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Karla Kuskin

Karla Kuskin was born on July 17, 1932, in Manhattan, New York, and became a talented poet and author who wrote delightful books and poems for children. With her playful words and creative ideas, Karla filled her work with imagination, fun, and a love for language. Today, her poems and stories continue to bring happiness and inspiration to young readers all around the world.

Karla’s Journey as a Writer

Karla Kuskin loved reading and writing since she was a young girl. She studied art and writing in college and started her career as a children’s book writer and illustrator. Her first book, Roar and More (1956), was written and illustrated by her and was a big success. Karla went on to write and illustrate more than 50 books, including The Philharmonic Gets Dressed (1982) and Moon, Have You Met My Mother?  (2003).

A Magical World of Poetry

Karla Kuskin was especially talented at writing poems for kids. Her poems were full of playful language, funny ideas, and beautiful images that made readers feel like they were part of a magical world. She believed that poetry should be fun and exciting, and her work is a perfect example of that.

Karla’s poems often explored everyday life and experiences, showing young readers that there is wonder and beauty in even the smallest things. Her poems also encouraged children to use their imaginations, play with words, and find their own voices as writers and readers.

The following is an example of one of her poems, from the book  Moon, Have You Met My Mother? Notice how the poem uses very simple language, but still draws a vivid picture in your mind, and ends with a cheery surprise.

A bug sat in a silver flower thinking silver thoughts. A bigger bug out for a walk climbed up that silver flower stalk and snapped the small bug down his jaws without a pause without a care for all the bug’s small silver thoughts. It isn’t right it isn’t fair that big bug ate that little bug because that little bug was there.

He also ate his underwear.

Inspiring Young Minds

Karla Kuskin also enjoyed teaching kids about poetry and writing. She visited many schools to talk to students about her work and to share her love for language and storytelling. Karla believed that reading and writing could bring joy and inspiration to children’s lives and help them learn about themselves and the world around them.

Remembering Karla Kuskin

Karla Kuskin may have passed away on August 20, 2009, but her fantastic stories and poems still make readers happy today. You can even read more about Karla and her life as a poet in this article by Jack Prelutsky . As we remember her life and work, we can enjoy her humorous and creative poems, tell her stories to our friends, or even give poem-writing a try, using her work as our inspiration. Karla Kuskin’s love for language and her enchanting world of poetry continue to spark imagination and excitement in young readers, keeping her spirit alive for many years to come.

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Karla Kuskin (July 17, 1932 – August 20, 2009) was an award-winning author and illustrator whose many books include verse picture books written by her, illustrated by her, and those she both wrote and illustrated. She first achieved popularity with the 1956 book “Roar and More”, and went on to write titles such as “The Rose On My Cake”, “Near The Window Tree”, “The Philharmonic Gets Dressed” and “So, What’s It Like To Be A Cat?”. Additionally, Kuskin was the recipient of a National Council of Teachers of English Poetry prize for her body of work. She was well known for her witty, alliterative style and her artwork was equally whimsical. “I write for children,” Kuskin noted in Something about the Author Autobiography Series (SAAS), “because of a close bond I have with my own childhood. There is an understanding, a way of seeing things that I have never completely out-grown, that is still a part of me.”

Kuskin’s childhood was spent largely in New York City. The only child of Mitzi and Sidney Seidman, she was, admittedly, “the focus of a lot of approving attention and scrutiny,” as she remarked in SAAS. “I preferred the attention. But my mother, a dry cleaner’s daughter, has always had the ability to spot an imperfection in the material at fifty feet. While I was often highly praised, I was also continually judged by that eye and have inherited the same sharp vision.” Kuskin’s love of words began early, and a first poem—transcribed by her mother when the fledgling author was four—describes the hydrangea bushes outside the front door of the country house where the family lived for a year. New York was and continues to be Kuskin’s backdrop, as “difficult, alarming, marvelous, and ugly” as it sometimes is. Her father was in advertising, though he had dreams of journalism, and her mother gave up a stage career for photography, then gave that up with the birth of her daughter. “I promised myself that when I grew up I would not give up a job for my family but would combine the two,” Kuskin noted in SAAS. “I was determined that my children should never feel that they had kept me from work I wanted to do.”

