Mina Loy was a controversial and influential early 20th century poet. Her poem Songs to Joannes was first published in 1915, and again in 1917, in a magazine called Others. Others gave poets with progressive, sometimes seen as radical, views on different social issues of the time a medium in which to publish their works which were often too risqué for other more established and larger publishers to accept (MJP). Mina Loy examines gender roles, feminism and exhibited “both sexual and poetic freedom” – both taboo subjects during the recently passed the late Victorian Period – making Others the perfect magazine for her to publish (Ellmann 269).
Others on of the little magazines popular in the early 20th century, usually approximately twenty to thirty pages in length per issue. Mina Loy’s Songs to Joannes took up the entire sixth issue of the 3rd volume series of the magazine. In the 1920s, after the last publication of Others, Alfred Kreymborg, the publisher of Others, described Loy as a “a ‘curious woman, exotic and beautiful,…[whose] clinical frankness and sardonic conclusions, wedded to a madly elliptical style scornful of the regulation of grammar, syntax, and punctuation, horrified our gentry and drove our critics into furious despair.’” (MJP)( Ellmann 269). Lines 27-29 in the 29th section of the poem display Loy’s use of both new form and compelling content, “Let them clash together / From their incognitoes [sic] / In seismic orgasm” (Ellmann 272). These were the traits that critics disliked but would continue throughout modern poetry.
Magazines like Others allowed poetry to take a new form and grow with the changes brought about by the early twentieth century. Had more progressive writers such as Mina Loy not been able to publish through smaller magazines, twentieth century poetry would be fundamentally different.
Ellmann, Richard, Robert O’Clair, and Jahan Ramazani. “Mina Loy.” Modern Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton, 2003. 268-72. Print.
“Modernist Journals Project.” Modernist Journals Project. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Jan. 2014.
This is a great intro to Others, but it would have been great to learn what other poets they published. Or to include some of the additional poems from Others that weren’t anthologized in our anthology. That is, it would have been great to have more of Others and less of the anthology here. It is also useful to include links and pictures when possible–the idea is to bring us to that material, or bring that material to us. Keep the blog dynamic–that’s what it is for!