By refusing to conform to either traditional love poetry tropes or modernist fatalism, Mina Loy creates a dynamic portrait of love in the modern age through her poem “Songs to Joannes.” This poem jarred many of its early readers and even incited some of them to anger and protest, and, perhaps, they did not merely find it offensive, obscene, or improper for a woman to have written (Academy for American Poets). Perhaps, they were deeply unsettled by the idea that love in their era was not as clean cut as they wanted it to be. It was messy and challenging and beautiful and undeniably human. And Mina Loy would not let them oversimplify or forget it.
Continue to the digital booklet to explore further.
Academy of American Poets. “Mina Loy: Poet.” Poets.org. Academy of American Poets. Web. 04 Oct. 2016.
Churchill, Suzanne W. “Mina Loy: The Poetics of Dislodging.” The Little Magazine Others and the Renovation of Modern American Poetry. Burlington: Ashgate Limited, 2006. 179-222. Print.
DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “”Seismic Orgasm”: Sexual Intercourse and Narrative Meaning in Mina Loy.” Ed. Keith Tuma and Maeera Shreiber. Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1998. 45-74. Print.
Loy, Mina. “Love Songs.” Others 1915: 6. Index of Modernist Magazines. Web. 29 Sept. 2016.
—. “Songs to Joannes.” Others Apr. 1917: 3. Index of Modernist Magazines. Web. 29 Sept. 2016.
—. “Songs to Joannes.” The Lost Lunar Baedeker. Ed. Roger L. Conover. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996. 53-68. Print.
Selinger, Eric Murphy. “Love in the Time of Melancholia.” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Ed. Keith Tuma and Maeera Shreiber. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1998. 19-43. Print.
Shreiber, Maeera. “”Love Is a Lyric / of Bodies”: The Negative Aesthetics of Mina Loy’s Love Songs to Joannes.” Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Ed. Keith Tuma and Maeera Shreiber. Orono: National Poetry Foundation, 1998. 87-109. Print.
