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Dear Poundians,

I am very happy to announce that on Ezra's birthday this year, The  
Cantos Project is officially launched. The platform now is fully  
operational and awaits our scholarly input.

Please have a look at http://www.thecantosproject.org.

A few words about it:

TCP is a website that aims to fulfil a dream that scholars have had  
since 1986: to have a second edition of Terrell's Companion - at best  
in electronic form so errors can be corrected and information added on  
a continuous basis without overwhelming the poem or the student.  
Though attempts have been made along the years (we all still remember  
Kybernekia) technology was not coping with our needs, nor were we  
coping with what technology demanded.

My position is that we are now ready. We can do it with the platform I  
am proposing. (Which I dearly hope you will like).

When I presented the project at the EPIC conference in Dublin last  
year, Alec Marsh, the society's former president, generously offered  
me the sponsorship I needed for it. In his vision, the Cantos Project  
was to be located at the heart of the scholarly activity of the  
society; it could be THE way for us to work together so as to bring  
the annotation of The Cantos up to speed.

There are almost 30 years of scholarship not included in Terrell's Companion.

New Directions allows us to present six cantos on the website at any  
one time. This is why TCP cannot be a digital edition of the poem,  
however much we may regret this fact. (As an aside, Robert Spoo  
remarked that we can apply Pound's economics to TCP: if your money is  
scarce you can increase the velocity of circulation. Six cantos can  
seem a lot, when the rhythm of publishing and hiding them is quick. I  
found this a wonderful idea. Once the Cantos are annotated they can be  
hidden and republished as often and as fast as we need.)

TCP can be our building site. We can make it our scholars' resource,  
our aid in research and teaching. Even at square one, as you will see  
when you look at it, the bibliographies are in place throughout the  
poem, at homepage and cycle page levels. A student, say, who wants to  
see relevant books or articles about a section of The Cantos or even  
individual poems can use TCP even now. The book bibliography is  
complete, as far as I know. The journal articles biblio is very  
comprehensive and will continuously be updated. What I still have to  
put in are chapters and book sections - but I will do that in the next  
six months. What we want is to make TCP our ultimate reference, the  
place to go. The scholarly apparatus is OURS and remains so.

What we can do: we can initiate a work stream whereby six cantos are  
"live" at any given time. This means they will be online and the  
annotation will be under construction. You don't need to be a  
technological wizard to contribute: if working conventionally is  
easier, that is possible - just drop me an email to discuss what suits  
you best. When annotation is finished, the glosses will be transferred  
to an online illustrated Companion, which will be a downloadable pdf,  
one for every canto. Then the cantos will be "unpublished" to make  
space for the next ones. This means that they are not deleted and the  
annotation is not taken away from them. They are just hidden from view.

I have uploaded six cantos on the site, from Ur-Canto I to Canto III.  
Canto I is minimally annotated so you can see an example. In order to  
preserve the integrity of the text and not spoil the magic, the  
annotation is hidden. By hovering with your mouse over an underlined  
word, you will bring up an electronic card with the gloss. Move the  
mouse away and the card disappears.
The system offers us the possibility of having longer glosses as well,  
which we can add by the "create article" function.
See the guidelines for contributors on the site.

Terrell's Companion bears his name on the cover yet The Companion  
would not have been possible without his friends and collaborators.  
Hugh Kenner, Eva Hesse, Robert Gordon, to mention just the best-known  
names, contributed massively to all aspects of its creation. Terrell  
also used the accumulated knowledge stored in Paideuma. But he had  
seven years of Paideuma behind him when he started. We now have forty  
years.

It is time we begin.

Happy birthday Ezra.





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