Mina Loy

 

 

Editor's Note to Anglo-Mongrels & the Rose

 
 

 


Jerome Rothenberg, in one of the many anthologies he produced in his long career,1 included, among a small selection of Loy poems, Anglo-Mongrels & the Rose, which he described, thus, in his short introductory note to Loy’s work:

  “….her work by 1918 had taken on a largeness of theme & an energy of sound & image that few in her generation could match. By then too, or soon thereafter, she was into a private mythology, Anglo-Mongrels & the Rose, that the present editor finds comparable to,& probably not chronologically behind, Pound's early Cantos &Eliot's Waste Land. But the parts ended up scattered like the limbs of Osiris, & by the time a few fragments turned up under other titles in Jargon Press' expanded reprint of her selected poems, Lunar Baedeker (1958), none of the three poets introducing the book (William Carlos Williams, Kenneth Rexroth & Denise Levertov) could recall the large work from which they came. So, if anyone wants to take the hint & read through Rogue, Broom, The Little Review, Others, Contact, etc., they may be able to piece together one of the lost master-poems of the 20th century.”  

Currently, Roger Conover, Loy’s editor and literary executor is at work on such a restoration of this important early work as Rothenberg calls for here.

 



 

     
     
  1. Revolution of the Word: A New Gathering of American Avant-Garde Poetry 1914-1945.
    New York, Seabury-Continuum, 1974;