Insel

Mina Loy (1882–1966) was born Mina Gertrude Lowy in London to a Hungarian father and an English mother. Originally trained as a painter, she was at the center of all the great artistic movements of the first half of the twentieth century: she wrote Futurist manifestos in Italy (including the “Feminist Manifesto,” which denounced the misogyny and incipient fascist tendencies of Futurism); her poem “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” appeared alongside T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” in The Dial; she starred in plays in Greenwich Village in the 1920s with William Carlos Williams; she was friends with Duchamp and Man Ray; she ran a lampshade business with Peggy Guggenheim; and in the 1940s, she lived on the Bowery, where she collected trash for found-art collages, as in the style of her friend Joseph Cornell, whose work she championed. During one of her earlier stints in New York, she met the love of her life, Arthur Cravan, the Dadaist poet and boxer who disappeared in mysterious circumstances shortly after their marriage. Only two collections of her work were published in her lifetime, Lunar Baedecker (1923) and Lunar Baedecker and the Time Tables (1958). She died in Aspen, Colorado, in 1966.

Elizabeth Arnold, a scholar and poet, is the author of Effacement and two other collections.

Sarah Hayden is an Associate Professor of Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Southampton and author of Curious Disciplines: Mina Loy and Avant-Garde Artisthood.