Poets are so often defined by their difference from some perceived 'centre' or mainstream. Their 'voice' is their own and they are somehow against the grain and individual. But whenever you look for poets that represent this elusive orthodoxy, there doesn't appear to be one because each candidate in turn is described in terms of their unique contribution.
The worst offenders for this claim to being 'opposite' to some unbearable state of normality are the so-called avant-garde, who seem to exist only to advertise their own difference from the rest. But it is 100 years now since the models of so much avant-gardisme appeared and the latest practitioners are, in fact, more staid, conservative, safe and predictable than those poets who continue in some kind of longer standing 'tradition'.
You can see how silly it all gets and it would be preferable if these distinctions could be reduced in significance and poetry read and appreciated on a less schismatic basis.
If and when the revolution ever happened in English letters, it still might have been at the outset of Modernism with Pound and Eliot and Mina Loy, a captivating and stylish lady from the most bohemian of milieu whose biography reads like a checklist of the bad boys and girls of those radical times.
Der Blinde Junge is the poem most likely to remain her anthology piece, a fragmentary snapshot of broken Europe after World War I. A difficult poem for difficult times, one might say, and such poetry is not written to be made easy. But Loy isn't always quite as opaque as it sometimes seems. Three Moments in Paris is an earlier work, selected here mainly for its first section, sensual and psychological and possibly ahead of its time.
The Mediterranean Sea is gloriously descriptive, Lady Laura in Bohemia a luxurious character sketch of sublime decadence and Lunar Baedeker is the perhaps most exuberant of her insistent wordplay. The Dead plays some accordion tricks with time and imagery that make one forget to consider their plausibility and literal truth, which is one thing poetry ought to be trying to do sometimes.
It is the sensual, the glamorous and the luxury of language that Mina Loy brought to the Modernist movement that makes her remarkable, her sheer enjoyment of the enterprise that makes her a welcome addition to a canon of varied and exciting poetry, irrespective of labels, agendas and manifestos.