From an early age Kuskin most wanted to write and draw. She formed an early, “almost magical belief in the power of words on paper,” she commented in SAAS. “To write things down, preserve the moment in words, has always been a necessity.” Her education, at private schools in New York, helped foster this love of words, as did her parents. Both at home and at school, poetry-reading was a daily activity. As a child, her favorite poets included Alfred Noyes, Robert Frost, along with the humorous verses of Ogden Nash, Don Marquis, A. A. Milne, and the Mother Goose volumes. T. S. Eliot became an inspiration, as were e. e. cummings, Yeats, and Auden. “Literature was neither dry or dusty,” she recalled of her school years in SAAS. “It was a fascinating part of our lives.”

Kuskin’s first published work provided her with a career focus. Now married to a freelance oboist, she worked on a magazine, for a photographer, and in advertising during the first year of her marriage. A forced vacation due to a bout of hepatitis gave her the free time to play with ideas and a rainy stay on Cape Cod provided the inspiration for “James and the Rain”, “one of the best read-aloud stories for very young children to appear in a long, long time,” according to a critic in Publishers Weekly. The story of a young boy who sets out to discover what various animals do when it rains, James and the Rain begins with a simple description: “James pressed his nose against the pane/ And saw a million drops of rain/ The earth was wet/ The sky was grey/ It looked like it would rain all day.” The book was republished in 1995 with illustrations by Reg Cartwright.

In the early 1960s, Kuskin had two children, Nicholas and Julia. Her experiences as a parent became a source of topics for some of her books. “The Bear Who Saw the Spring”, for example, was written when Kuskin was pregnant with her first child, Nicholas, and contemplating motherhood. The story focuses on a knowledgeable, older bear who teaches a young dog about the seasons of the year; the relationship of the two characters is similar to that of a parent and child. “Sand and Snow”, about a boy who loves the winter and a girl who loves the summer, was dedicated to Kuskin’s infant daughter Julia. And “Alexander Soames, His Poems”, a book Kuskin acknowledges was partly inspired by her children, recounts a conversation between a mother and her son Alex, who will only speak in verse despite his mother’s repeated requests that he express himself in prose. Critiquing the last title, Ellen Lewis Buell noted in the New York Times Book Review that “Kuskin’s fantasy about a small boy who speaks only in rhymes is as amusing as its title’s promise.” Buell went on to remark that the verses “are good nonsense, lighthearted, swiftly paced.”

Kuskin drew upon vivid memories of her own youth as themes for her books. Growing up in New York City, Kuskin reflected in SAAS, “there was … the sense of being a small child in big places that was very much a part of my childhood. And I was determined to remember those places and those feelings. I vowed to myself that I would never forget what it was like to be a child as I grew older. Frustration, pleasure, what I saw as injustices, all made me promise this to myself.” Kuskin has been lauded for knowing “what is worth saving and what is important to children,” according to Alvina Treut Burrows in Language Arts. “Her pictures and her verse and poetry,” the reviewer continued, “are brimming over with the experiences of children growing up in a big city.”

Kuskin’s great respect for education and her love of poetry motivated her to visit schools and try to help children in writing their own verse. She stressed a different approach in the way she writes for children and the way children should write poetry themselves. “When I write I often rhyme,” Kuskin remarked in Language Arts, “and I’m very much concerned with rhythm because children love the sound and swing of both. But when children write, I try to discourage them from rhyming because I think it’s such a hurdle. It freezes all the originality they have, and they use someone else’s rhymes. It’s too hard. And yet their images are so original.” The author encourages children to write verses by paying attention to their surroundings, concentrating on descriptions and experiences, and writing what they have imagined in short, easy lines rather than worrying about perfect sentences and paragraphs.

Kuskin has also employed an educational technique in some of her poetry collections. In “Dogs and Dragons, Trees and Dreams”: A Collection of Poems, for example, Kuskin adds notes to each poem, explaining her inspiration for the particular verse and encouraging the reader to write his own poetry. Critics lauded the author for including her commentary; Washington Post Book World contributor Rose Styron praised Kuskin’s “variety, wit and unfailing sensitivity” in addressing children.

