‘Me you—you—me’: Mina Loy and the Art of Ethnographic Intimacy

This chapter examines the economy of intimacy and affective rapports in Mina Loy’s poetry. Focusing on the ‘participant observation’ characterising Loy’s ethnographic writing practice, it probes the affect of discomfort as a mode of intimacy that binds Loy’s reader to the subject matter of her early ‘Songs to Joannes’/‘Love Songs’ (1915, 1917, 1923) as well as her mature poems ‘Hot Cross Bum’ (1949) and ‘Photo after Pogrom’ (c. 1945), including, in ‘Songs to Joannes’, sexual intercourse, abortion and bodily functions like sweating and urination, and, in the later poems, homelessness and corpses. The chapter reveals how Loy’s multi-sensual and polyphonic poetry uses the poet-ethnographer’s simultaneous proximity and reinforced exteriority to foreground the social, ethical and political possibilities, but also limits, of intersubjective, physical intimacy as depicted and mediated by the print text. It highlights how the participant observation cultivated by Loy’s poetry and its social commitments ‘challenges the binaries of proximity and distance, attachment and detachment, the inside and the outside, and, for this reason, transforms […] our understanding of how modernist literature (re-)engaged intimacy’.