This is also an SWC note.

If we are going to keep initials by each note, this one should end with (SWC), since it's an argument I make in my chapter on the plays, here: https://mina-loy.com/chapters/courting-an-audience/6-the-sacred-prostitute/

Loy wrote this in a letter to Mabel Dodge Luhan, which is digitized here:

Mina Loy, Letters to Mabel Dodge Luhan. Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/10000282

The quotation can be found on image 16.

Citation for these letters:

Mina Loy. Letters to Carl Van Vechten. Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2043789

The first quotation can be found on image 40; the second on image 36.

Here again, i don't have time to proof the play itself, but I suggest proofreading it against the version reprinted in Sara Crangle's Stories and Essays of Mina Loy, which is the authoritative edition of the play.

These letters can be found in the Beinecke digital collection, so consider adding a link and citation:

Mina Loy. Letters to Carl Van Vechten. Carl Van Vechten Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2043789

The first quotation comes from images 104-105; the second quotation comes from image 44 in this digital exhibit.

We could also refer readers to my chapter on the plays, which I included in a previous note: https://mina-loy.com/chapters/courting-an-audience/

Or to the specific section on The Pamperers: https://mina-loy.com/chapters/courting-an-audience/7-the-pamperers/

I would suggest putting The Sacred Prostitute before The Pamperers to publish them in chronological order. Also you might add to this paragraph the sentence:

Although the play was never produced in Loy's lifetime, it was published in The Dial* in July 1920 (vol. 69, no. 1, pp. 65-78).

For this reason, I think it's better to print The Sacred Prostitute before The Pamperers in this collection.

Add period at the end of this sentence. Also please cite my chapter Suzanne W. Churchill. "Courting an Audience: Loy's Plays," Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, edited by Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum, University of Georgia, 2020. https://mina-loy.com/chapters/courting-an-audience/. Accessed 4 June 2024.

Alternatively, you can link to the chapter section on The Sacred Prostitute, which is where this info comes from: https://mina-loy.com/chapters/courting-an-audience/6-the-sacred-prostitute/

A citation for the Feminist Manifesto is:

Loy, Mina. "Feminist Manifesto." The Lost Lunar Baedeker: Poems of Mina Loy, edited by Roger Conover. New York, Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1996, p. 154.

I might cut this note, since it's not clear what Woolf is echoed and isn't a definitive echo anywya.

italicize book titles.

I don't have time to proof this entire play, but hopefully someone else already has or will do so? I've been comparing it to the Dial publication, but probably better to look at Sara Crangle's edited version, reprinted in the Essays and Stories of Mina Loy. This is also the authoritative addition of Sacred Prostitute.

This appears more like a poem. There aren't line breaks in the same place in the Dial publication. Also, replace hyphens with full m-dashes with a space before and after each one.

In the Dial publication, these lines are indented so that the two columns appear on the center of the page (both left aligned).

Shouldn't The Sacred Prostitute come before The Pamperers to present them in chronological order?

Citation for Bay-Cheng:

Bay-Cheng, Sarah. “Modernist Poetic Drama: A Critical Introduction,” Poets at Play: An Anthology of Modernist Drama, edited by Barbara Cole. Selinsgrove, PA: Susequehana University Press, 2010.

change hyphen to m-dash

delete and insert "and"

italicize Lacerba. Also consider deleting "I think that" in the next sentence and starting with: "These references are important...."

Although I love this construction, it's not clear to me why it's here or how it relates to these two plays. It seems to me to represent a very different focus, style, and concern than these early plays. If an image/illustration is desired, maybe include the photo of Loy dressed for the Blind Man's Ball? Or one of her early drawings or paintings?

In the Rogue publication, the final line is followed by a space, then:

February 28, 1915, Firenze.

move footnote to end of line

remove dash, which is not in original Rogue publication.

Perhaps worth linking to the manuscript in the Beinecke's digital collection: https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2112213

Two Plays are digitized in images 42-47 of this digital exhibit, which can be cited:

Loy, Mina. Poems and Plays. 1914. Carl Van Vechten Papers. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. https://collections.library.yale.edu/catalog/2112213.

Check with Laura, but I think it's distracting to have our initials after each note. I'd be happy to have them eliminated.

change comma to dash for clarity.

Did Laura mean to substitute citations or links here?

add punctuation: planes, etc.,

The word CREATION—" should appear centered on the next line, like a header parallel to DISHARMONY. above.

The underscores beneath the footnote reference are a bit confusing/distracting because they look like Loy's dashes. Can they be eliminated?

