intense affiliation with the American avant-garde, and her training as a painter, lend credence to her selection of the ekphrastic mode. By examining each poem beside the image it addresses, and alongside other artwork relevant to Loy, this thesis presents a critical assessment of the radical movements of Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism that engrossed the poet and her contemporaries. Her astute (and ironic) deployment of the traditional ekphrastic mode, delivered in characteristically compressed modem verse, contains a cryptic commentary on the tenuous nature of abstraction and fragmentation. Scholarship in literary modernism revived Loy’s work in the 1980s to extol her feminist sensibility, and recent attention has been paid to her importance as an active member of a cultural revolution. The significance of her ekphrastic poetry, however, has been underappreciated, and deserves closer study, so that her voice can be added to the ongoing discourse on the paradoxical modernist mission to “make it new.” Dedication To my patient and supportive husband, Gerry Chevrier, and our children, Emily and Daniel. Preface In this thesis I position modernist Mina Loy inside her engagement with the art movements of the 1910s to determine how visual aesthetics and cultural contexts underpinned her ekphrastic poetry of the 1920s. I speculate that Loy effectively curated the three-way experience that ekphrasis facilitates between artist, art object and audience, to present a nuanced commentary on modernist tenets. My own discovery of Loy’s work was, in itself, an inspiring ekphrastic encounter: when I first read Loy’s poem “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” I had studied Brancusi and could envision his sculpture, but I understood little about poetic structure and knew nothing about Loy. My own frame of reference, as an interior designer, had been built by the instruction of modernist theorists and practitioners. Not surprisingly, their teaching of design history was focused on visual art and architecture, and the notion of integrating literary history into an already demanding curriculum was never considered. Now, happily, thirty years later, I am able to investigate the design of modernist poetry within its cultural contexts. In the same thirty-year span of time, although scholarship in literary modernism has restored Loy’s relevance, I believe it has neglected her ekphrastic poetry. A deep reserve of references to her modernist cohort of poets, aesthetic theorists and visual artists is contained within this particular body of Loy’s work, making it well suited to today’s methods of inter-textual and cross-textual investigation. Loy’s deployment of the ekphrastic mode is pointedly self-referential. Trained as a painter, Loy naturally gravitated to expressions of ekphrasis—those meant “to evoke an image in the mind’s eye as intense as if the described object were actually before the reader” (Cuddon 252). Poetic explorations of art objects certainly aligned with her dual creative impulses; but they also addressed the declared mission of early modernism, to “make it new,” which united artists and writers in their pursuit of abstract forms of expression. In the 1910s, Loy’s pared-down poetic style and keen attention to the visual nature of text were daring manifestations of this mission. Her compressed ekphrastic poems from the 1920s reflect not only her continued theoretical engagement with this pursuit, but also her active involvement with the radical art movements of Cubism, Futurism, and Dadaism, which had vehemently instigated die rejection of past traditions and conventions. I contend that Loy understood that ekphrasis was profoundly relevant to the modernist experience because it simultaneously heralded and challenged these instigations. Loy deftly demonstrates that the ekphrastic poem, despite its traditional origins, can become a modem object of cultural significance. Loy herself exerted a brief, but brilliant, impact on the Anglo-American avant- garde culture of the 1910s and 1920s. By the 1930s, critical discourse on her work came to a halt, and this cessation effectively confined her to that epoch. Unlike her contemporary Marianne Moore, who continued to write poetry until her death in 1972, and retained a high public profile, Loy slipped into relative obscurity. The omission of her work from the canon of Anglo-American modernist literature was undeserved, certainly, but understandable given the dominance of the male modernist giants—Eliot, Pound, Williams, Stevens, to name but a few—whose work garnered the most attention well into the 1980s. That dominance, as feminist critics Virginia Kouidis and Carolyn Burke rightly argued, was due to the masculinist bias of modernist studies of poetry. Their recovery of Loy’s work, along with the concerted efforts of Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Marissa Januzzi, and Roger Conover, revived interest in her distinct poetics. During the 1980s, Burke offered perhaps the most in-depth reading of modernist women’s poetics, “Getting Spliced: Modernism and Sexual Difference,” which draws critical connections between Loy, Gertrude Stein, and Ezra Pound. Conover produced a revised edition of Loy’s collected works,The Lost Lunar Baedeker (referred to as LLB in this study’s citations), which was published in 1996, and includes previously unpublished poems and a wealth of biographical information and social context derived from his detailed archival research of Loy’s manuscripts and correspondence. In the 1990s, Ellen Keck Stauder published an insightful essay on the “conceptions of art” in the work of Loy and Pound, and a thorough analysis of “Brancusi’s Golden Bird,” one of the very few that has apparently been undertaken. Although both Stauder’s essays investigate the correlation between Loy’s poetics and her affiliations to art movements, neither addresses her use of the ekphrastic mode. In the last decade, critical attention to Loy has aligned with the impetus to examine modernist literary and visual production within cultural contexts defined by technology and marketing, and within a broad range of social contexts including immigration and urbanization. Alex Goody’s study, Modernist Articulations: A Cultural Study o f Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy and Gertrude, Steinsituates Loy well within these contexts, and pays particular attention to her connections to Marcel Duchamp, the pioneer of conceptual art who shared the avant-garde spotlight with Loy. Most recently, Lara Vetter has centered her study, Modernist Writings and Religio-scientific Discourse, on Loy, H.D. and Jean Toomer, and offers close readings of Loy’s poems that
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