Mina Loy's Bird

In the pages of Margaret Anderson's The Little Journal, the poet Mina Loy's ekphrastic poem "Brancusi's Golden Bird" appeared. I was reminded of it this week when I read about Princeton’s Blue Mountain Project making available an entire digital library of modernist avant-garde literary journals. I’ve only just begun to imagine all of the ways I could use these in classes. For now it’s enough to peruse from it and from Brown University’s similar collection that includes Margaret Anderson’s The Little Review, in whose pages I discovered how Loy used fragments of language from Ezra Pound's review of Brancusi's work in her poem, which I argue challenges male theories of genius that were circulating at the time.