This Header is centered in the Rogue publication

Is there a reason why these first 5 lines are spaced more widely apart? In the original publication in Rogue, the first five lines are actually centered. When the man speaks, the lines shift to left alignment for the rest of the script, but all lines are spaced the same throughout.

Remove "s": The title is "Collision"

For clarity, consider adding:

However, the term may also have a sexual valence, since in "Songs to Joannes," a long poetic sequence....

In American publications, comma usually goes inside quotation mark (in British ones, it looks like this).

Would it be possible to add a citation to my chapter on the plays, since this is a key argument I put forth there? The citation would be:

Suzanne W. Churchill. "Courting an Audience: Loy's Plays," Mina Loy: Navigating the Avant-Garde, edited by Churchill, Linda A. Kinnahan, and Susan Rosenbaum, University of Georgia, 2020. https://mina-loy.com/chapters/courting-an-audience/. Accessed 4 June 2024.

Seems like these 3 sections could be combined into one Introduction to "Mina Loy: Futurism, Feminism and the Right to 'Genius.'"

The epigraph from the Pamperers could come before the short Introduction to Mina Loy.

The contents of the Futurism, Feminism & etc. page seem more like a title page, so perhaps the info belongs in copyrights?

Add "white": historically championed white, European men

Add comma after access

Cool idea to have a map, but it doesn't feel very interactive!. The marker name a place, but don't include any pictures. when I click on the linked chapters, it takes me away from the map. What about adding a Knight Lab JS StoryMap and showing where they moved in Ireland and the US?

her

how are these details relevant to their story? Were they interested in this history?

This is vivid storytelling. Strive to make more scenes feel like this, as if we're in the moment.

her plan, not she and his plan

above you say they were guaranteed a way back, so this seems contradictory. Did they initially misunderstand the laws or did they change?

what did she miss most?

while on the bus? this is a little confusing!

Was this a lucrative enough job for him to be the sole financial provider? Whatever happened to his gambling habit?

But you said she didn't have any anxiety. And why was it so easy to move back and forth? How wealthy were they? their story seems to contradict assumptions about Irish immigrants and poverty, so you might say more about their economic position.

When is this picture take and when was this written? Did this reputation come after they moved there or before?

can you include some of these stories?

What about the vibrant, supportive Irish American community you wrote of?

she

What matched her dreams and what exactly were they? I only heard that she dreamed of beaches. Knowing so little of her dreams and of her family life it's hard to understand how they aligned.

Wait, when did they have children? What was Mairead's experience of childbirth and infant motherhood like? Did she keep working or stay at home? Seems like an important chapter is missing!

Given that the father is such a pillar of the family, it seems strange that we didn't hear about him in the courtship/wedding chapter. Would he have had a say about his daughter's suitor? Wouldn't she have been sad to leave him?

Spaces between paragraphs occasionally is inconsistent in these chapters.

Why go back to her childhood here? Can you prepare for or build a transition?

who is "they" in this sentence?

These paragraphs feel very thin. Can you flesh them out with more details?

How are these newspaper clips functioning? Are you expecting your readers will read them? (they're pretty small for my old eyes). Would it help to frame them with a little more context, e.g. when you describe the news paper saying something about the Letters to the Editor and the reflections on St. Patrick's day, maybe even pulling out quotations from the pieces you incorporate?

But Red Bank is a suburb, not a city. I don't understand this remark!

awkward syntax

Don't you kind of wonder what they did there?

missing paragraph break?

Also it would be nice down her to have a button link to move to the next chapter, rather than having to scroll back up to the top of the page.

Or maybe she couldn't bear to say goodbye because she knew what a risk she was taking, and it was too painful to confront the loss of her mother?

What is the significance of this detail?

Say more?

Can you ask your grandmother if her mother's choice of marriage over adventure influenced her not to make the same sacrifices? (though in her case, marriage was the ticket to adventure, so she didn't really have to make the same choice. Nevertheless, she may have heard her mother express regret about dreams not pursued, and didn't want to clip her own wings.)

Images are too small to see/read

We haven't really seen this yet.

tense change

What is she implying? His family was too stingy to supply a full meal? or too generous with tea and cake?

Feels a bit choppy. Can you provide more details here?

Can you embellish this with the stories/images/beach scenes Angela described to her, to prepare for the next paragraph?

Yet on the home page, you say it was characteristic of the Irish experience. Seems slightly contradictory that something so commonplace could also be so exotic.

