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Mina Loy

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MinaLoy-Portrait

Mina Loy (1882-1966). Courtesy HiLoBrow.

Mina Loy

Mina Loy in 1917
Born Mina Gertrude Löwry
December Decenber 27, 1882
London, England
Died September September 25, 1966
Aspen, Colorado

'Mina Gertrude Loy (December 27, 1882 - September 25, 1966) was an American poet, artist, playwright, novelist, and designer.

Life[]

Overview[]

Loy was among the last of the original generation of modernist poets to achieve recognition. Her poetry was admired by T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Gertrude Stein, Francis Picabia and Yvor Winters, among others.

Youth and education[]

Loy was born Mina Gertrude Löwry in London, England. Her mother, Julia (Bryan), was English, and her father, Sigmund Löwry, was a Hungarian Jew.

Upon leaving school at age 17, Mina moved to Munich and studied painting for 2 years. When she returned to London, she continued to study painting, once having Augustus John as a teacher. During her studies, she became familiar with the latest advanced theories in Europe, such as that of Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, and Sigmund Freud, as well as teachings of the East.

Early career[]

Loy moved to Paris with Stephen Haweis, who studied with her at the Académie Colarossi. The couple married in 1903. Loy is noted using her new last name in 1904, when she exhibited 6 watercolor paintings at the Salon d'Automne in Paris. Loy and Haweis had a child, Oda, in 1904. Oda died on her 1st birthday.

Loy soon became a regular in the artistic community at Leo and Gertrude Stein's salon, where she met many of the leading avant-garde artists and writers of the day. Loy would meet the likes of Guillaume Apollinaire, Pablo Picasso, and Henri Rouseau. During her 3 years in Paris, she, Gertrude Stein, and Djuna Barnes would develop lifelong friendships.

In 1907, Loy and Haweis moved to Florence, Italy, where they lived more or less separate lives, becoming estranged. Despite drifting apart, they had 2 more children: Joella in 1907 and Giles in 1909. It was during this time that Loy became part of the Futurists community, having a sexual relationship with their leader Filippo Marinetti. While attending gatherings held at Mabel Dodge's Medici villa, she also networked with expatriates from Manhattan. Among this group were communist poet and journalist John Reed, as well as novelist and critic Carl Van Vechten, who would eventually become Loy's agent. During World War I, Loy would serve in an army hospital.

Loy's extremely original poems started to frequent smaller magazines such as Rogue, attracting the attention of the New York avant-garde. Once her work started to gain momentum, she began to publish poems and articles in more significant New York publications. In 1914, "Aphorisms on Futurism" was published in Alfred Stieglitz's Camera Work. "Parturition", her graphic depiction of childbirth, was printed in Trend.

James_La_Marre_reads_"Songs_to_Joannes"_by_Mina_Loy

James La Marre reads "Songs to Joannes" by Mina Loy

In July 1915, Loy began to write what would be later known as "Songs to Joannes" [1] "(originally "Love songs"), a collection of Modernist, avant-garde love poetry about her disenchantment with Giovanni Papini, another founding Futurist with whom Loy had been in a romantic relationship in Florence. Early readers of "Songs to Joannes" were shocked by Loy's forward expressions of sexuality, particularly the grotesque and uncensored depictions of erotic desire and bodily functions.

In 1918, Loy penned her polemical Feminist Manifesto, at least partly in response to the misogyny of Futurism's founder, F.T. Marinetti.

Loy and Arthur Cravan[]

Disillusioned with the macho elements in Futurism and its move towards Fascism, as well as desiring a divorce from her husband Stephen Haweis, Loy left her children with a nurse and moved to New York City in 1916, where she began acting with the Provincetown Players. She was a key figure in the group that formed around Others magazine, which also included Man Ray, William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, and Marianne Moore. She also became a Christian Scientist during this time. Loy soon became a leading member of the Greenwich Village bohemian circuit. She also met the 'poet-boxer' Arthur Cravan, self-styled Dadaist and fugitive from conscription. Cravan fled to Mexico to avoid the draft; when Loy's divorce was final she followed him, and they married in Mexico City. Here, they lived in poverty, and years later, Loy would write of their destitution.

Once Loy became pregnant, the couple realized they needed to leave Mexico. A few months later, Cravan set sail for Buenos Aires in a small yacht as Loy watched from the beach. He sailed over the horizon and disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again. The tale of his disappearance is strongly anecdotal, as recounted by Loy's biographer, Carolyn Burke. Their daughter was born April 1919.

