Pirating Pound: Drafts & Fragments in 1960s Mimeograph Culture

Ezra Pound’s Drafts & Fragments of Cantos CX–CXVII, the final volume of his Cantos, first appeared as a 1967 piracy, 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.