In addition to teaching children to read, write, and appreciate poetry, Kuskin’s self-illustrated books contain appealing pictures that serve to emphasize her themes. Her early books, such as “All Sizes of Noises”: which features an assortment of everyday sounds translated into visual representations—display Kuskin’s belief that “the best picture book is a unity, a good marriage in which pictures and words love, honor, and obey each other,” as she wrote in SAAS. Her 1994 self-illustrated “City Dog” is an example of this meticulous blending of art with text. The story of a city dog’s first trip to the country, this book “is a verbal and visual romp,” as poetry and motion take over, according to Betsy Hearne writing in the Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books. Hearne went on to note that “words and pictures that at first glance appear naive accrue a rhythmic warmth that deepens with each runthrough.” Mary Lou Budd concluded in School Library Journal that “City Dog” is replete “with the imagery one has come to expect from Kuskin,” making it “a treat” for young readers.

While Kuskin’s self-illustrated books far outnumbered her stories that have been illustrated by others, she had no compunctions about working with other artists when the story requires it. “For many years,” she noted in SAAS, “I assumed that I would illustrate whatever I wrote.” In the late 1970s, however, the author asked Marc Simont to illustrate “A Space Story”, a book about the solar system that won an award from the New York Academy of Sciences. Her collaborations with Simont and then David Frampton are among her most popular and acclaimed books. After “A Space Story”, Simont illustrated the well-received “The Philharmonic Gets Dressed”, which earned Kuskin several awards, including an honor from the American Library Association and inclusion on the American Book Award short list. The book describes the pre-performance activities of one hundred and five orchestra members; their preparations include bathing, shaving, powdering, hair drying, and dressing before they finally perform in concert.

A similar topic is addressed in Kuskin and Simont’s third collaboration, “The Dallas Titans Get Ready for Bed”. After a difficult game, forty-five members of a victorious football team retreat to the locker room until the coach tells them they must go home and rest for practice the next morning. As reluctantly as a child who wishes to avoid an early bedtime, each player removes layers of football gear, takes a shower, dresses in street clothes, and leaves for home. Though Molly Ivins commented in the New York Times Book Review that “The Dallas Titans Get Ready for Bed” is “a much better book for boys than for girls,” she described it as “neat” and “funny.” And Horn Book contributor Hanna B. Zeiger found the story “a totally original and very funny behind-the-scenes look at a large organization.”

For “Jerusalem, Shining Still”, a book she wrote after an official invitation in 1982 to that holy city, Kuskin selected woodcut artist David Frampton to provide illustrations. Recounting 3,000 years of the history of Jerusalem, was a challenging task for the author. She spent a considerable amount of time thinking about her visit there and deciding what elements of the city and its past she would include in her book. “I wrote and cut and cut and wrote and condensed that long history into seven and a half pages,” she related in SAAS. Kuskin eventually chose Jerusalem’s survival and growth despite frequent attacks by foreigners as the theme of “Jerusalem, Shining Still”, and she was praised for making the city’s complex history more accessible to children.

Chanukah is the topic of “A Great Miracle Happened There”, featuring illustrations by Robert Andrew Parker. With a prose text, the book tells the story of a young Christian boy who spends his first Chanukah with a Jewish family and the questions the children ask about the tradition. A reviewer for School Library Journal described the work as worthy of “sharing for many seasons to come,” while a Kirkus Reviews contributor called it an “unusually thoughtful account of the events celebrated during Chanukah.” The picture book Paul is the result of an unusual collaboration. For this book, Kuskin wrote a text for illustrations created by noted American painter Milton Avery, completed in 1946 for a book that was never published. The manuscript had been lost, and Kuskin’s job was to weave a story from the series of fantastical double-spread illustrations. She constructed a tale about a young boy’s search for his magical grandmother.

Patchwork Island, illustrated by Petra Mathers, is a story-poem about a mother who stitches a quilt for her toddler that is decorated with images from her Canadian island home. Heide Piehler commented in School Library Journal that the “sense of warmth and security that the patchwork symbolizes is evident in both illustrations and narrative.” Somewhat similar to Roar and More, Kuskin’s City Noise is an “exuberant explosion of colors and shapes” accompanying a “rhyming, energetic poem,” according to Mary Rinato Berman in School Library Journal. A tin can held to a little girl’s ear becomes a magical conch shell, relating all the strange sounds of the city. A critic writing in Publishers Weekly felt that illustrator Renee Flower and Kuskin “seize on urban cacophony and turn it into a celebration of life itself in this dynamic picture book.” Kuskin recreates a veritable ocean of city sounds: “Squalling / Calling/ Crashing/ Rushing/ … Cars and garbage/ Reds and greens/ Girls and women/ Men/ Machines.” A Kirkus Reviews contributor called the book an “exuberant poem that captures the hubbub of urban life.”