Mina Loy, and Ezra Pound

Mina Loy and Ezra Pound in Paris, 1921. Courtesy Wikimedia Commons.

Europe and New York[]

Loy returned to Florence and her other children. However, in 1920 she set out for New York, hoping to find Cravan, unable to accept his death. Here she returned to her old Greenwich Village life, perusing theater or mixing with her fellow writers. She would mingle and develop friendships with the likes of Ezra Pound, Dadaist Tristan Tzara, and Jane Heap. In 1923, she returned to Paris and, with the backing of Peggy Guggenheim, started a business designing and making lampshades, glass novelties, paper cut-outs and painted flower arrangements. Her 1st book, Lunar Baedecker was also published that year. She rekindled old friendships with Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein.

Later life and work[]

In 1936, Loy returned to New York and lived for a time with her daughter in Manhattan. She moved to the Bowery, where she became interested in the Bowery bums, writing poems and creating found art collages on them. In 1946, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her second and last book, Lunar Baedeker & Time Tables, appeared in 1958. She exhibited her found art constructions in New York in 1951 and at the Bodley Gallery in 1959.

In 1953, Loy moved to Aspen, Colorado, where her daughters Joella and Fabienne were already living; Joella had married the Bauhaus artist and typographer Herbert Bayer. In Colorado, she continued to write and work on her junk collages up to her death in Aspen at the age of 83.

Loy also wrote a novel, Insel, which was published posthumously.

Recognition[]

There was no biography of Loy until 1996 – 30 years after her death – when Becoming Modern: The life of Mina Loy (by Carolyn Burke, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996) was released along with a new edition of her poems, The Lost Lunar Baedeker.[2]

In popular culture[]

Loy appears in Djuna Barnes's novel Ladies Almanack as Patience Scalpel, the sole heterosexual character, who "could not understand Women and their Ways."[3]

Publications[]

Poetry[]

  • Songs to Joannes. New York: Others, 1917.
  • Lunar Baedecker. Paris: Contact Publishing, 1923.[4]
  • Lunar Baedeker and Time-Tables: Selected poems. Highlands, NC: J. Williams, 1958.
  • At the Door of the House: Poems (edited by Leigh A. Giurlando). Northampton, MA: Aphra Press, 1980.
  • Love Songs (edited by Leigh A. Giurlando). Northampton, MA: Aphra Press, 1981.
  • Virgins Plus Curtains: Poems. Rochester, NY: Press of the Good Mountain, 1981.
  • The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems (edited by Roger L. Conover). Highlands, NC: Jargon Society, 1982; New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1996; Manchester, UK: Carcanet Press, 1997.

Novel[]

  • Insel (edited by Elizabeth Arnold). Santa Rosa, CA: Black Sparrow, 1991.

Collected editions[]

  • Stories and Essays (edited by Sara Crangle). Champaign, IL: Dalkey Press Archive, 2011.


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.[5]

See also[]

"An_Old_Woman,"_by_Mina_Loy

"An Old Woman," by Mina Loy

"Poe,"_by_Mina_Loy

"Poe," by Mina Loy

References[]

  • Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996.
  • Kouidis, Virginia. Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1980. OCLC 11251843. [Solo exhibition catalogue with commentary.]
  • Prescott, Tara. "'A Lyric Elixir': The Search for Identity in the Works of Mina Loy." Claremont Colleges, 2010.
  • Shreiber, Maeera, and Keith Tuma, eds. Mina Loy: Woman and poet. National Poetry Foundation, 1998. [Collection of essays on Mina Loy's poetry, with 1965 interview and bibliography]

Fonds[]

  • Mina Loy papers at Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University

Notes[]

  1. ↑ "Songs to Joannes, by Mina Loy". Minaloy.tripod.com. http://minaloy.tripod.com/Songs_to_Joannes_XIII.html. Retrieved 2011-07-14. 
  2. ↑ John W. May, "Mina Loy," Of Poetry, April 12, 2012. Blogspot, Web, Feb. 22, 2018.
  3. ↑ Philip Herring, Djuna: The life and work of Djuna Barnes. New York: Penguin, 1995, 141–153. Quotation from Barnes, Ladies Almanack, 11.
  4. ↑ "Baedeker" was misspelled "Baedecker" in both the title and the title poem; see Jessica Burnstein, "Mina Loy: Lunar Baedeker", Poetry Foundation. Web, Nov. 16, 2014.
  5. ↑ Search results = au:Mina Loy, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Nov. 16, 2014.

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