“Gertrude Stein”

Hi, folks! Having spent the morning booting & re-booting the computer in various attemots to solve performance issues (nothing too major, but all annoying at least), I am finally here with our Final Thursday featured poem.

We’re bringing our two-month look at Mina Loy to a close today with a short poem that Loy wrote in the early 1920s as a tribute to Gertrude Stein. Mina Loy was an active member of Stein’s salon, & was close friends with many of the artists & writers who congregated chez Stein. Gertrude Stein paid Loy a high compliment in her Autobiography of Alice B Toklas, when she wrote, "Mina Loy . . . was able to understand without the commas. She has always been able to understand." There was a great deal of mutual respect between Stein & Loy—interesting, because they are unquestionably two of the most important yet misunderstood writers from the “Modernist” period.

If you’re not familiar with the work of Loy & Stein, please do yourself a favor & check them out. Loy’s poems are fortunately in print, as The Lost Lunar Baedecker, while Stein’s works are readily available. A good introduction to Stein (I think) would be either Three Lives or The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas.

Featured poet for July & August? Robert Creeley. But for now, enjoy these lines about Gertrude Stein—& consider in what ways they are about Loy as well!

Gertrude Stein

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

Mina Loy