Kuskin tells the tale of two fighting cats in verse in The Upstairs Cat, illustrated by Howard Fine, and presents a boy and his cat conversing in So, What’s It Like to Be a Cat? which a Kirkus Reviews contributor felt “illustrates Kuskin’s perfect apprehension of the feline psyche.” In The Sky Is Always in the Sky, illustrated by Isabelle Dervaux, she collects thirty-six of her poems previously published in other books. Reviewing the poetry collection, Booklist critic Hazel Rochman noted that there “is a wonderful physical immediacy to this selection of poems,” and concluded that it serves as a “great collection for reading aloud at home, in the library, and in the classroom.” Riverbank Review listed So, What’s It Like to Be a Cat? among its 1999 Children’s Books of Distinction awards, noting the “funny and intelligent” nature of the poems that act as a representative sampling of Kuskin’s body of work.

I Am Me, illustrated by Dyanna Wolcott, follows a child as she lists the way her many body parts resemble those of her relatives: she has her mother’s eyes and her father’s coloring. Once she finishes talking about how she is like her relatives, she declares that she is still entirely herself. Hazel Rochman, writing for Booklist, found that the pictures and words “celebrate the unique child in a loving universe.” Kuskin’s “Rhyming text ably captures the forebearing tone of a heroine who is clearly the apple of everyone’s eye,” commented a reviewer for Publishers Weekly. Maryann H. Owen, writing in School Library Journal considered I Am Me “A reassuring lesson of belonging and being unique.”

In 2002, one of Kuskin’s early self-illustrated picture books, The Animals and the Ark, was rereleased with new illustrations by Michael Grejniec. This update on the story of Noah and the Ark integrates Kuskin’s original text into Grejniec’s new pictures. A Kirkus Reviews contributor predicted that the book “should make a big splash.” Gillian Engberg, writing in Booklist, wrote that while the new illustrations are sometimes chaotic, “it’s the energetic words and appealing rhymes that will hook children.” Kathy Piehl, writing in School Library Journal, also commented on Kuskin’s original rhymes, noting: “Kuskin’s verse doesn’t falter until the story screeches to a halt once the sun appears.” Despite the quick pace, Kuskin does find space for humor; wrote a Publishers Weekly reviewer, adding: “The poet’s rhythm and rhyme unfold with deceptive ease, yet she varies the schemes to create a sense of urgency or to pause for a laugh.”

Moon, Have You Met My Mother? collects poetry published over forty years of Kuskin’s career, both previously published and brand new. Grouped into thematic units, the poems are accompanied by illustrations created by Sergio Ruzzier. The collection includes so many poems that a Kirkus Reviews contributor recommended taking it in small portions, noting: “Kuskin’s verse is best when presented intimately, to specific audiences.” Margaret Bush, writing in School Library Journal, noted that the collection is full of “good read-aloud fare” while Gillian Engberg maintained in her Booklist review that the collection is “long overdue,” and added that the book “will invite new generations of children to delight in the simplest words.”

One of Kuskin’s individual poems, originally published in 1964, made its appearance as a picture book in Under My Hood I Have a Hat. A little girl narrates the story of bundling up for a cold afternoon of playing in the snow with her dog. After successfully building a snowman, the girl comes inside and talks about each article of clothing as she removes it in preparation for having a snack; she then resumes describing the clothing as she puts eat item back on in order to continue playing. “The text is short and simple,” complimented a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who felt that beginning readers would enjoy the book’s “the rhyme, rhythm, and attractive illustrations.” Commenting on the collaboration between Kuskin and illustrator Fumi Kosaka, Linda Staskus noted in School Library Journal that “The simplicity of the art reflects the simplicity of the poem,” while Booklist contributor Carolyn Phelan wrote that the work’s “simplicity and child-like voice make it easy to enjoy again and again.” A critic for Publishers Weekly commented that “A funny cautionary note at the tale’s close should bring smiles to readers’ faces,” while Kitty Flynn, writing in Horn Book, praised Kuskin’s use of language, stating, “The poem almost doesn’t need pictures.”

