Make It the Same : Poetry in the Age of Global Media

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 is increasingly made from other texts through sampling, appropriation, and other forms of repetition. 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. Our world is full of copies. This proliferation includes not just the copying that occurs online and the cultural copying of 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, as opposed to privileging "innovative" or "original" works. Edmond tracks the rise of copy poetry across media from the tape recorder to the computer and through various cultures, languages, and places, reading across aesthetic, linguistic, geopolitical, and media divides. He illuminates the common form that unites a diverse range of writers from dub poets to conceptualists, samizdat wordsmiths to Twitter-trolling provocateurs, analyzing the works of such writers as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, Caroline Bergvall, Vanessa Place, Christian Bök, 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 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 "In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond argues that literary change in our age of globalization and digital media is best understood as the process of reframing, remediating, and recontextualizing existing literary and artistic works as opposed to privileging "innovative" or "original" works. Edmond examines how writers over the past fifty years have employed appropriation and media technologies -- tape recorders and typewriters (carbon copies), the Internet and machine-based writing -- as a way to develop new modes of creation and distribution. In looking at examples from a wide range of literatures - Caribbean, Soviet, American, and Chinese - Edmond reveals how copying practices in contemporary poetry have drawn on existing material to challenge and undermine cultural authority by questioning the privileging of conventional understandings of originality. While recognizing the liberatory potential of these practices, Edmond also considers how, in recent years, these practices have been seen to reinforced certain social and racial hierarchies"-- Provided by publisher CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION 1. POSTCOLONIAL MEDIA 2. THE ART OF SAMIZDAT 3. MAKING WAVES IN WORLD LITERATURE 4. SHIBBOLETH 5. COPY RIGHTS 6. CHINESE ROOMS RECAPITULATIONS NOTES BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX