Mary Ann Caws

Mina Loy was born in London in 1882, became American, and lived variously in New York, Europe and, finally, Aspen, Colorado, where she died in 1966. Flamboyant and unapologetically avant-garde, she was a poet, painter, novelist, essayist, manifesto writer, actress, and dress and lampshade designer. Her life involved an impossible abundance of artistic friends, performance and spectacular adventures in the worlds of Futurism, Christian Science, feminism, fashion, and everything modern and modernist. This new account by Mary Ann Caws explores Mina Loy’s exceptional life, and features many rare images of Loy and her husband, the Swiss writer, poet, artist, boxer and provocateur Arthur Cravan, who disappeared without trace in 1918.

The first English-language collection of its kind, this anthology offers an overview of the past and present history of a long-underappreciated--and now quickly burgeoning--poetic tradition. For decades, the prose poem has variously delighted, confounded, and incensed readers and critics. Until recent years, it had been confined to the margins of literary history as a rather disturbing and elusive oddity. All this is changing. The prose poem, which has long been neglected and underrepresented in mainstream and experimental publications alike, is growing in popularity in the world of contemporary poetry. It is more widely available than ever before, thanks to the joint efforts of an ever-increasing number of imaginative writers, publishers, and editors. And still, this volume is the first anthology of the French prose poem to see the light in the English-speaking world. This anthology gathers a wide range of poets practicing what Michael Riffaterre memorably called "the literary genre with an oxymoron for a name," from the prose poem's official "inventors" (Aloysius Bertrand and Charles Baudelaire) to a younger generation of poets from all over the French-speaking world. The poems in this bilingual collection have been rendered into English by some of the finest translators of French literature, including John Ashbery, Mark Polizzotti, Richard Sieburth, Rosmarie Waldrop, and many others.

Over the course of her long, highly distinguished career writing about literature and art, Mary Ann Caws has excavated, illuminated and examined in depth the most intriguing works and personalities of Symbolism, Dada, Surrealism and beyond. In these concise but always colourful and insightful articles, Caws brings us fresh portraits of the most famous figures and introduces us to writers and artists who merit more attention than they have received, with a special focus on female writers and artists. The author’s sensitivity to the intersections of eccentric literature and eccentric life infuses each critical essay with the human passions that these essential modernists lived. From Dickinson and Mallarmé to Duchamp and Mina Loy, Caws applies the art of close looking to shrewdly framed slices of the modernist experience.

Poetry by one of the most powerful female figures in twentieth-century surrealism, now collected in English for the very first time. Alice Paalen Rahon was a shapeshifter, a surrealist poet turned painter who was born French and died a naturalized citizen of Mexico. Along with her first husband, the artist Wolfgang Paalen, her circle included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Joan Mir , Paul luard, Man Ray, and Ana s Nin. Bicultural, bisexual, and fiercely independent, her romantic life included affairs with Pablo Picasso and the poet Valentine Penrose. This new selection of Rahon's poems, included both in the original French and in translation by Mary Ann Caws, celebrates the visionary work of a woman who defied easy definition. Her spellbinding poems, inspired by prehistoric art, lost love, and her travels around the globe, weave together dream, fantasy, and madness.

Originally published in 1990, Women of Bloomsbury takes a fresh look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington. Connected by more than bonds of friendship and artistic endeavour, the three women faced similar struggles. Juxtaposing their personal lives and their work, Mary Ann Caws shows us with feeling and clarity the pain women suffer in being artists and in finding – or creating – their sense of self. Relying on unpublished letters and diaries, as well as familiar texts, Caws give us a portrait of the female self in the act of creation.

Art is seen as a solitary, even a reclusive, endeavour. But visual artists, writers and musicians often find themselves energized by a collective environment. Sharing ideas around a table has always provided a starting, and a continuing, place for fruitful exchanges between artists of all kinds. In her charming new book, Mary Ann Caws explores a rich variety of gathering places, past and present, which have been conducive to the release and sustenance of creative energies. Creative Gatherings surveys meeting locations across Europe and the United States, from cityscapes to island hideouts, from private homes to public cafes and artists’ colonies. Examples include Florence Griswold’s house in Old Lyme, Connecticut, meeting place of the Old Lyme Art Colony; Prague’s Le Louvre café, haunt of Kafka and Einstein; Picasso’s modernist hangout in Barcelona, Els Quatre Gats; Charleston, gathering place of Virginia Woolf, and Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant; and the cafés of St-Germain-des-Prés and Montparnasse: the hangouts of Apollinaire, Sartre and Patti Smith. The book interweaves 200 examples of collaborative artworks throughout the text, with 120 in colour.