In addition to possessing a strong work ethic, Kuskin also possesses a unique gift. As Judson Knight and Margaret F. Maxwell concluded in a critical study of the poet and artist’s work in the St. James Guide to Children’s Writers, “Kuskin’s most successful poems are those which capture the essence of childish experience; her ability to think herself into a child’s skin … is due to the fact that she draws for her inspiration on memories of her own childhood. That she has been able to distill these memories into simple yet lighthearted verses, which at their best are exquisite in their evocation of her small themes, is Kuskin’s lasting talent.”

On the Scholastic’s Writing with Writers Web site, Kuskin wrote, “I think that I write books because I loved reading them so much as a child. I loved drawing, too. Many of my feelings and ideas come from my childhood.” She concluded by encouraging young writers: “Trying to get a story of poem just the way you want it is hard work. I spend a great deal of time rewriting. But I am very happy, working in my room at my desk, in Brooklyn or Virginia, making pictures and pushing words around. So I just keep at it.”

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Dogs & dragons, trees & dreams: A collection of poems Hardcover – January 1, 1980

• Print length 85 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Harper & Row
• Publication date January 1, 1980
• ISBN-10 0060235438
• ISBN-13 978-0060235437
• See all details

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Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Harper & Row; First Edition (January 1, 1980)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 85 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0060235438
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0060235437
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 14.4 ounces

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Karla kuskin.

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    Poetry for Children

           About finding and sharing poetry with young people

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Remembering karla kuskin.

15 comments:

A wonderful tribute. And while I didn't know her, you've given me an opportunity to discover her work. Thank you.

I checked out one of her books yesterday, Sylvia--just in memory of a favorite author. This is a nice tribute you've written here.

Lovely post, Sylvia. Kuskin pours a child's heart all over the page.

Thank you for this lovely post.

Thanks for this tribute, Sylvia. Karla Kuskin was one of my favorites.

As a teacher and school library specialist, I knew Ms Kuskin's work well. Thank you for this lovely remembrance.

Oh, a new favorite poet! Thank you for this treasure!

Many years ago, when I first started trying to write poems for kids, I came across "Sitting in the Sand" by Karla Kuskin. I still remember where I was -- that was the impact her poem had on me. I saw what could be done and I realized how terribly far I had to go. Thank you, Sylvia, for remembering a wonderful poet.

Thank you all for your support and kind comments. It's lovely to remember Karla's work together and to share it with "newcomers!" Sylvia

This is a funny memory of Karla, whom I knew very well. She designed the Medallion for the NCTE Poetry Award and became the third recipient in 1979. I always teased her telling her the only reason she won the award was that she did design the medal. We always laughed over this. Lee Bennett Hopkins

Lee, thanks so much for sharing that lovely, personal memory. That helps us feel even more connected with her and her work! Sylvia

Thank you for the memories about Karla. I quote her and cite you in my poetry chapter in the IRA book just out, Children's Literature in the Reading Program, An Invitation to Read. David

Thank you, David. I look forward to your chapter and the new IRA book. Congrats to you! Sylvia

Sylvia, Thank you for posting this.

Karla was and still is my Mom. Thanks for posting this.

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Karla Kuskin

Karla Kuskin Poems

Write about a radish Too many people write about the moon. ...

Karla Kuskin Biography

Karla Kuskin (née Seidman) (July 17, 1932 – August 20, 2009) was a prolific author, illustrator and reviewer of children's literature. Kuskin was known for her poetic, alliterative style. Born in 1932 in Manhattan, New York, Karla Seidman was the only child of Sidney and Mitzi Seidman, and was raised in Greenwich Village, New York City. She attended the Little Red School House, followed by Elizabeth Irwin High School. She then attended Antioch College in 1950–53, and transferred to Yale where she studied with, among others, Josef Albers, Herbert Matter and Alvin Eisenman. She earned her B.F.A in graphic design in 1955 from Yale. Before working as a full-time author, she worked as an assistant to a fashion photographer, a design assistant, and in advertising. Her first book, Roar and More (Harper, 1956), came out of her senior graphic-arts project at Yale to design and print a book on a small press. She was married to Charles M. Kuskin, oboist, from 1955–1979 and in 1989 married William L. Bell Jr, a lawyer with the Center for Naval Analyses. She lived and worked in Brooklyn for most of her life, moving to Bainbridge Island, Washington, then settling in Seattle at the end of her life. In August 2009, Kuskin died of corticobasal degeneration in Seattle, at age 77. She died in a car accident going to a book signing.)

