Today we're revisiting an important recording from the PennSound archives that was recently segmented. In 1965, towards the end of her life, modernist icon Mina Loy sat down with another iconic poet, Paul Blackburn, for a sprawling ninety-minute conversation that covered various topics across the span of her life and also featured Loy reading extensively from her poetry. While Blackburn is the primary interlocutor, Joan Blackburn informed us that poet and publisher Robert Vas Dias was also present and took part.
The complete recording has been broken down into forty-three discrete MP3 files, isolating threads of their conversation and showcasing the individual poems read. Topics discussed include Loy's "life in England and her husband Arthur Cravan," Robert Creeley, James Joyce, "giving up poetry," "exhibiting paintings in Paris," "how she began writing," "'strange experiences,'" republishing her work, and more. Individual poems read include "Love Songs" (split into separate files for each of its thirteen parts), "Parturition," "Three Italian Pictures," "On the Costa San Giorgio," and more. Listen in by clicking here.
We're grateful to Joan Blackburn and Roger Conover (Loy's editor and literary executor) for their permission to present this historic recording, as well as to Douglas Storm who provided us with a copy. While this is the sole recording present on PennSound's Mina Loy author page, don't forget about Loy's homepage at the Electronic Poetry Center, which we launched in 2020. Sandra Simonds served as coordinator for the page, selecting the poems and other writings presented there and wrote notes on many of her choices. Jack Krick handled the coding and site design, while Karla Kelsey and Ariel Resnikoff also had some input into the page.
