truepenny | And another

Because it beats trying to work or think or be in any way, shape, or form a useful and contributing member of society.

Stupid virus.

Anyway, this is Mina Loy, as photographed by Man Ray (one of many, and not actually one of the ones that shows how absolutely stunningly drop-dead gorgeous she was). The words are also Mina Loy, from her poem "Lunar Baedeker." (Collected in The Lost Lunar Baedeker. That and her very strange, semi-autobiographical novel, Insel, are her only readily available works.)

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 ...
in the museums of the moon

"Nocturnal cyclops"
"Crystal concubine"
-- -- -- -- -- -- --
Pocked with personification
the fossil virgin of the skies
waxes and wanes-- -- -- --

Loy's biography, Becoming Modern by Carolyn Burke (interviewed here in-depth and with photographs--including pictures of the art assemblages Loy did as an old lady living in the Bowery) came out in 1996. There's a collection of criticism, Mina Loy: Woman and Poet edited by Maeera Shreiber, from 1999.

Okay, perhaps I'm slightly useful after all. At least to anyone interested in obscure Modernist/Futurist/Dadaist women poets.