The Best Poem Of Karla Kuskin

Write About a Radish. . . Write about a radish Too many people write about the moon. The night is black The stars are small and high The clock unwinds its ever-ticking tune Hills gleam dimly Distant nighthawks cry. A radish rises in the waiting sky.

Karla Kuskin Comments

when you search up an author, you should put poems by the author also

LAAA LA LA AL AL LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LALALALA

Where would you be on a night like this

How many poems has she written

True That Daugs True That

you should really put poems by the auther! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !

Karla Kuskin Popularity

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Karla kuskin Poems

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Wonderful words : poems about reading, writing, speaking, and listening

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• Karla Kelsey on Mina Loy’s Lost Writings

May 29, 2024 | M'Baye, Fatou | Humanities , Interviews , Literature

Lost Writings: Two Novels by Mina Loy includes two never-before-published manuscripts by the groundbreaking writer, artist, and feminist. In this Q&A, we talk with the book’s editor Karla Kelsey about the process of editing and Mina Loy’s enduring legacy.

What was your first encounter with Mina Loy’s work?

In the small photocopy room of the department where I was working on a graduate degree, Eleni Sikelianos, one of my mentors, was copying multiple pages from a large, fat book with a peacock-blue cover. When she finished, she stapled the stack and handed it to me, telling me I needed to read it because I was working on a long poem of my own, and, furthermore, would love it. It was Mina Loy’s verse-epic, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose,” which had been published in its entirety for the first time in Jargon Society’s 1982 The Last Lunar Baedeker, edited by Roger Conover. I was immediately drawn to Loy’s fresh, innovative language. Even though the poem was written in the early 1920s, the boldness with which the poem addresses the impact that gender, ethnicity, and class have on self-identity and artistic pursuits continues to feel necessary. Like the novels of Lost Writings, the poem is based in autobiography, and Loy revisits many of the themes and scenes of the poem in the novels.

Aside from its publication in The Last Lunar Baedeker , which has long been out of print, this groundbreaking poem has never appeared in its entirety. It was originally published in installments in little magazines and an anthology alongside work by writers like Gertrude Stein, H.D., William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound—Loy’s friends and peers, all of whom are substantially more known. Like the contents of Lost Writings and so much of her work, “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” is both astonishing and tenuously transmitted.

Lost Writings includes two of Loy’s never-before-published manuscripts, The Child and the Parent and Islands in the Air . You note that Loy rarely put dates on her manuscripts or indicated when a work was finished. Could you describe the process of piecing together these manuscripts and editing them for the collection? Did you feel a sense of responsibility, trying to bring this work to audiences for the first time?

The process of piecing together Loy’s manuscripts began on a summer afternoon with her papers at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, which holds the largest public collection of her materials. While Loy is most recognized for her innovative poetry of the late 1910s and early’20s, she also wrote novels, manifestos, plays, stories, and uncategorizable prose. The Mina Loy Papers, a relatively small collection, includes all these genres, and four of the eight archival boxes preserve drafts of six of her seven known novels. This autobiographical cycle, which she referred to as her “Book,” draws on her childhood, student days, and artistic literary life. On this initial encounter, I was immediately electrified by the language of The Child and the Parent and Islands in the Air but quickly understood that to really read them I’d need to piece them together and transcribe them. I was also intrigued by their relationship to each other: they were clearly connected, but how? While both manuscripts exist as typescripts with Loy’s hand-corrections alongside multiple other drafts, none of the copies are complete.

All of Loy’s papers in the Beinecke are scanned and available online, but it was crucial to work with the physical manuscripts. Loy was also an accomplished visual artist and designer, and the materials of the page, the typewriter, the pencil scrawl, are all important. In addition to working in the reading room, studying the scholarship that has developed around the manuscripts was essential to my process. Particularly indispensable was Sandeep Parmar’s Reading Mina Loy’s Autobiographies: Myth of the Modern Woman, as was grasping the way other editors have approached her work, including Conover, who edited her poetry, as well as the editors of her prose. Sara Crangle’s 2011 Stories and Essays of Mina Loy works primarily with previously unpublished work,and from Loy’s papers Elizabeth Arnold edited Insel in 1991, which was reissued in 2014 with further materials from the archive edited by Sarah Hayden.

None of Loy’s “Book” was published in her lifetime, despite efforts by her and her daughter in the 1950s and early ’60s to interest editors. My introduction and afterword flesh out the historical and archival contexts of the manuscripts alongside my process of bringing them into print. I feel a great sense of responsibility, privilege, and pleasure in introducing this work to audiences for the first time.

Could you explain what you call “the intimate connection” between the two novels in Lost Writings?

Thought to have been written in Paris in the 1930s, The Child and the Parent is enigmatic and philosophical. It begins with infancy and early childhood before branching off into a lyrical meditation on the repression of women. Islands in the Air, thought to have been written in New York City in the ’40s and ’50s,reshapes passages from The Child and the Parent into the story of Loy’s alter ego, Linda, and follows her into her teenage years as she strives to become an artist and independent woman. The novels not only share a theme of coming into selfhood but, in early chapters, share material. Presenting them together provides insight into Loy’s writing process and invites discussion about genre: What do different approaches to writing a life allow one to say, allow one to be?

Loy herself foregrounds these questions, most pointedly at the beginning of Islands in the Air. The novel opens as Linda returns home to find one of her abandoned manuscripts scattered across her apartment. She recognizes this as part of the “Book” she had once “felt impelled to write.” Compelled to resume her project, Linda goes to the closet to “pick the first chapter” from a valise of papers she has stored there. It is titled “The Bird Alights,” which readers of The Child and the Parent will recognize as the first chapter of that earlier manuscript. World has become text, and text has become world: The Child and the Parent is the very manuscript Linda will develop into Islands in the Air , offering “A life for a life. My experience to yours for comparison.”

Mina Loy lived in several cities, having been born in London and then later moving to places such as Paris, Munich, Mexico City, and New York. How did these different settings impact her writing over the years?

Loy’s remarkable life maps onto many of the most important locations of European modernism, and following her around the globe charts a story of the avant-garde. Some of the highlights include Paris in 1905 where she showed work in the Salon d’Automne, which would become famous for its Fauves. In Italy before the First World War, she ran with the Futurists and was the only British artist to show work in the 1914 First Free Futurist International Exhibition in Rome. Loy’s literary debut, a manifesto titled “Aphorisms on Futurism” (1914) published in Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Work, leveraged Futurist techniques toward the liberation of creative consciousness. When she arrived in the United States in 1916, she was embraced by the New York Dadaists. She exhibited a painting in the 1917 First Annual Exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists (famous for its rejection of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain ), performed in avant-garde theater, and published in little magazines. Lunar Baedecker [sic], her first book of poetry, was released in 1923 by Robert McAlmon’s Paris-based press, Contact Editions, alongside volumes by Bryher, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, and Marsden Hartley. In the mid-1920s she designed and produced lamps and lampshades, which she sold in her own shop, partially funded by Peggy Guggenheim. After selling the business in 1930s, she was the sole “Paris représentante” for her son-in-law Julien Levy’s New York City gallery and was instrumental in his introduction of Surrealism to the United States. At this time, she was living in the same apartment building as her good friend Djuna Barnes while working on her “Book” and generating at least two distinctive suites of paintings. In the 1940s and ’50s, she lived on the Bowery in New York City, where she had emigrated before the Second World War. There she gathered trash, which she made into assemblages, continued to work on her “Book,” and wrote documentary-style poetry about her neighborhood.

In all of these cases, Loy wasn’t just in the right place at the time but was an essential part of literary and artistic communities and movements. Yet her work remained unique and her creative practices never derivative and always distinctive. Key to this was her curiosity and engagement balanced by self-awareness and a strong aversion to conformity.

Loy was a Jewish writer during a time of rising anti-Semitism and Fascism in Europe. What was her relationship to her Jewish identity, and how did it reveal itself in her work?

