The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy Free

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All rights reserved. Used The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy permission. National Poetry Month. Materials for Teachers Teach This Poem. Poems for Kids. Poetry for Teens. Lesson Plans. Resources for Teachers. Academy of American Poets. American Poets Magazine. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy Find and share the perfect poems. Lunar Baedeker. A silver Lucifer serves cocaine in cornucopia To some somnambulists of adolescent thighs draped in satirical draperies Peris in livery prepare Lethe for posthumous parvenues Delirious Avenues lit with the chandelier souls of infusoria from Pharoah's tombstones lead to mercurial doomsdays Odious oasis in furrowed phosphorous the eye-white sky-light white-light district of lunar lusts Stellectric signs "Wing shows on Starway" "Zodiac carrousel" Cyclones of ecstatic dust and ashes whirl crusaders from hallucinatory citadels of shattered glass into evacuate craters A flock of dreams browse on Necropolis From the shores of oval oceans in the oxidized Orient Onyx-eyed Odalisques and ornithologists observe the flight of Eros obsolete And "Immortality" mildews Moreover, the Moon Face of the skies preside over our wonder. Fluorescent truant of heaven draw us under. Silver, circular corpse your decease infects us with unendurable ease, touching nerve-terminals to thermal icicles Coercive as coma, frail as bloom innuendoes of your inverse dawn suffuse the self; our every corpuscle become an elf. Mina Loy Parallel lines An old man Eyeing a white muslin girl's The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy And all this As pleasant as bewildering Would not eventually meet I am for ever bewildered Old men are often grown greedy— What nonsense It is noon And salvation's seedlings Are headed off for the refectory. Moonrise Will you glimmer on the sea? Will you fling your spear-head On the shore? What note shall we pitch? We have a song, On the bank we share our arrows— The loosed string tells our note: O flight, Bring her swiftly to our song. She is great, We measure her by the pine-trees. Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter. Teach This Poem. Follow Us. Find Poets. Poetry Near You. Jobs for Poets. Read Stanza. Privacy Policy. Press Center. The Walt Whitman Award. James Laughlin Award. Ambroggio Prize. Dear Poet Project. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy by Mina Loy

Mina Loy is not Myrna Loy. The confusion is recurrent. Yes, their names are similar and yes, they were contemporaries, but the mix-up makes an even deeper sense given the two Loys' shared elegance, and the Platonic rightness of imagining the poet ordering and lining up a sequence of martinis while in the company of William Powell. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy point of fact, Mina Loy was not even Mina Loy. While Myrna Loy played on screen with Asta the pedigreed dog, our Loy played with a mongrel language, and she started those games with her name. There is a philosophy here. Names were words, and words were for Loy opportunities. Her dictum seems to have been: no simple words. It's little surprise, then, that the first poem in her first book was misspelled. Thus her first book was Lunar Baedeckerin ; the title recurred with correction as Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables infollowed unswiftly, posthumously, and incorrectly adverbially speaking by The Last Lunar Baedeker in ; today the most reliable collection of her work is The Lost Lunar Baedeker edited by Roger L. Rather than giving us directions on how to navigate the known world, she redirects our attention to another orb entirely: the moon. She begins:. Esses, The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, will rule the poem, and it hisses accordingly. We are in a place whose inhabitants are up to no discernible good, given the presence of a fallen, drug-dealing angel. The poem mixes Biblical and mythological references: Lucifer is followed by Lethe, and some evil Persian fairies:. Whether Lethe is a nymph or the more famous river of forgetfulness that flows through the underworld, the theme of altered states continues. Hence, the Peris are dressed in the accoutrement of servants, and attend upon some recent arrivistes, who however recent their arrival on the social scene, have shown up too late, for they are posthumous. In short, dead. This is Loy being post-humorous, for it makes a certain kind of sense that the beverage one would serve a dead arriviste is amnesia: parvenues can arrive on the scene by obliterating the past. It's perhaps this combination that makes "Lunar Baedeker" a distinctly Loy poem. In bringing the idea of the moon above together with the underworld, she in effect wreaks havoc with any idea that top and bottom, or up and down, are discreet matters. We see this in two ways. First, the poem is something like a satire of personification, turning the basis of the trope on its head. Personification is the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman entities, or even ideas, as when for example a poem apostrophizes death by telling it not to be proud. The players in Loy's drama are however almost exclusively non-human: Lucifer is an angel, Peris are either fairies or elves, and we see Eros zoom overhead not that the poem cares :. We see another instance of Loy's play with personification in the leanest stanza that the poem offers:. By the time the twentieth century gets hold of the word, though, browsing transforms into flipping through a book at once aimlessly and concertedly. Thus Loy is either exploiting the metaphor of a book having leaves, or—tastier still—the idea that when a British student was rusticated think Miltonhe was temporarily expelled from college and returned to the countryside. The image of sheep grazing on a hillside is stripped of any trite pastoralism, however, because these dreams feed on the dead. The dreams qua sheep are on Necropolis—that is, they are standing on top of a cemetery, which is right, in a deeply uninteresting way that only Loy would be suspicious of. By extension, to be a human who reads is to be an extreme version of a ghost-eater; to read is to ingest the past and its progenitors. If the metaphorical is the spirit of an idea, Loy is waking us to the body of an idea, for she is repeatedly literal, or material. In so doing, Loy makes strange the ways we think, for she casts those tendencies as aspects of the material world. Instead it remarks upon its inevitability with its closing lines:. If personification is the bestowing of life on the non-living, the poem here reverses the process, ending with an image of a non-living thing that was once alive a fossilwrapped in a cloud of metaphor. In the end the poem asks us what it is we expect when we are certain. She is reminding us of what we once knew but forgot, pre-Lethe: that we move through our world by telling ourselves that we know where we are, when in fact the world is immune to our cartographies. A lesser poet would leave us at the level of alienation, but Loy suggests that there is something to be gained in the mutual recognition of strangeness. Loy lived her life as an expatriate, and the experience of being in a strange place finds a recurrent, uncanny place in her The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, and should be recognized as a social ethic. She is in that sense a deeply social poet, invoking as her work does the fact that society is an uneasy aggregate of wholly distinct individuals. The repository of strangeness in Loy is The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy reminder of the fact that we do not know where we are, and that at the moments in which we come together—let us call that conversation—we overlook something major when we forget to remember that the other person is not us. The fact that Mina Loy is not Myrna Loy is one thing or two things ; equally incontrovertible—important to recall, and impossible to forget as we read her work—is that we are not Mina Loy. Mina Loy, poet and painter, was a charter member of the generation that—beginning in with the founding of Poetry magazine—launched the modernist revolution in poetry in the United Thank you for this well written article. I had never heard of Mina Loy until today; I will be purchasing her works very soon. This is a fantastic article on a mind-blowing book. Moy was a sensualist and pushed her language to express a dreamy, but shard-bright worldview. So many of the poems feels like throw-aways, yet she was profoundly trying to express something and the reader can feel her effort as a sort of nightmare, both hers and theirs. Try reading her in the bathtub while drinking champagne-makes you want to hit the gym again! Yo Manitoba represent! Just a short comment really, to say how much I both enjoyed and was informed by Jessica The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy article on Mina Loy. I was delighted to experience at what felt like first hand, her razor sharp insight, warmth, clarity and humour. It has reawakened in me a love of this art form. Thank you. Please, more from this exceptional academic! Helen Cox, London. Thank you for this insightful article on a writer who deserves wider recognition. Prose Home Harriet Blog. Visit The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy Events Exhibitions Library. Newsletter Subscribe Give. Poetry Foundation. Back to Previous. Poem Guide. The poet navigates the unknown world. By Jessica Burstein. Originally Published: November 18th, Related Content. Related Poem Lunar Baedeker. Related Collections An Introduction to Modernism. Related Authors Mina Loy. Related Comments. Lunar Baedeker. By Mina Loy. A silver Lucifer. Read More. An Introduction to Modernism. The monumental artistic movement that changed poetry forever. Mina Loy. The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy Poems and Some Talking Heads. From Poetry Off the Shelf August Chatting about Dada with Robert Polito. November 25, Kimberly Richardson. November 28, November The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, Helen Cox. December 5, Ed Herrmann. See a problem on this page? The Lost Lunar Baedeker Quotes by Mina Loy

