14 April 2007

A Modern Woman's Inspiration



Sharon Lizotte
Mrs. Bosch
English 10 Honors
17 April 2007
A Modern Woman's Inspiration
There are very few people within the billions of people that have ever lived, whoselives’ works could tell the story of a generation, and inspire one as well. Thereare average every day people who never get any notice, the helpful people who mightbe noticed in town or maybe even their state, but very rarely is someone noticed worldwide. Being known world wide and for a good reason such as being an inspiration to millions is very rare, but it does happen occasionally. Unfortunately some of these great idealists were not truly recognized until after they had spent many years on earth trying to get noticed, and finally, when they died somebody realized that they were indeed assets to society. This is only half way true for Mina Loy, she was quite an asset to society and an inspiration to many through her poetry, but never wanted to be known as a poet. Sadly her fame from poetry faded with her death but later came back to tell the story of the generation in which she lived in. Her poems inspired a generation of freethinking women, modern women who finally felt the right to express their sexual freedom, and even now give us a key to the past of modernization.
Mina Loy was born Mina Lowy in 1882, in England to a Christian mother and Jewish father. She was born during a time of poverty but still managed to attend a conservative London art school where she ventured into impressionism and traditional figure drawing. She was no amateur at the arts and soon became a member of “the prestigious Salon d'Automne” in Paris 1905(Modernism). Mina was an excellent painter whose works would “become part of future sculpture paintings,” such as “Music is Like Painting”, by Francis Picabia, and “Portrait of Fillipo Tomasso Marinetti”, by F.C. Coletti (Modernism). Even though she was quite a remarkable and talented painter she seemed to make her name as a writer of “vers libertine -- the sort of free verse that in the 1910s seemed to lead to free love”(Jacket). This type of free verse is seen in the following excerpt from her poem “Café du Néant.”
Nostalgic youth
Holding your mistress's pricked finger
In the indifferent flame of the taper
Synthetic symbol of LIFE
In this factitious chamber of DEATH
The woman
As usual
Is smiling as bravely
As it is given to her to be brave (Loy)
When Mina Loy moved to the United States several years after graduating from the London art school she was seen as the “new woman” and a great master in modern verse. Loy’s poetry “disturbed a few of her more conservative contemporaries, Marianne Moore found herself uneasy in Loy's company,” and Amy Lowell was incensed by Loy's poem "Love Songs”(Mina).
Whose rivers run no fresher
Than a trickle of saliva
These are suspect places
I must live in my lantern
Trimming subliminal flicker
Virginal to the bellows
Of experience
Colored glass. (Loy)
Yet there were many others that admired her such as “William Carlos Williams, Marcel Duchamp, and the members of the New York Dada group--including the poet/boxer Arthur Cravan, whom she married in 1918”(Mina). Towards the end of her live Mina became isolated and was careless to whether she made a name for herself or not. Mina Loy died September 29, 1966, in Aspen, Colorado, leaving behind two daughters, and an “unpublished collection of poems she had written during the 1940s”(Mina). She associated herself with her paintings rather than her writing, “claiming at the end of her life that she ‘never was a poet’”(Mina).
After her death Mina Loy was forgotten for quite a long time, maybe because her poems were unlike those of any other female poet. They defied all the usual standards of female poetry with her wit, irony, and sense of justice, that made readers think about whether or not that liked what they had read. When “poetry reflects concerns with sexual difference as well as the relations between language and perception, she seems decades ahead of her time” (Jacket). The voice that speaks through her poems is decidedly “that of a modernist; her poems see art, love, sex, and childbirth from the perspective of a new woman,” shown best in this excerpt from her poem “Love Songs”(Jacket).
Evolution fall foul of
Sexual equality
Prettily miscalculate
Similitude
Unnatural selection
Breed such sons and daughters
As shall jibber at each other
Uninterpretable cryptonyms
Under the moon (Loy)
The credit to the rediscovery of her poems goes to Rexroth, who knew that her works were important and should be reprinted. Decade’s later Loy’s poems open the door to the past and the struggles women went through to express their sexual freedom. Her life was that of a “woman peculiarly responsive to the social and artistic movements of her time,” and through her poems we can look back to the time in which she lived (Jacket).
In history there are very few people who can be boasted upon as the leaders of their generation or as the essence of their generation. This great honor can easily be boasted upon Mina Loy whose artistic works both in painting and poems brought forth the birth of the modern woman, and the acceptance of this modernist view to men. Through her various works Mina tells the story of her time, in which women were starting to see that they had sexual freedoms and she embodied this in her works. Although she was quite ahead of her time she opened up the door for future modernist women, and inspired the generations to come. The fading of her popularity came with the fear of the new things she was revealing upon the people of her time, but now with the rebirth of her poems new generations are able to see the impact that her poetry truly had with helped with the coming of the modern woman.

Works Cited

Jacket #5. 1998. Jacket Magazine. 12 April 2007.
Loy, Mina. Lunar Baedecker. Paris: Contact Editions, 1923.
Mina Loy. 2007. The Academy of American Poets. 12 April 2007.
Modernism. 1997. 12 April 2007.

Posted by Sharon_Lizotte @ 3:19 PM