EDITORIAL

The third issue of our society magazine continues our commitment to reviewing recent work in Ezra Pound studies, whether monographs, collections, or articles. Our online form of publication gives us freedom to go into more detail and publish longer reviews. We aim to make them informative rather than essayistic so that we can gain a real insight into the volumes discussed. 

For the first time we are able to publish a review of a book written in Italian – that is a welcome development, which we plan to expand into a series. With the help of Claudio Sansone, who has agreed to be our associate editor, we will now be able to follow Italian research and relate it more closely to our own. We hope to develop our work in this direction with reviews, summaries, and bibliographies of work done in other languages as well, which will open large zones of scholarship unknown to us at present:  work done in Chinese, Japanese, German, and French. I am very happy to announce that the Ezra Pound Society of Japan has made contact, allowing us to show our readers titles of work presented by Japanese scholars at their annual conference, which this year took place on November 1st. 

As befits a controversial book, we have received our first reader response, which we publish in this issue. Following the three reviews that Matthew Feldman’s Ezra Pound’s Propaganda 1935-1945 received in MIN 1.2, A. David Moody has sent a very detailed comment to the book and to the reviews themselves. We have preserved the reading notes layout Prof. Moody adopted in the belief that unfamiliar formats will bring freshness and impetus to our work. In this issue we are experimenting with archive reports (Joshua Kotin), scholarly correspondence (Margaret Fisher and Stephen Adams), annotated bibliography of work in foreign languages (Claudio Sansone), and announcements of new books on Pound, which we are presenting in the order of publication, from July to October. 

We are very proud to publish three poems by Ron Smith in this number. Ron has the gift of of exploding the present moment and making the past alive. Like Pound, he needs an intrepid reader who follows his suggestions and explores to find treasure - in language, in imagery, in ideas.

This November number has a strong focus on music: reviews, dialogue, commentary, and the setting of Pound’s Ancient Music. For those unfortunate readers like me, who cannot read solfėge, I have added a link to a version sung by the Hilliard ensemble. If you try to sing along, you might grumble, as Pound did, against the advent of sloshy weather. But then, you will also smile and marvel at how well the words and the music fit together. Or reflect at how impossible it seems that the melody is well over seven hundred years old. Let this song and Ron’s poems be a very special Christmas present to you from our society this year.

Roxana Preda, November 21, 2014