Mina Loy: Gertrude Stein

Mina Loy was very well known as a great feminist writer. She had an early influence of Impressionism when she started going to art school in her earlier years. Mina Loy’s writing is a bit more distinct that any of the other female writers during this time, some maybe even disturbing or confusing. Even so, she was still admired nonetheless. As the years passed she started being a recluse and later died in 1966. According to The Norton Anthology her use of alliteration, internal rhyme, and other forms of phonemic repetition is insistent and direct. 
Mina Loy wrote a poem about Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein was lesbian writer and probably the most famous lesbian woman during this time. The poem is only nine lines long:

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

Every three lines she adds an indent. She starts off with “Curie.” In the foot notes of The Norton Anthology, we see she is referring to Marie Curie, a French/Polish scientist who discovered radium and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize. I managed to imitate her style by what I believe is what she is trying to say:

Carson
of the operation room
of two wheels
he operated
the mass
of tumorage
as he rides
to eradicate
the malignancy on the road.

What I got from Loy’s poem was that she was trying to compare two things and make it the same thing. For example, in the first line and the third line, she compares Curie, a scientist, to vocabulary. She is taking something as complex as chemistry and comparing it to something as simple as writing. In my poem I attempted to make the same kind of technique and format as she did. I chose to write about brain surgery and bike riding. Ben Carson is a very famous neurosurgeon, to which I compared to something simple like riding a bicycle. This is a very complex poem yet it’s not. Which is really interesting and fits Mina Loy’s style very well.