Unopened letters: the poetics and politics of Mina Loy’s graphopoeia

This essay proposes the term graphopoeia to describe the emphatic writtenness of Mina Loy’s poetry. This term clarifies Ezra Pound’s famous description of her poetry as a form of logopoeia: “poetry that is akin to nothing but language.” Pound’s schematization, helpful though it is, glosses over a distinction between a logopoeia of the text and a logopoeia of the voice that this essay insists upon as key to understanding modernist poetics and politics. Specifically, Loy’s poetically ambitious and politically radical textual practices, especially her embrace of nonsignifying graphical practices, contrast with the aggressive vocalism of Futurism’s fascist poetics with which her writing is sometimes – and, I argue, misleadingly – associated. Loy’s graphopoeia, furthermore, can also be compared to that of certain of her predecessors and contemporaries, even those with whom she had no direct contact: in particular, Stéphane Mallarmé and Walter Benjamin. The term graphopoeia therefore adds a degree of nuance that allows for productive connections and distinctions to be drawn within the avant-garde poetry and literary theory of the era.