“Face of the Skies”: Ekphrastic Poetics of Mina Loy's Late Poems
“Face of the skies”: Ekphrastic Poetics of Mina Loy’s Late Poems Raphael Schulte After a lifetime engaged in “migratory modernism,” to quote a term from Rachel Blau DuPlessis (191), the seventy-year old painter and poet Mina Loy (1882-1966) moved in 1953 to Aspen, Colorado, a town with only about nine hundred residents. Loy, who had participated in most of the major art movements of the first half of the twentieth century—Symbolism, Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, and Surrealism—and had lived in London, Paris, Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Florence, Geneva, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Rio de Janiero and New York City, moved to the artistic backwater world of 1950s Aspen in order to be with her daughters Joella and Fabienne and their families. The move proved to be both isolating and stimulating. In a September 26,1955 letter to the artist Joseph Cornell, one of her friends in New York City, Loy wrote: It’s nearly two years since they whisked me up here. I am not at my ease here, but the altitude is stimulating—sometimes surprising. When I arrived my hair stood on end and crackled with electricity, the metal utilities give electric shocks under one’s fingernails—the Radio is a volley of shots except at night— & in the streets mostly all there is to walk on are 3 cornered stones” (qtd in Burke Becoming 427).1 In this new life of isolation from her friends but stimulation from the “electricity” in the mountain air, Loy looked both backward and forward. Within a year of her arrival in Aspen, in July 1954, Loy completed, probably by memory, a pencil portrait of Teri Fraenkel.2 Teri may have seemed like an unlikely choice for a portrait.
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