Essay --

Mina Loy's feminism in her poetry 1882-1946 Mina Gertrude Lowy, [Mina Loy] was born in 1882 in London. Her foremost interest was art, and she studied painting in Munich for two years after leaving school at 17. On her return to London, she continued art classes, Loy moved from Victorian England to impressionist Paris, to futurist Florence, to bohemian Greenwich Village and back to expatriate Paris during her long career. Painter, poet, actress, playwright, feminist, mother, designer, conceptual artist - her array of talent and experience make it difficult to place her exactly in any one artistic group. Literary Modernism was one of the few eras in the history of American literature in which writers and artists openly sought, through their own inventive projects, to produce social and economic commotion. Mina Loy, whose work is now being rediscovered with the recent republication of The Last Lunar Baedeker and recent publication of a biography was one of the more radical intellectua l and writers of her time. Mina's first published work appeared in 1914 as the result of her New York acquaintances, in Alfred Steiglitz's magazine Camera Work and in Carl Van Vechten's Trend. "Aphorisms on Futurism" and her poems roused great responsiveness in New York bohemian elite, and when a group of poets, disaffected with the editorial policy of Harriet Monroe's Poetry magazine--decided to set up a new academic journal, Mina Loy was their rallying point. The new magazine, Others, appeared in 1915, with Mina Loy's "Love Songs" significantly exhibited. The poems were much talked about in New York avant-garde circles. The text used intimate material from her personal life and was blunt to the point of being scandalous. Three Moments in Paris ... ...depicting them spiritual, ethereal or dominant. What is amazing about Loy and her writings is her persistence on openly enjoining the political with the creative and the creative with the political. Loy understands art as an influence spot in which social change and commotion could be performed. It is Loy’s aim to familiarize her readers with her revolutionary poetics, particularly her theories on the coercive nature of language and to study a historical instant in which artists and literary theorists like Loy still believed peaceful revolution could be achieved through artistic expression. References http://www.poetrypreviews.com/poets/poet-loy2.html http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/engl/VSALM/mod/wolkowski/paper.html http://jacketmagazine.com/05/mina-iv.html http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/loy/bio.htm http://www.ags.uci.edu/~clcwegsa/revolutions/Buchanan.htm