Description
Book SynopsisJacob Edmond examines the turn toward repetition in poetry, using the explosion of copying to offer a deeply inventive account of modern and contemporary literature.
Make It the Same explores how poetry is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, and other forms of repetition.
Trade ReviewMake It the Same rebuts the notion that formal word-games are a decadent first-world hobby. It is an empirically broad, thoughtfully constructed, well-written, timely book about an important subject: a technical "mode of production" prominent in contemporary poetry, with its effects on content and reception. -- Haun Saussy, author of
The Ethnography of Rhythm: Orality and Its TechnologiesMake It the Same offers a global perspective on cultural iteration, triangulating English-language poetry with Russian and Chinese practices. Edmond immediately underscores the unintended irony with which those in the United States speak of "the poetry world" to mean precisely the opposite of the global: a micro, naval-gazing echo chamber. Given how parochial literary communities around a genre can be, this is an especially important contribution to literary studies. -- Craig Dworkin, author of
No MediumWith its revisionist echoes of Pound’s ‘make it new,’
Make It the Same is theoretically generative for thinking about modernist, contemporary, and world literature. Edmond powerfully demonstrates how the new media of repetition have generated a poetics of the same, a ‘copy poetry’ that remixes prior poetries in global trajectories outside Eurocentric, center/periphery literary studies. A path-breaking book for post-1950s literature! -- Susan Stanford Friedman, University of Wisconsin-Madison
A radical contribution to poetry studies. . . .
Make It the Same should be celebrated not only for what the book does well—its subtle analyses of poems, its detailed knowledge of technology, its easy movement between English, Chinese, and Russian—but also for what it makes possible for scholars of poetry to do next. -- Walt Hunter * Los Angeles Review of Books *
The flexibility of [Edmond’s] approach, his uncanny ability to extend the meanings of writing and reading, and his willingness to participate in the numerous digital frontier forms that poets in recent decades have sought to explore bear rich fruit. . . . Only a supremely creative and passionate scholarly approach could have yielded such a timely vision. -- Martin Dyar * Times Higher Education *
Make It the Same is lucidly written and meticulously researched....[and] establishes the terms for a vital reappraisal of cultural production in our present age. As such, it will be of close interest to scholars of contemporary literature and cultural studies, comparative and world literature, media studies, and the cultural history of information. * Modernism/Modernity *
A breakthrough work of analysis, drawing from a range of critical fields to substantiate its case for the copy as a dominant global cultural form. It is a measure of Edmond’s contribution that
Make It the Same will be required reading across the fields of modernist studies, contemporary historical poetics, and world literature, and a salient model for future transnational literary studies. * Review of English Studies *
An important, fascinating and timely discussion of poetry of the iterative turn. * Landfall *
A fascinating look at what poetry is becoming in the 21st century: it is subversive and regenerating like the tendrils of an octopus, always alive and seeking more ideas. * Choice *
Make It the Same shows the author’s globe-spanning grasp of emergent and established poetries, understanding of a combination of theoretical persuasions, and persuasive deployment of a range of interpretive methods. * Cha *
Edmond’s
Make It the Same offers a significant rewriting of world literature in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, raising a series of important questions about language, form, circulation, and comparativity that will no doubt prove enabling for future scholarship. -- Sarah Dowling * Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory *
Edmond’s engaging and exciting book merits a wide readership by scholars
and students across literary and cultural studies. Innovative, thoroughly researched,
and well-argued, this book is a remarkable study. * Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews *
Students and scholars of literary conceptualism, experimental translation, cross-cultural collaboration, multilingualism, performance writing, visual poetry, artistic plagiarism, and digital poetics among other nonnormative modes of poiesis are bound to benefit from Edmond’s rich contextualizations and his method of what we might call “comparative iterature.” * Contemporary Literature *
Edmond makes a compelling case for the contemporary avant-garde as a counterweight to more mainstream codex-based poetics that often privilege notions of original authorship. * Journal of Modern Periodical Studies *
A new moment in poetry criticism, one in which studies of form refigure the archive, undoing longstanding divisions between experimentation and expression. * American Literary History *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments
Introduction: The Copy as Global Master Trope
1. Postcolonial Media: Kamau Brathwaite’s Reel Revolution
2. The Art of Samizdat: Dmitri Prigov, Moscow Conceptualism, and the Carbon-Copy Origins of New Media Poetics
3. Making Waves in World Literature: Yang Lian and John Cayley’s Networked Collaboration
4. Shibboleth: The Border Crossings of Caroline Bergvall, Performance Writing, and Iterative Poetics
5. Copy Rights: Conceptual Writing, the Mongrel Coalition, and the Racial Politics of Digital Media
6. Chinese Rooms: The Work of Poetry in an Age of Global Languages, Machine Translation, and Automatic Estrangement
Recapitulations: Repetition and Revolution in World Poetry
Notes
Bibliography
Index
