Mina Loy - Songs to Joannes & Other Verses

Mina Loy - Songs to Joannes & Other Verses
Public Domain Poets #7 | Publicdomainpoets.com

Containing the entire 34 song sequence, 'Songs to Joannes', and a generous selection of Loy's other verses (originally published 1914-1923), as well as selected short essays, manifestos, and aphorisms. New edition designed, edited, and selected by Dick Whyte.

I am the jealous store-house of candle-ends
That lit your adolescent learning
---------
Behind God's eyes
There might be
Other lights

Loy (1882-1966) was born in London to wealthy parents. While her father did not believe in formal education for women, Loy convinced him to let her study at Künstlerinnenverein, a women's arts college in Munich, and the Académie Colarossi, in Paris.

Out of the severing
Of hill from hill
The interim
Of star from star
The nascent
Static
Of night

She became close with Gertrude Stein while living in Paris, and then moved to Florence in 1906. Loy began publishing 'free verse' in 1914, dabbled in Futurism, and then in 1916 moved to New York to join the avant-garde arts and literary scene, alongside Dadaists like Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Tristan Tzara, and publishers Jane Heap & Margaret Anderson (et al.).

The prig of passion---
To your professorial paucity

Proto-plasm was mad
Evolving us---

Loy would go on to be a leading poet of the post-1913 'new verse' movement - culminating in her 1923 book, Lunar Baedeker - and her poetic innovations were praised by numerous contemporaries, including William Carlos Williams, Alfred Kreymborg, Walter Arensberg, and T.S. Elliot. Though it would be 25 years until Loy would publish a 2nd book of poetry, she continued to write and make assemblages until her death in 1966.

Gertrude Stein

Curie
Of the laboratory
of vocabulary
she crushed
the tonnage
of consciousness
congealed to phrases
to extract
a radium of the word

Public Domain Press is dedicated to producing contemporary editions of out-of-print poets and poetry collections, particularly with regard to compressed and fragmented 'free verse' from the late-1800s and early-1900s. All poems start as facsimiles - to preserve the original fonts - which are then cleaned up, edited for consistency, and spaciously laid-out, adorned with borders, illustrations, and ornaments from the books and magazines they originally appeared in. These are not "reprints" of previously existing books, but newly crafted collection, lovingly edited from public domain material, for the serious poetry lover.