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Mina Loy (1882-1966)

LINKS

http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?prmID=96

This link connects you to the Academy of American Poets. Here you will find an exhibit on Mina Loy including a biography, online primary texts, criticism, bibliographic information, and additional links.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/loy/loy.htm

This link connects you to the Modern American Poetry site, edited by Professor Cary Nelson at the University of Illinois, Urbana. Here you will find an exhibit of secondary criticism, bibliographic information, and external links on Mina Loy.

BIOGRAPHY

The daughter of a second-generation Hungarian Jewish father and an English mother, Mina Gertrude Lowry was born in London and began her career as a visual artist, exhibiting her paintings in the Salon d'Automne show in Paris, 1905. A cosmopolitan modernist, she spent time in England, Paris, and Florence before moving to the United States. In 1903, at the time she married the photographer and writer Stephen Haweis, she shortened the spelling of her name to become Mina Loy. Between 1904 and 1907 she had three children and was an active friend to fellow modernists Gertrude Stein and Mabel Dodge in whose salons she met such figures as the cubist painter Pablo Picasso, John Reed, and Carl Van Vechten. By 1913, Loy was emerging as a modern artist in her own right, in part through her connections to Italian Futurists such as Filippo Marinetti and through her published verse in Alfred Steiglitz's stylish journal Camera Work and in Carl Van Vechten's Trend. Her publication of the experimental verse collection "Love Songs" in the avant-garde magazine Others created something of a literary stir at the time. In 1916, Loy moved to New York to take the lead role in Alfred Kreymbourg's play Lima Beans, and the following year met and married the surreal poet and professional boxer Alfred Cravan. Her marriage was short-lived, however, owing to Cravan's disappearance in Mexico. Returning to England, Loy gave birth to Cravan's daughter Fabienne in 1919 and later moved to Florence. Leaving her children there, she sailed for New York where she became a member of the Provincetown Players. With the financial support of Peggy Guggenheim, Loy traveled to Paris three years later with Fabienne and opened a lampshade business. Meanwhile, that same year Robert McAlmon's Contact Press published her book of verse Lunar Baedecker (1923). By 1930 Loy had given up her business in Paris and was working as the Paris agent for a New York gallery managed by Julien Levy, her son-in-law. Her last creative project of Bowery "constructions" was documented in her New York gallery exhibition and involved a series of poems and experimental art works based on the street life of the lower Bowery where she lived until the age of 71. Loy spent the remaining decade of her life with her daughters in Colorado where she died in Aspen at the age of 84.

SECONDARY SOURCES

Burke, Carolyn. Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1996.

DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. "'Seismic Orgasm': Sexual Intercourse, Gender Narratives, and Lyric Ideology in Mina Loy." Studies in Historical Change. Ed. Ralph Cohen. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992. 264-91.

Januzzi, Marisa. "Dada Through the Looking Glass, or: Mina Loy's Objective." Women in Dada: Essays on Sex, Gender, and Identity. Ed. Naomi Sawelson-Gorse. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998. 578-612.

Kinnahan, Linda A. Poetics of the Feminine: Authority and Literary Tradition in William Carlos Williams, Mina Loy, Denise Levertov, and Kathleen Frasier. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Kouidis, Virginia M. Mina Loy: American Modernist Poet. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980.

Logue, Antonia. Shadow Box. New York: Grove Press, 1999.

Shrieber, Maeera and Keith Tuma, Eds. Mina Loy: Woman and Poet. Orono, ME: The National Poetry Foundation, 1998.

Weiner, Joshua. "Rediscovering Mina Loy." American Scholar. 67(1):151-58. 1998 Winter.

SECONDARY SOURCES BY CHAPTER