Think about cities you have been to, or cities you have seen in movies. Write a poem that describes both the cityscape and the The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy of being there or watching it on screen. Try, like Loy, to use words that are both descriptive and evaluative. The poem is packed with alliteration: try writing a poem that uses similar effects the The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy of the time. Why did Loy choose to use such short lines? Notice the lines that are just a single word—what are the words and why might Loy have isolated them in this way? Is she neutral, angry, excited, disgusted? What do you notice about the tone of this poem? What elements of the poem itself— word choice, line breaks—help you understand its tone? Where do you think it comes from? Why did Loy include it? What does putting something in quotation marks do to the poem, and to your experience of reading the poem? Mina Loy was an artist as well as a poet. Read the poem a few times aloud to your class, or have each student read it aloud in a circle. What visual cues does the poem itself contain? Ask students to think about the mood of the place as they illustrate the poem, as well as its sights. Why did Loy choose to use such difficult words? What is the effect of using a purposefully complex vocabulary in poems? Mina Loy, poet and painter, was a charter member of the generation that—beginning in with the founding of Poetry magazine—launched the modernist revolution in poetry in the United States. Loy was too radical for Poetry 's editor Harriet Monroe, who published her poetry only Prose Home Harriet Blog. Visit Home Events Exhibitions Library. Newsletter Subscribe Give. Poetry Foundation. Back to Previous. Lunar Baedeker. By Mina Loy. Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations. A silver Lucifer Lunar Baedeker The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy A Baedeker is a series name of popular guidebooks. Lucifer is the former angel name for Satan, which has been used to name the morning star, that is the planet Venus. Lethe Lethe River of forgetfulness in Hades. Reprinted by permission of Roger Conover, Literary Executor. Related Learning Resources. Two Poems and Some Talking Heads. From Poetry Off the Shelf August Chatting about Dada with Robert Polito. Read More. Writing Ideas. Discussion Questions. Teaching Tips. More Poems by Mina Loy. Religious Instruction. Human Cylinders. Giovanni Franchi. See All Poems by this Author. See a problem on this page? More About This Poem. Lunar Baedeker By Mina Loy. This poem has learning resources. View Resources. About this Poet. Read Full Biography. More About this Poet. Quick Tags. Nature Stars, Planets, Heavens.