Loy was born in London in 1882; her father, a Jewish Hungarian tailor, had emigrated from Budapest as a young adult, and her mother was Protestant, the daughter of a cabinet maker. Loy was raised Christian, and her parents’ different backgrounds seems to have been a great source of conflict. Across her writing, the characters that Loy base on her mother are depicted as anti-Semitic. The mother figure is ashamed of her husband (although appreciative of his income) and bent on forcing Loy to conform to middle-class, Victorian feminine standards. Loy writes into this conflict, using it as an opportunity to explore not only the interpersonal dynamics of a fraught household but also as an allegory for imperialism and religious identities. Titles like “Anglo-Mongrels and the Rose” and “Goy Israels” (another of her autobiographical novels) speak to Loy’s relationship to her identity: always partial, always mixed.

You call The Child and the Parent a “a work of feminist lyric philosophy” that was revolutionary in its examination of domestic life and female sexual pleasure, long before the feminist movements of the 1960s. Could you expand on feminism in Loy’s writing?

Loy’s feminism stands out for her keen awareness of the power of social forces to shape individual psyches and for her critique of the way those forces perpetuate conditions hostile to human flourishing. Both novels challenge the imperialist, patriarchal culture of the late Victorian era of her youth, but her critique is applicable to our own time. In a passage that she repeates in both novels, she writes, “Not realizing that my very survival depended on submitting to that psychic pressure that church and state and even the police force would see to it that I should, and that failing their protection, the economic system would throw me out of life itself if I tried to escape, I decided to ignore it.” Of course, as Loy’s narrator well knows, she cannot ignore it, and the novels examine the internalization of these structures and the struggle against them.

Islands in the Air explores these structures narratively; The Child and the Parent explores them symbolically. For instance, the second half of the book critiques marriage and the grave individual and societal consequences of a sexual dissatisfaction that consigns women to a “terrain vague, ” a wasteland. As a chapter boldly titled “The Outraged Womb” explores, consignment to the wasteland is an “act of violence” that ensures women remain sexually, psychically, and intellectually unfulfilled. It guarantees that they will never know who they truly are. Furthermore, women are not merely victims of this violence: they perpetuate it and turn on each other, with a particularly vicious tendency to cut down the fallen woman, who, in the end, is a causality of a cruel economic and social system that thrives on the very inequalities that poison us.

In the prologue you write, “If the entire range of Loy’s output has not been as available as it should be, each period seems to find its own Mina Loy or to find in Mina Loy the writer and artist it urgently requires.” Who are some contemporary writers and artists that embody Mina Loy?

Someone like the visual artist and writer Etel Adnan, who innovated across forms and throughout a long life, comes to mind. Or Laurie Anderson: uncategorizable and out-of-this-world brilliant. Loy’s depth of accomplishment and commitment to both writing and visual art, coupled with her lifelong practice and ardent nonconformity, is rare. Lost Writings allows us to see her as a writer at work past the time she is assumed to have fallen silent. Mina Loy: Strangeness is Inevitable, the extraordinary monograph exhibition launched at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art last year and continuing at the Arts Club of Chicago this spring, similarly brings the span of her work into view.

Loy succeeded in building a multifaceted creative life in the face of a harsh Victorian upbringing; the meagre education allowed to a woman of her time; divorce when this could ruin a woman; the loss of her beloved second husband, Arthur Cravan; the death of two of her children; and the raising of her two other children. Although born with more advantage than many, she did not have a large inheritance, and what she did receive evaporated during the Depression. She sustained herself through two World Wars, a global pandemic, a worldwide economic depression, continual personal economic precarity, and immigration in her fifties as part of the wave of refugees fleeing Europe before World War II. In search of generative environments, she traversed the globe, frequently with very little money, and in her impoverished later years, public attention to her work increasingly declined until she was all but forgotten. Yet Loy persisted, created, and thrived as both a writer and visual artist, using what was at hand—a crushed tin can, an autobiographical fragment—to break new ground.

Karla Kelsey  is professor of English and creative writing at Susquehanna University. Her recent books include  Transcendental Factory: A Poet’s Novel for Mina Loy  and the poetry volumes  On Certainty  and  Blood Feather .

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