Aphorisms by Mina Loy
Posted on January 31, 2008
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Mina Loy always considered herself more of a visual rather than a verbal artist. She was born in London in 1882, and first established a reputation as a post-Impressionist painter. She lived in Paris during the early years of the 20th century and was involved in all of the artistic movements of the time: dadaism, futurism, surrealism. She moved to the U.S. in 1916, and in 1921 Ezra Pound wrote to Marianne Moore, editor of Poetry magazine: “Is there anyone in America except you, Bill [William Carlos Williams] and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?” One of Loy’s verses, “Aphorisms on Futurism,” is an aphorism sequence as much as it is a poem. My thanks Lori Ellison for alerting me to Mina Loy. Excerpted aphorisms:
THE velocity of velocities arrives in starting.
LOVE the hideous to find the sublime core of it.
LOVE of others is an appreciation of one’s self.
MAY your egotism be so gigantic that you comprise mankind in your self-sympathy.
TIME is the dispersion of intensiveness.
THE Futurist can live a thousand years in one poem.
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* Life gives us a world of chances but not the time to travel. Leonid S. Sukhorukov
I feel that I don’t quite like “other people’s poetry”, because it is better than mine; as, as for myself, “I’m not quite a poet, but I don’t quite know it.”
This was my most exciting discovery after reading her biography and her poems. She had an exhibition of her work late in life and her good friend Duchamp wrote the essay for the catalogue.
The egotists are right about themselves but wrong about others.
Time does not pass, it continues.