ABSTRACT
Mina Loy's emergence and development as a poet, beginning with her first publications in the 1910s, would engage "the new" through gender-aware innovations that foreground the visual as a vital terrain for meaning. Her poetry reveals correspondences with visual cultures and discourses of modernity engendered by twentieth-century camera and print technology. How Loy's own intense interest in the visual coincides with, and takes part in, these rhetorical structures and cultural dynamics reveals itself in poetic engagements with particular visual discourses. This chapter provides an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book establishes how the photographic portrait, the figure of the photographer, and the concept of the camera eye circulate across Loy's poetry and appear in her autobiographical work Islands in the Air. It focuses on Loy's encounters with Surrealism in Paris of the 1920s and 1930s, and in its migration to New York in the 1930s and 1940s.
