I think of this as an exploratory idea. Whoever takes it on would need
access to the manuscripts, plus patience about permissions, plus a
deep-pocketed publisher lined up in advance -- and maybe, after all that,
the effort wouldn't pan out. Still, for what it's worth, here's the news
about the idea at work in a different field.
 
As most of you know, only a handful of Emily Dickinson's poems were
published in her lifetime. However, this was not because her work was
unknown. On the contrary; editors begged her for manuscripts, and except in
a few special circumstances she always said no. Instead, she mailed her
poems to friends, sometimes decorating the manuscripts with little
cartoons. For the purposes of those mailings, too, she developed a special
script -- one that oddly enough is much harder to read than the penmanship
of her working drafts. She wrote her letters in the same special script,
and in fact it's impossible to make a sharp distinction between Dickinson's
letters and her poems, either in content or in form.
 
Now, it's been hypothesized that all this was in fact a mode of publication
-- a special Dickinson mode, or perhaps a special feminine mode. Either
way, the corollary of the hypothesis is that nothing less than a facsimile
will do if we want to read Dickinson's poems as their author intended. A
large body of critical and textual work has followed accordingly. For some
recent examples, read:
 
Jerome McGann, _Black Riders: The Visible Language of Modernism_ (Princeton
UP, 1993)
Ellen Louise Hart and Martha Nell Smith, eds., _Open Me Carefully: Emily
Dickinson's Intimate Letters to Susan Huntington Dickinson_ (Ashfield, MA:
Paris Press, 1998);
Marta L. Werner, _Emily Dickinson's Open Folios: Scenes of Reading,
Surfaces of Writing_ (University of Michigan Press, 1995);
Susan Howe, "These Flames and Generosities of the Heart: Emily Dickinson
and the Illogic of Sumptuary Values," in _The Birth-Mark: Unsettling the
Wilderness in American Literary History_ (Hanover, NH: UP of New England,
1993);
and, for a skeptical view of the above, Domhnall Mitchell, "Revising the
Script: Emily Dickinson's Manuscripts," _American Literature_ 70 (1998):
705-37.
 
Truth in advertising: I haven't read _The Black Riders_ myself, and I may
be duplicating an idea McGann has already had. But for what it's worth here
and now:
 
In _The Pound Era_, p. 90, Hugh Kenner briefly mentions the extraordinary
appearance of Pound's typed manuscripts. Likewise, Harvey Gross takes the
trouble to reproduce a Pound typescript on the endpapers of _Sound and Form
in Modern Poetry_. And of course the new collections of Pound's
correspondence, such as _Pound/Cummings_, try to give us at least an idea
of Pound's typocalligraphy, within the limits of conventional print. But --
the question for an MLA panel --
 
would a facsimile (of, say, for a start, one canto, or a handful of
letters) be worth the difficulty and expense of producing? What would the
task involve in terms of theoretical preliminaries and practical work?
 
And which Pound specialists would be qualified to think about it?
 
Jonathan Morse