This sentence changes tense: what is the timeframe in this section. When did this realization occur to you and why?

returned to Dublin from where? and when? Reorder sentences to iron out confusion.

What about incorporating an image of your text exchange, if you still have it?

why did it make more sense? How old were you? Can you develop this anecdote to tell us more about you, your relationship to her, and what these linguistic differences meant to you as a child---or mean now?

vocalizing seems like an odd verb, possibly one that requires an object. Maybe say: listen to her tell tales of life in Dublin in her thick Irish accent as she sipped her ever-present cup of Lipton tea. The Lipton detail is interesting--is it important? Does it signal that she's assimilated American culture and brands?

This "welcome" seems like something that comes with a WordPress theme, rather than the beginning of a creative nonfiction essay. Can you adapt the affordances of the WP theme to better reflect your genre and appeal to your readers?

On the other hand, the photo of your grandmother as a bride is captivating. Something about her smile with the slight underbit and the way she's tucking her chin suggests a mixture of skepticism, hopefulness, and gumption! Do you want to caption the image with her name and the date of the photo?

I admire the way you are thinking about and articulating your goals, but I wonder if this really is the goal of your project. Are you most interested in the larger landscape, or in capturing something distinctive and dynamic about your grandmother within this context? "Through one courageous immigrant's story" sounds too cliched for your own distinctive voice!

Are you going to use a footnote plugin or MLA style for citations?

What period are you referring to?

My, grandmother, Mairead...

Name her if you name him.

Also, you know what might be fun? Incorporating a short audio of her pronouncing her own name. I realized I don't know how to pronounce it!

Cut the adverb and let your readers feel the surprise.

Try using the quotation block to see how it looks.

The chronology seems a bit wrinkly here. Maybe the engagement ring paragraph could be moved down to here?

unnecessary comma.

These call outs are more disruptive here than in your word doc because of the white space that breaks up the narrative. Maybe a plugin or another theme would allow more options for formatting.

men, presumably?

I don't understand this fully. Why did they have to move to sponsor their friends? Why did he have to leave his job to work at the same restaurant as his friend?

Do you have the kind of relationship where you can ask her about birth control? I'm always curious to know what was available to women in various eras. Given her family's history of large families, Irish women didn't seem to have much access to birth control in Ireland!

Can you use the caption feature or a header to distinguish image captions from your narrative?

I wonder if you need to be in the narrative more consistently?

the vessel's

Maybe just say:

K and P were close, having grown up in a family of 15 children packed into a two-bedroom home.

Why is it so important? Is reader participation part of your feminist practice or resistance to orientalism, in that you want to practice a desire to learn and understand, rather than an impulse to master and authorize?

What is "mastery"?

Excellent opening that gets straight to the point and sets up a clear, helpful summary of Bornstein.

Can you say more about how it misrepresents the meaning? How does the title change alter the political meaning of the poem? Why is "The White House" so much more pointed and inflammatory than "White Houses"? Similarly, how does the change to the final lines affect the meaning of the poem. After a strong set up for a careful close reading of the two versions of the poem, you seem to stop just when you get to the good stuff! Close read the poems to show how they mean different things!

Here you need a signal phrase such as "According to Henry Louis Gates," to mark the beginning of the borrowed material, with the parenthetical to mark the end of it.

Where is the citation for this information?

To readers unfamiliar with Atavist, you might provide instructions in the caption telling them to slide the arrow right to left to see full page vs. single sonnet view. Though in this case, i think the slider is unnecessary, since the sonnet is so legible on the full page.

You might note that it's in the form of a Shakespearean sonnet. It seems significant that he would protest within the preeminent literary form of the English language!

What is the source of this image? Caption is incomplete. Also should you provide a source for the biographical information below?

Where is the citation for this information?

and yet, the tea leaves' prophecy proves accurate.

excellent intro so far. Does this idea need a citation?

I don't think this acknowledgment is necessary. You've cited me plenty! just take it out.

It's worth re-reading the previous section's discussion of Mantled, because it offers different definitions, so you've got an apparent dissonance between the sections, each written as if it's the only one to discuss the "mantle" trope.

excellent argument, but is it worth acknowledging that Johnson herself had only sons--no daughters?

missing space

fascinating and problematic equation, because it means that the black body is being rejected as burdensome, in favor of the supposedly more pure spirit. Reminds me of Blake's Little Black Boy, where the innocent speaker internalizes white society's condemnation of the black body.

