The Effectual Marriage

Someone emailed me to ask about the origins of my blog's title and description, both of which pay homage to the poet and visual artist, Mina Loy. She published her first collection of poems, Lunar Baedecker, in 1923. Since then, these poems have been republished as The Last Lunar Baedeker and The Lost Lunar Baedeker, both edited by Roger L. Conover. The first book, usually described as the "complete collected works of Mina Loy," is quite difficult to come by as it's been out of print for more than twenty years; however, I managed to find a pristine hardover copy on Ebay for about $25. The second text is easy to find through online booksellers. Though it is highly incomplete, it includes several previously unpublished poems and prose works. Both books fail to preserve the order or entire content of Loy's original collection and they both choose to correct the original collection's "misspelled" title. As you can see, I made the same correction when titling my blog, in large part because her texts are now published and most widely known by this corrected title.

Loy is, hands down, my favorite poet. I lover her unorthodox use of language and her willingness to challenge political and poetic conventions. I never tire of reading her work and frequently find myself opening one of the Baedekers and rediscovering some amazing line or image. My blog's description comes from the poem, "The Effectual Marriage or The Insipid Narrative of Gina and Miovanni," written in 1914. This poem also appeared in the often-referenced modernist anthology, Others. In reviewing this anthology for the magazine Future, Ezra Pound "misremembered" the title as "The Ineffectual Marriage," once again exhibiting his tendency to play the role of Modernism's editor-in-chief. As it is a fairly lengthy poem, approximately three pages long, I'll quote only the first two stanzas.

The door was an absurd thing
Yet it was passable
They quotidianly passed through it
It was this shape
Gina and Miovanni     who they were God knows
They knew    it was important to them
This being of who they were
They were themselves
Corporeally   transcendentally    consecutively
conjunctively  and they were quite   complete

In the evening they looked out their two windows
Miovanni out of his library window
Gina from the kitchen window
From among his pots and pans
Where he so kindly kept her
Where she so wisely busied herself
Pots and Pans              she cooked in them
All sorts of sialagogues
Some say that happy women are immaterial