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Ezra Pound's Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVII, the final volume of his Cantos, first appeared as a 1967piracy, mimeographed and staple-bound by Ed Sanders's Fuck You Press. The piracy elicited two authorized versions: a commercial edition by New Directions (1968) and a hand-printed Stone Wall Press edition (1968). While the story of the piracy is well known, Sanders's version of the text has received scant attention from critics, who tend to dismiss it as illegitimate. However, each of these three versions offers its own way of imagining Drafts & Fragments in relation to the market and the canon. In particular, the bibliographic details of the piracy situate Pound in the 1960s mimeograph revolution, offering insight into the ways that the next generation of experimental poets reconfigured and responded to modernism - not only through poetics, but through the dynamics of print production.
Keywords: Ezra Pound / Ed Sanders / American poetry / print culture
On October 28 [1967] Pound's longtime companion, Olga Rudge, told [Allen] Ginsberg during lunch in Venice that Pound now had enough new poems for a fresh book of the 'Cantos.' Little did they know that I was on that very day hard at work on an edition of them!
-Ed Sanders, Fug You
Unfinished in any conventional sense, Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX-CXVI stands as a functional conclusion to Ezra Pound's multi-volume, multi-decade Cantos. When Pound began work on these poems in 1958, he was by all accounts in a slump: his health was failing and his writing laborious. In 1960, Donald Hall arranged to interview Pound for the Paris Review, and the magazine hoped to print some of the poet's new work alongside the interview. After much encouragement, Pound sent Hall a collection of canto drafts to type out into a cleaner copy. This set of poems was sent in April; by May, Hall received-to his surprise - an extensively revised second version of the poems. Hall made two carbons of each poetry manuscript and soon after lent his carbon of the second version to Tom Clark to aid Clark in writing an honors thesis on the Cantos. In 1967, Clark ran into Ed Sanders-poet, musician, mimeograph publisher, and the proprietor of New York City's Peace Eye...