The poet and visual artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a restless and much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism, where her friends and lovers included Gertrude Stein, Marinetti, Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Djuna Barnes, the poet-boxer Arthur Cravan, and the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke's riveting, authoritative biography brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism--and one woman's important contribution to it.
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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Altering her family name, wearing the clothes she wanted (which she designed herself), encouraging nudity among her children, writing about sex, and befriending derelicts were among the life achievements of English poet Mina Loy (1882-1966). Loy emerged out of a tortured childhood into the age of free love and expression in Europe and America with irrepressible force. Though her behavior was at times reproachable, such as when she dumped her children in Florence to go gallivant among the elite in New York, her story is always interesting. Biographer Carolyn Burke tells it in generous detail in Becoming Modern.
From Publishers Weekly
Thirty years after her death, Mina Loy (1882-1966) remains the most obscure of the great modernist poets-a public scandal in the New York of the 1910s, a forgotten literary innovator soon afterward. Burke, a pioneering scholar in the rediscovery of Loy, has written the first comprehensive biography of this intriguing figure. She draws on interviews and Loy's private papers to illuminate some of the murkier years of the poet's glamorous life, especially her final reclusive years and her Victorian English girlhood. After coming to America in 1916, Loy helped invent the techniques of American modernist poetry, hobnobbing with fellow poets Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams as well as with painters such as Marcel Duchamp. Her outrageously witty, often obscene verse had a decisive role in the development of modern poetry. Burke follows Loy's wanderings from Greenwich Village to Mexico, from Paris to Aspen, turning up plenty of good stories and delightful gossip. The author does not spend much of the book reading Loy's poetry, interpreting it strictly as coded autobiography. But this story should make anyone interested in literature curious to investigate the work of this brilliant poet. An important contribution to a neglected corner of modern literary history. Photos not seen by PW. (July) ~ FYI: FSG will concurrently publish a selection of Loy's poetry, The Lost Lunar Baedeker.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lunar Splendor,
This review is from: Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Paperback)
Mina Loy's well on her way to rejoining the Modernist Hall of Fame, and Carolyn Burke deserves credit for stoking the fires with this full-scale biography, the first (but I hope not the last) word on Loy's life and achievement. Loy enjoyed a view from the center during the evolution of modern art c. 1905-1940, and her list of friends, lovers and acquaintances reads like a 20th-century Who's Who: F.T. Marinetti, Arthur Cravan, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Duchamp, James Joyce, Peggy Guggenheim, Constantine Brancusi, Walter Arensberg, William Carlos Williams, Mabel Dodge, Djuna Barnes, Ezra Pound--virtually anybody who was anybody in the international art circuit between the wars seemed to know and remember Loy.
Having famous friends is a tricky business, and in Burke's account the roll call of Loy's intimates threatens to eclipse her own distinctive work in poetry and the visual arts. Burke inadvertently assigns Loy a sort of secondary role in her own life, throwing over a deeper analysis of her poetry and prose to focus on the colorful age she lived in. I put down the book knowing more about Loy's world than about her own work or vision, or why Burke thinks it's important; she seems more attracted to the parade of bohemians and makers of famous "isms" that moved through Loy's life than she is to the poetry, which she stops to consider less often than you'd expect, and then in abbreviated soundbites. Still, this is a good place to start if you're at all interested in Loy and the work that's been done on her in the decade since this book first appeared.
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant biography of modernism,
By A Customer
This review is from: Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Paperback)
This biography of the madcap artist-poet, Mina Loy, is a masterpiece of the genre. Exhaustively researched by a meticulous scholar, the book's rich detail and witty slant make it read like a well-written novel. Its scenes are so vivid, in fact, that a recent novelization (unauthorized) of it has appeared and is receiving all the wonderful reviews that rightfully belong to Burke's book (see Logue).
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Very Informative, but Very Dense,
By Megan A. Burns "meganaburns" (new orleans, louisiana United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Becoming Modern: The Life of Mina Loy (Paperback)
Mina Loy led an extraordianry life and was clearly an artist creating before her time. This book is exhaustingly researched, a veritable Loy tome. If you love Mina Loy, it is certainly a must-read. It is very dense in parts though and often explains much more than is needed. The diction is very elevated, which often gives this the feel of an university book written for other academics. It's unfortunate though, because the book does a wonderful job of chronicling her life. This is often weighed down by the feeling that this book is seeking to impress rather than inform.
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