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, 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.