While her career as a painter was often eclipsed during her lifetime by that of her husband, Yves Tanguy, recent scholarship posits that the influence was mutual and that Kay Sage's work was distinct from Tanguy's. The full extent of Sage's talent is laid bare in this stunning slip-cased book that includes many works that have not been viewed publicly since the 1940s and 1950s. An insightful essay explores Sage's involvement with the Surrealists and her marriage to Tanguy, as a partner and sounding board. A generously illustrated chronology includes personal and archival material that reveals much about her life and practice. The paintings, collages, and works on paper-haunting, evocative, and original-are reproduced to full effect, each with comprehensive provenance and exhibition history. Impeccably researched and engagingly written, this monograph brings to life an intrepid and hugely gifted artist whose talent is long overdue for recognition.

Food has always been a favourite subject of the world’s artists, from still-lifes by Matisse and Picasso to the works of Claes Oldenberg and Andy Warhol. But how do artists eat? The Modern Art Cookbook provides a window into how both great and lesser-known modern artists, writers and poets ate, cooked, depicted and wrote about food. A cornucopia of life in the kitchen and in the studio throughout the twentieth century and beyond, the book explores a wide-ranging panoply of artworks of food, cooking and eating from Europe and the Americas – from the early moderns through the Impressionists, Symbolists, Cubists, Futurists and Surrealists up to today’s art – as well as writing about food from contemporary novelists, writers and poets. Beautifully illustrated and often surprising, this new paperback edition is a joyous guide to the art of food.

Originally published in 1990, Women of Bloomsbury takes a fresh look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Dora Carrington. Connected by more than bonds of friendship and artistic endeavour, the three women faced similar struggles. Juxtaposing their personal lives and their work, Mary Ann Caws shows us with feeling and clarity the pain women suffer in being artists and in finding – or creating – their sense of self. Relying on unpublished letters and diaries, as well as familiar texts, Caws give us a portrait of the female self in the act of creation.

First Published in 1991. Knowing any real city, and still more so, knowing what it is to know a city, may be as much about passive as about active experience. What we read in the field-that field of the city in all its bizarre mixture of culture and nature-is bound to determine, to some non-fictional extent, what we know of it, what we imagine it could be, what we fear it may be, or become. These essays are meant to be, albeit in their critical mode, the recountings of knowing something through something else: they are the projected imagination, through reading, of the reading by the self and/or others (a wide range of each) of a city, or cities as such, of what city-knowing or city-thinking is. The city as stage, market, and labyrinth, variously trafficked and aestheticized, dreamt and politicized, as passionately written by authors from Cicero to Kazin, from Wordsworth, Dickens, Whitman, and Woolf, to Williams, Ashbery, and Bonnefoy, is the place the essays play themselves out, through architecture and metaphor.

With many never-before-published photographs taken by the artist, as well as paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, and films, this volume offers an unparalleled examination of Pablo Picasso’s relationship to photography.

Food has always been a favourite subject of the world's artists, from still-lifes by Matisse and Picasso to the works of Claes Oldenberg and Andy Warhol. But how do artists eat? The Modern Art Cookbook provides a window into how both great and lesser-known modern artists, writers and poets ate, cooked, depicted and wrote about food. A cornucopia of life in the kitchen and in the studio throughout the twentieth century and beyond, the book explores a wide-ranging panoply of artworks of food, cooking and eating from Europe and the Americas - from the early moderns through the Impressionists, Symbolists, Cubists, Futurists and Surrealists up to today's art - as well as writing about food from contemporary novelists, writers and poets. Mary Ann Caws supplies numerous delicious modern art recipes, from Frida Kahlo's Veracruz-style red snapper to David Hockney's strawberry cake and Claude Monet's madeleines, exploring the parallels between the art of cuisine and the visual and verbal arts. The Modern Art Cookbook illuminates the significance of particular ingredients and dishes in the lives of some of the world's greatest artists, providing a feast for the eyes and the mind as well as the palate. Beautifully illustrated and often surprising, this compilation is a joyous guide to the art of food.

