Make It the Same

Poetry in the Age of Global Media

Jacob Edmond

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9780231548670
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The world is full of copies. This proliferation includes not just the copying that occurs online and the replication enabled by globalization but the works of avant-garde writers challenging cultural and political authority. In Make It the Same, Jacob 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—an art form associated with the singular, inimitable utterance—is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, translation, remediation, performance, and other forms of repetition. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures and languages, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and technological divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets in the Caribbean to digital parodists in China, samizdat wordsmiths in Russia to Twitter-trolling provocateurs in the United States, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Yang Lian, John Cayley, Caroline Bergvall, M. NourbeSe Philip, Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanessa Place, Christian Bök, Yi Sha, Hsia Yü, and Tan Lin. Edmond develops an alternative account of modernist and contemporary literature as defined not by innovation—as in Ezra Pound's oft-repeated slogan "make it new"—but by a system of continuous copying. Make It the Same transforms global literary history, showing how the old hierarchies of original and derivative, center and periphery are overturned when we recognize copying as the engine of literary change.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION

1. Mark Earls and John V. Willshire, Copy, Copy, Copy: How to Do Smarter Marketing by Using Other People’s Ideas (Somerset, NJ: Wiley, 2015). In the field of computer science, iterative and iteration describe both mathematical programming methods and workflow models for design development; for example, J. F. Kelley, “An Iterative Design Methodology for User-Friendly Natural Language Office Information Applications,” Transactions on Information Systems 2, no. 1 (1984): 26–41; J. Nielsen, “Iterative User-Interface Design,” Computer 26, no. 11 (1993): 32–41. Iterative design principles have also been applied to other fields; for instance, H. B. Wang, J. L. Wang, and J. Lam, “Robust Fault Detection Observer Design: Iterative LMI Approaches,” Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control 129, no. 1 (2007): 77–82; David C. Wynn, Claudia M. Eckert, and P. John Clarkson, “Modelling Iteration in Engineering Design,” paper presented at the 16th International Conference on Engineering Design, Paris, August 28–31, 2007.

2. Already in the 1990s, “the culture of the copy” seemed “pervasive.” By the 2010s, copies were increasingly recognized as “everywhere around us” and as “a crucial factor in our ability to make sense of ourselves and the world.” Hillel Schwartz, The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likeness, Unreasonable Facsimiles (New York: Zone, 1996), 17; Marcus Boon, In Praise of Copying (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 9–10.

3. Marjorie Perloff, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). On the iterations of performance, or “versionings,” in contemporary poetry, see, for example, Kenneth Sherwood, “Elaborate Versionings: Characteristics of Emergent Performance in Three Print/Oral/Aural Poets,” Oral Tradition 21, no. 1 (2006): 119–47. On the use of translation in contemporary poetic composition, see, for example, Juliana Spahr, “Connected Disconnection and Localized Globalism in Pacific Multilingual Literature,” boundary 2 31, no. 3 (2004): 75–100. On sampling, see Brian McHale, The Obligation Toward the Difficult Whole: Postmodernist Long Poems (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 254–56. On reiterations of a poetic work across multiple media, see Marjorie Perloff, “Screening the Page / Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and the Differential Text,” in New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories, ed. Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 143–64. On the use of multiple media in poetic works, see, for example, Maghiel van Crevel, Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 459–74. On the rise of constraint-based poetries, see Brian M. Reed, Phenomenal Reading: Essays on Modern and Contemporary Poetics (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012), 191–213. On the impact of the Internet on literature, see, for example, Michel Hockx, Internet Literature in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015); Heather Inwood, Verse Going Viral: China’s New Media Scenes (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014).

4. See, for example, Kaja Marczewska’s account of the “Iterative Turn,” which she defines in much narrower terms as applying only to a relatively small set of avant-garde works that are “inherently uncreative” and “composed by means of copying.” Kaja Marczewska, This Is Not a Copy: Writing at the Iterative Turn (New York: Bloomsbury, 2018), 7.

5. On these fault lines, see, for example, Adalaide Morris, “Saying It Again: Ideas, Things, and Poetry in the Americas,” American Literary History 28, no. 2 (2016): 318. For critical work that does point to formal commonalities across the mainstream-experimental divide, see Stephanie Burt (writing as Stephen Burt), “Sestina! or, The Fate of the Idea of Form,” Modern Philology 105, no. 1 (2007): 218–41; and Reed, Phenomenal Reading, 191–213. The persistence of the false opposition between form and identity is evinced in the work of Marjorie Perloff, who insists on a sharp distinction between literary criticism and cultural critique “esp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Copy as Global Master Trope
• One: Postcolonial Media: Kamau Brathwaite’s Reel Revolution
• Two: The Art of Samizdat: Dmitri Prigov, Moscow Conceptualism, and the Carbon-Copy Origins of New Media Poetics
• Three: Making Waves in World Literature: Yang Lian and John Cayley’s Networked Collaboration
• Four: Shibboleth: The Border Crossings of Caroline Bergvall, Performance Writing, and Iterative Poetics
• Five: Copy Rights: Conceptual Writing, the Mongrel Coalition, and the Racial Politics of Digital Media
• Six: 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