Here you seem to be allowing sound to trump sense. This last phrase sounds dramatic, but doesn't make clear sense. Can we really follow the codes into a marginalized life? Maybe it would be more accurate to say we must read the linguistic codes along with the bibliographic codes in order to understand the complicated identity politics of the poem.

It seems to me that the change in punctuation from period to comma (which is the only difference I detect) changes the antecedent. With the period, "Reft of the fetters modifies" the spirit; with the comma it refers back to "prejudice," which makes more sense. Seems like GDJ is simply correcting a typo!

delete "that" for parallel structure

"And so"? Why? I don't understand the logic of your argument. Why, when she says it's "entirely racial" do you insist that it's not?

unnecessary comma following reading, but even without the comma, I don't understand the logic.

Please also be aware that every instantiation has bibliographic codes--some are just more obvious than others.

Rephrase for stronger conclusion:

Separated from the bibliographic codes that emphasis race in the Crisis, the poem in the context of the anthology is reduced to a lament about gender.

Watch this tendency to write in negatives statements that would work more concisely in the affirmative, e.g.. Within the context of the Anthology of Magazine Verse, To the Mantled comes across as a lyric by a woman and about the oppression of women.

I'm not sure how Braithwaite encourages this reading, since all the poems in the anthology are treated the same way. I would not attribute such strong intentionality to his placement.

As a final example of what?

And what continues? That final sentence is a puzzler!

Really, only student writers use page #s like this. This site is too sophisticated an impressive for such gestures. Put the page #s in parentheses at the end of the sentence and don't use them to pad your prose or substitute for thoughtful transitions!

change to affirmative? supports this analysis?

How did the interested reader become "They." Should be "he," "she" or "a reader"

the biographical section at the end of the book? (page #s aren't really helpful in this context)

VERY IMPORTANT! There seems to be a missing citation here. Please add it ASAP.

This is a strange transition. Why do we need this information now? Wouldn't it be better at the beginning, when you first mention the term?

According to my scanning of the volumes, the 1917 edition is the first one to include African American writers. Prior to that year, the anthologies were limited to white poets.

confusing punctuation.

Maybe change to:

The Mantled referred to in the title and addressed as "they" in the poem are "colored people."

rep. Maybe just say which issue.

a bit mind boggling. Would anything be lost if you trimmed it to: "does the reader have to the text of the poem"?

make sense of their differences?

Seems like the answer to how to attend to them is quite obvious: pay attention to them!

to avoid overuse of claim, rephrase:

Later that year, William Stanley Braithwaite reprinted the Crisis version of the poem in his 1917 Anthology of Magazine Verse.

editorial interventions

But wait: for a black woman to claim conventional feminine and material feelings and ideals is actually a daring defiance of race conventions (as that earlier awful Williams quotation shows: black women and men were considered outside the categories of "woman" and "man"). To claim gender conventions is to defy race conventions, no?

why "almost" anagogical (a word I had to look up, which could use some clarification, since you don't seem to be talking about spiritual matters).

Johnson. [otherwise "she" could refer to Churchill]

I'm wondering if, in this section, you'd be better off just comparing Shall I Say in the Crisis to Prufrock on Poetry. It would be more efficient and prepare for your argument about different modernities, without stealing the thunder of the How to read a Poem section. I think that the important lesson in this section is that Johnson, read out of context, seems simple and conventional, but read in context becomes a more complex figure. In contrast, Eliot is complex on the page, even in his original publication context, which isolated the poem anyway.

is the horse in a dreamlike state?

weird citation.

Why not include a facsimile of her poem next to the facsimile of Prufrock?

Can we see the poem? It's hard to understand the comparison without being able to read the first stanza.

This letter is certainly damning, but it doesn't suggest that he thinks she's trite. Maybe requote the passage above and say that while he publicly described her work as "simple and sometimes trite," he was privately more damning, writing in a letter of recommendation: "She is erratic..."

seeking reinforcement for their own stereotypical portrayals of black men as...

seems like you've already got a strong answer to this question, so why go backwards? Might be better to say: to appreciate GDJ as a poet, we must read her in the contexts in which she published. In these contexts, what appears conventional proves to be a more complex grappling with intersectional constraints that characterize her experience of modernity.

eliminate cap on poet

not sure you need the "somewhat" qualifier. It is reductive.

consider moving up to epigraph position or just after you quote this sentence.

Beautifully stated! Put a version of this sentence at the end of the Bibliographic codes section, in the place of the claim to access the "true intended meaning."

can you provide a bit more context? When did he write this and where? Who was he?

seems like you should reverse the chronology and have newborns first and change second clause to"fear of their children facing discrimination, violence, and even lynching."

is the boldface in the original? If not, add a parenthetical that says (emphasis added).

