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MINA LOY
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Mina Loy
~From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mina_Loy


Mina Loy (December 27, 1882 - September 25, 1966) was an artist, poet, Futurist, actor, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps and bohemian extraordinaire. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and William Carlos Williams.


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Early Life
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Loy was born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London. On leaving school, she studied painting, first in Munich for two years and then in London, where one of her teachers was Augustus John. She moved to Paris, France with Stephen Haweis who studied with her at the Acad?mie Colarossi. The couple married in 1903, at which point Mina changed her name to Loy.


Loy soon became a regular at Gertrude Stein's salon, where she met many of the leading avant garde artists and writers of the day. She and Stein were to remain lifelong friends. In 1905, Loy and Haweis moved to Florence where they lived more or less separate lives. Loy mixed with the expatriate community and the Futurists, having a relationship with their leader Filippo Marinetti. She started to publish her poems in New York magazines. She was a key figure in the group that formed around Others magazine, which also included Man Ray, William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore. She also became a Christian Scientist at this time.



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Loy and Arthur Cravan
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Disillusioned with the Futurists' move towards Fascism and wanting a divorce, Loy moved to New York in 1916, where she began acting with the Provincetown Players. She soon became a leading member of the Greenwich Village bohemian circuit. Here she met the 'poet-boxer' Arthur Cravan, self-styled Dadaist and fugitive from conscription. Cravan fled to Mexico; when Loy's divorce came through she followed him, and they married in Mexico City. A few months later, Cravan set sail from Mexico in a small yacht. He was never seen again.



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Back to Europe
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Loy returned to Europe, partly to search for Cravan. She was unable to accept his death, and in 1920 she returned to New York, still searching. Here she returned to her old Greenwich Village life, acting and mixing with her fellow writers. 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 first book, Lunar Baedecker was also published that year. She picked up old friendships with Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein.



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Later life and work
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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. She finally moved to Colorado to live with her daughters. In 1946, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Her second and last book, Lunar Baedeker & Time Tables appeared in 1958 and she exhibited her constructions in New York in 1951. In Colorado, she continued to write and work on her junk collages up to her death.



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POEMS
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Lunar Baedeker

~by Mina Loy



A silver Lucifer

serves

cocaine in cornucopia



To some somnambulists

of adolescent thighs

draped

in satirical draperies



Peris in livery

prepare

Lethe

for posthumous parvenues



Delirious Avenues

lit

with the chandelier souls

of infusoria

from Pharoah's tombstones



lead

to mercurial doomsdays

Odious oasis

in furrowed phosphorous---



the eye-white sky-light

white-light district

of lunar lusts



---Stellectric signs

"Wing shows on Starway"

"Zodiac carrousel"



Cyclones

of ecstatic dust

and ashes whirl

crusaders

from hallucinatory citadels

of shattered glass

into evacuate craters



A flock of dreams

browse on Necropolis



From the shores

of oval oceans

in the oxidized Orient



Onyx-eyed Odalisques

and ornithologists

observe

the flight

of Eros obsolete



And "Immortality"

mildews...

in the museums of the moon



"Nocturnal cyclops"

"Crystal concubine"


Pocked with personification

the fossil virgin of the skies

waxes and wanes----



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Moreover, the Moon

~by Mina Loy




Face of the skies

preside

over our wonder.



Fluorescent

truant of heaven

draw us under.



Silver, circular corpse

your decease

infects us with unendurable ease,



touching nerve-terminals

to thermal icicles



Coercive as coma, frail as bloom

innuendoes of your inverse dawn

suffuse the self;

our every corpuscle become an elf.



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References
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Mina Loy
www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/95


Mina Loy (1882-1966)
www.modjourn.brown.edu/mjp/Im...Loy/Loy.htm


Mina Loy at Modern American Poetry
www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/po.....oy/loy.htm


Becoming Modern — The Life of Mina Loy by Carolyn Burke
www.carolynburke.com/


Mina Loy Links Page
www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl...LM/mod/wolkowski/


~confetta
people.tribe.net/confetta