dumbfoundry

Joella Bayer has died and you've never heard of her unless you're from Aspen, Colorado. But:

In Paris, Joella lived an enchanted life with her mother, poet Mina Loy, and her sister, Fabi (Benedict). They ran in the most artistic of circles, being friends with writer James Joyce and artist Marcel Duchamp.

And there is much to read about her mother:

• The Academy of American Poets:
  In 1921 Ezra Pound wrote to Marianne Moore: "... is there anyone in America except you, Bill [William Carlos Williams] and Mina Loy who can write anything of interest in verse?" But for decades, the avant-garde poet Mina Loy was virtually invisible next to many of her fellow modernists.


• Wolkowski's Mina Loy Page:
  There has been a recent explosion of interest in Modern poet Mina Loy (1882-1966). Her "forgotten" poems were published in 1996 in the collection, The Lost Lunar Baedeker, a biography has recently been published, and no fewer than two book-length criticisms are at press as this site is being constructed.


• Becoming Modern — The Life of Mina Loy:
  I FIRST HEARD of Mina Loy when I was living in Paris twenty years ago. A fin-de-siècle English painter, she had made her name, quite unexpectedly, as a writer of vers libertine—the sort of free verse that in the 1910s seemed to lead to free love. To the modernists, she was the first to chart the sensibility of the "new woman." Ezra Pound praised her intellect and her refusal to traffic in sentiment, the staple, he judged, of women poets. (Her poems bristled with such intelligence that Pound coined the term "logopoeia" to describe them.) William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, and E. E. Cummings all learned from her example. In the 1920s she was as well known as Marianne Moore, the other female modernist with whom she was frequently compared.

This entry was posted by eeksypeeksy on Wednesday, March 10, 2004 at 11:48 AM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.