Again, I think the diagram deserves more than a link--an actual caption acknowledging its author. And while I suggested that you maintain the b & w and bronze aesthetic of the site, I think the color diagram worked better. In black and white, it renders the disable almost invisible.

I think Giovana deserves at least a caption for this animated spoken word poem, if not explicit introduction and acknowledgment. The citation at the bottom of the page seems like an insufficient acknowledgment.

Possibly also center and even enlarge the video frame to make it parallel to the size and location of the New Yorker comic.

ah, the thorny issue of intention. I think this is a red herring. What strikes me as most promising about reading bibliographic codes is not their potential to unearth the true, intended meaning (does the author even know? is that the only valid meaning?), but its potential to bring to light complexity and innovation in her poetry that might be overlooked if the poems were read merely as linguistic objects.

I'm not sure you can separate the author's own work from these pressures, but ok...

missing space

also possibly change "adversarial atmosphere of a black and female poet" to "adversarial conditions faced by black and female poets."

historical context?

Also, maybe you can restate this so you're not attacking a straw man. I think a stronger transition might be something like: Bornstein's methodology is especially effective for re-reading a poet like Georgia Douglas Johnson. When her poems are isolated and read solely for their linguistic codes, they may seem conventional and even unoriginal. But when read in the context of their bibliographic codes, the poems generate more complex meanings, drawing attention to the intersectional demands of race, class, and gender that she had to negotiate. As an African American female writer...

Thanks for introducing me to Dettmar's critique of Bornstein. I like the way the sense of debate enlivens this discussion, though this paragraph seems a bit wordy and repetitive. It might be condensed to say something like: Dettmar criticizes Bornstein for lackin originality and for underestimating the value of well-edited anthologies: [emperor's new clothes quotation]. But if Bornstein's argument isn't original, it has the virtue of compiling a set of theories to produce a practical methodology that helps us read poems and appreciate poems whose complexity does not lie solely in their material contexts. [this kind of statement would lead smoothly to your next section]

cut the comma

cut the commas

This last phrase dangles. Possibly revise to say: Literature is most fully understood not merely as words on a page, but as a collaboration between those linguistic codes and the bibliographic codes that anchor them in more complex, material, and historical contexts.

change to (qtd in Bornstein 7)

This "begs the question" is a cliche that is used in ways that don't reflect it's actual meaning. Can you rephrase this sentence without relying on a cliche? I'm not sure why our tendency to focus on linguistic codes leads to the question about self-reflexivity. What do you mean by self-reflexive? I think you may mean autonomous, independent, and self-bounded.

But she did have trouble getting her work published during this time, no?

This sentence lacks a period. Also would make more sense if revised to say: Her dedication to her family, especially to supporting her son's education, sheds light on why motherhood is such a prevalent theme in her poetry.

change to (qtd in Shafer 231). i.e. eliminate caps and period after qtd

delete this comma

Propelled by? Energized by? "Building off" gives agency to "her literary career," which is not a sentient agent of action.

high standards?

missing period after B.

insert: she was born...

would be a good idea to cite the scholars, at least in a parenthetical, though you could give them more credit by saying something like: Although scholars such as Gloria Hull and Claudia Tate have attempted to elevate her status and claim her originality...

no comma

weird punctuation

Is this really the case, or are you the pioneers in bringing the theory to bear on modernist periodical studies? I would take this phrase out and just say: as periodical studies grows and the modernist canon expands,...

capitalization unnecessary

Missing punctuation and citation.

I still think this sentence is misleading. The early Crisis didn't compete with Fire!! which didn't even appear until after the Crisis had been in print for a decade and a half!!

see comment below.

Maybe revise to maintain present tense, e.g.:

like when a picture of a child appears...

and suddenly the words no longer speak by themselves.

bibliographic codes...make a multitude [revise for plural verb]

Also I wonder if the codes themselves can make value judgments. Maybe they can imply or can elicit value judgments, but codes aren't sentient beings!

see above comment

see note above on this section (I just figured out how to highlight).

Abstract typos:

1. art and politics [add s to politic]
2. no comma after But we don't
3. no cap on canon

When you scroll down to instructions for reading the site, references to ARCHIVES need to be changed to SOURCES.

Not trying to be nit-picky, but the landing pad is where you establish your credibility, so small typos matter!

Great looking website!