My name is Leah Mell and I am an undergraduate at Davidson College in North Carolina. I am enrolled in Dr. Suzanne Churchill’s class, Terrible Beauty: Yeats and Modern Poetry in the Fall semester of 2016. For our final project, we are each creating works of digital scholarship, and I have elected to focus my project on Mina Loy’s poem “Songs to Joannes.” The initial concept for this project came from a paper that I wrote earlier in the semester, titled “Love as a Broken Art: An Examination of Mina Loy’s ‘Songs to Joannes’.” My central claim is that, though most critics elect to view this poem in an entirely bleak light, I, as a not-quite-as-jaded undergraduate, see Loy presenting love as broken and painful, but significant and worthwhile despite that.
My digital project is a remediation of the publication of “Songs to Joannes,” based on Mina Loy’s wishes for its presentation. I have created a digital booklet in Adobe InDesign and embedded it under the “Digital Remediation” tab with more in-depth analysis and explanation of its critical implications. It is my wish that seeing the poem in a reimagination of its intended form will allow my readers to experience the combination of meaning that results from the unity of content and layout. Of course, my project is digital, which was not even conceivable at the time that Loy was looking to publish this poem, but I hope that by converting this publication to a digital format I will be able to make Loy’s work more accessible to a wider audience and allow you to engage with it in a new way through my remediation.
Having been published in 1917 (prior to 1923), “Songs to Joannes” as it appeared in Others is legally in the public domain in the United States. My representation and recreation of it are purely for academic and scholarly purposes.
a photo of me in my natural state of unbridled enthusiasm
