ROXANA PREDA
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U. of EDINBURGH

The MLA Convention in Vancouver was especially valuable to us Poundians this year. Two events stood out on that occasion – the society panel on the Canadian contribution to Pound studies, featuring Leon Surette’s central position in the canon; and the announcement of the society award for 2013, honouring Margaret Fisher’s and Robert Hughes’s achievement in the study of Pound as composer, a study they established and developed in their lifelong careers. The current number of Make It New is picking up the thread from the beginnings made at the MLA, devoting space in the issue to the latest developments of Leon Surette’s work. It is also announcing the award winners, whose portraits will be featured in the spring number.

This issue inaugurates a new section of the magazine called “Books in Focus.” The section uses the lesson learned in the controversy on Matthew Feldman’s book, Ezra Pound’s Propaganda, 1935-1945, where the same work was illuminated from several reader positions and points of view. What we wanted to measure then was the pulse of disagreement in the community of scholars on a book that was an in-depth study of Pound’s politics. We were able to see that disagreement was strong – we have followed it up with Alec Marsh’s response to David Moody’s “Reading Notes” in this number. But out of this controversy, the idea of the “Books in Focus” was born. A book may achieve canonical status in a discipline – when it does, it is not on the basis of depth of scholarship alone, but also on the strength of scholars’ agreement that this book presents a true state of affairs on which it is possible to build. This is why the Books in Focus section presents two reviews on each book. They enable us to see what a new work means to readers who are situated in various positions and therefore may have different approaches to it, evaluating it differently.

Finally, the news of the day is the dedicated website that we now have for the magazine. It is by now known to our readers that Make It New has grown much faster than anticipated. If we don’t want the periodical and the society website to stifle each other, we need a space for our serial to grow without being cramped and shut in by an all-protective womb. This step implicitly means an invitation to interested visitors to subscribe on their own. They will thereby become members of the society, but they can choose to just read the magazine if this is all they wish. Make It New will thus enter the google listings and our publications in it will become much more visible. Additionally, our little mag will be archived by the British Library and will hopefully become interesting for other academic libraries as well. No academic samizdat any more but pretty gorgeous respectability!