This singular book illustrates how to edit a piece of prose and enhance its clarity of thought and felicity of style. The authors first present ten principles of effective composition, and then scrutinize three extended paragraphs, suggesting with remarkable specificity how to improve them. The volume also offers challenging practice questions, as well as two finished essays, one serious and one humorous, that demonstrate how attention to sound mechanics need not result in mechanical writing. Steven M. Cahn and Victor L. Cahn help readers deploy a host of corrective strategies, such as avoiding jargon, bombast, and redundancy; varying sentence structure; paring the use of adjectives and adverbs; properly deploying phrases and clauses; and refining an argument. Here is a book for all who seek to increase their facility in written communication.

This singular book illustrates how to edit a piece of prose and enhance its clarity of thought and felicity of style. The authors first present ten principles of effective composition, and then scrutinize three extended paragraphs, suggesting with remarkable specificity how to improve them. The volume also offers challenging practice questions, as well as two finished essays, one serious and one humorous, that demonstrate how attention to sound mechanics need not result in mechanical writing. Steven M. Cahn and Victor L. Cahn help readers deploy a host of corrective strategies, such as avoiding jargon, bombast, and redundancy; varying sentence structure; paring the use of adjectives and adverbs; properly deploying phrases and clauses; and refining an argument. Here is a book for all who seek to increase their facility in written communication.

The Lost Steps (Les Pas perdus) is André Breton's first collection of critical and polemical essays. Composed between 1917 and 1923, these pieces trace his evolution during the years when he was emerging as a central figure in French (and European) intellectual life. They chronicle his tumultuous passage through the Dada movement, proclaim his explosive views on Modernism and its heroes, and herald the emergence of Surrealism itself. Along the way, we are given Breton's serious commentaries on his Modernist predecessors, Guillaume Apollinaire and Alfred Jarry, followed by his not-so-serious Dada manifestoes. Also included are portraits of Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, and Breton's mysterious friend Jacques Vaché, as well as a crisis-by-crisis account of his dealing with Dada's leader, Tristan Tzara. Finally, Breton offers a first glimpse of Surrealism, the movement that was forever after identified with his name and that stands as a defining force in twentieth-century aesthetics.

The southern landscape forms a lush backdrop in this memoir by Mary Ann Caws in which she recounts a life of passionate engagement. She sketches her early years in North Carolina, where she makes her debut and begins to struggle with accepted social values of the time and region. She recounts the tangled relationships of her family and her ties to her sister, parents, and the grandmother - a painter - who served as her role model. Caws describes her education at Bryn Mawr, in Paris, and at Yale - where she weds a professor of philosophy. She details the joys, small and large, of a complicated marriage that ends in divorce, after which she strives toward self-sufficiency and self-understanding. Finally, Caws relates her deep passion for writing, teaching, art, and poetry; her friendships with the writers, artists, and intellectuals who provided sanctuary for her mind and heart; and the many light-filled summers spent with her children at their field house in Provence.""To the Boathouse"" is the account of a southern girl and her maturing sense of self as she grows to become one of the most prolific and accomplished writers and critics of our day.

A text of surrealism. It includes an essay on Eluard's works.

For Mary Ann Caws—noted translator of surrealist poetry—the most appealing translations are also the oddest; the unexpected, unpredictable, and unmimetic turns that translations take are an endless source of fascination and instruction. Surprised in Translation is a celebration of the occasional and fruitful peculiarity that results from some of the most flavorful translations of well-known authors. These translations, Caws avers, can energize and enliven the voice of the original. In eight elegant chapters Caws reflects on translations that took her by surprise. Caws shows that the elimination of certain passages from the original—in the case of Stéphane Mallarmé translating Tennyson, Ezra Pound interpreting the troubadours, or Virginia Woolf rendered into French by Clara Malraux, Charles Mauron, and Marguerite Yourcenar—often produces a greater and more coherent art. Alternatively, some translations—such as Yves Bonnefoy’s translations of Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats into French—require more lines in order to fully capture the many facets of the original. On other occasions, Caws argues, a swerve in meaning—as in Beckett translating himself into French or English—can produce a new text, just as true as the original. Imbued with Caws’s personal observations on the relationship between translators and the authors they translate, Surprised in Translation will interest a wide range of readers, including students of translation, professional literary translators, and scholars of modern and comparative literature.