Intimate Circles | Loy and Barnes

Mina Loy
Drafts of “Nancy Cunard”
n.d.
Mina Loy Papers

Drafts of Loy’s poem about Nancy Cunard, her friend, fellow poet, and editor of The Hours Press, provide a window on her creative process. The final, published version of the poem ends with lines derived from this draft’s beginning and its final lines are now the poem’s center:

The vermilion wall
receding as a sin
beyond your moonstone whiteness,
Your chiffon voice.1

1	Mina Loy, “Nancy Cunard,” The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems, selected and edited by Roger L. Conover, New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1996, p. 103.