Impressive People: Stories of Remarkable Lives - Sykalo Eugen 2025

Mina Loy – Radical modernist poet, artist, inventor, designer, lover of Futurists

It starts with a face. Sharp angles. Dark, haunted eyes. A mouth that never quite settles — poised between declaration and desire. Somewhere in a grainy black-and-white photograph, Mina Loy is looking past you. Past the lens. Past the century.

The tragedy isn’t that she vanished. The tragedy is that she was never really seen.

In the early 20th century, when modernism swaggered across Europe in violent, splattered strokes, Mina Loy was in the thick of it — and then, just as quickly, she wasn’t. A poet, an artist, an inventor of bizarre lamps and bizarre-er manifestos, a lover of Futurists (and breaker of them), she existed like an electrical charge between cultural movements, too singular to belong to any of them. Today, she’s a whisper in academic corridors. But once, she was the kind of woman who made even Duchamp blink twice.

And she knew it.

Florence, 1905.

Let’s start there — with candlelight and scandal.

Mina was born in London, but the city was too gray, too hemmed in. Italy, in contrast, was ripe. She arrived married to a dapper but miserable painter, Stephen Haweis, already cracking at the edges. What she found instead of marital bliss was a city humming with art, egos, and illicit affairs. She painted. She posed nude. She wrote feverishly — verses that read like they’d been chiseled in lightning. She painted elongated faces, stained with longing. She had a child, then buried a second. The earth gave, then took, then gave again.

Florence turned her heart inside out.

And it was there, among the crypts and citrus trees, that she met Filippo Tommaso Marinetti — the human Molotov cocktail who founded Italian Futurism. Theirs was a collision, not a romance. Marinetti was all chrome and velocity and screaming trains. Loy was more of a soul-mirror: she wanted the future, but not his kind. She craved a revolution that included the female body, the female voice. She gave him her bed but not her allegiance.

Instead, she wrote her Feminist Manifesto — not a document, but a detonation.

“Leave off looking to men to find out what you are not,” she spat onto the page. It wasn’t polite feminism. It was warpaint feminism. While Virginia Woolf was threading pearls through prose, Loy was declaring the virginity complex a sham and demanding surgical liberation from gendered obedience. In 1914. You read it now and feel the page vibrate.

New York, 1916.

She arrived like a comet. Or maybe like a storm in silk stockings.

Greenwich Village was at its peak: smoke, jazz, erotic mischief. Loy dove headfirst. She became a magnet in a scene that didn’t know what to do with women who were smarter, sharper, and sexier than the men around them. Gertrude Stein liked her. Djuna Barnes copied her. Marcel Duchamp flirted. William Carlos Williams called her “the very essence of modernity.” Even Ezra Pound, that grump, begrudgingly admired her.

But it was Arthur Cravan — half poet, half myth — who flipped the script. A boxer, an anarchist, a man who made Dada look tame. They met at a party. He called her "the only woman." She chased him across the continent. He vanished off the coast of Mexico in 1918, swallowed by sea and rumor.

She never stopped believing he might come back.

Mina Loy poems were not poems you quoted at dinner parties.

They pulsed. They tangled flesh and spirit in a brutal ballet. She wrote about childbirth with the intimacy of a scalpel. About sex like it was both sacrament and slaughter. She called her own verse “psychological landscapes,” which is true if your psyche has fault lines and you’ve stopped pretending it doesn’t.

Her collection Lunar Baedecker (1923) isn’t a book. It’s a séance. In it, religion gets undressed, gender turns inside out, and the moon — a recurring motif — becomes less celestial body, more maternal ache.

She was a modernist poet, sure. But Loy never fit neatly beside Eliot’s cold fragmentation or Pound’s pompous classicism. Where they wielded allusion like armor, she used emotion as a weapon. She made vulnerability feel atomic.

Paris, 1920s.

Back to Europe. The postwar party raged. Mina opened a lampshop on the Right Bank. Not a metaphor — an actual boutique. She made surreal lighting fixtures: globes and wires and shards, the kind of things that looked like they might float into the sky or collapse in on themselves. It made sense. She’d always been part architect, part sorceress.

She drifted in and out of surrealism, attended Gertrude Stein’s salons, painted alongside Man Ray, dressed like no one else. Her style was curated madness: turbans, asymmetry, brilliance. Fashion magazines of the time would call her a “style icon,” had they dared. Instead, they mostly ignored her.

Still, Loy burned.

Then came the long fade.

The 1930s brought her to Manhattan again — but the Village had changed. Bohemia had morphed into something more professional, less mad. Loy grew quieter. She stopped publishing. Worked as a door-to-door peddler. Yes, the once-luminary selling lotion. There’s something mythic in that — like if Athena retired to sell Avon.

But her eyes never dimmed. The flame receded, but the pilot light stayed lit.

She moved to Aspen, of all places, in the 1950s. Wrote in notebooks. Whispered her brilliance to herself. She died in 1966, mostly forgotten.

Today, if Mina Loy is mentioned, it’s usually as a “forgotten modernist.” Which is a bit like calling Cleopatra a “notable Egyptian.”

She wasn’t just a female modernist poet — she was its defibrillator. A surrealist before Surrealism knew itself. A feminist when feminism was still spelling itself out. A lover of Futurists who knew their future didn’t include her. And she didn’t mind. She was inventing her own.

Mina Loy was the kind of artist you don’t canonize. You resurrect her. You say her name into the mirror like a spell.

Mina Loy.

She never wanted your pedestal. Just your attention. Even for a moment.

And now she has it.