Contemporary Poetry and Comparative Iterature

Jacob Edmond, Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. 360 pp. $65.00.

Modern poetry has a complicated relation to both the original and the repetitive. On one hand, as Marjorie Perloff argues, “we expect our poets to produce words, phrases, images, and ironic locutions that we have never heard before.”¹ On the other hand, repetition, the “already heard,” is a central feature of poetic language—from the recursivity of rhyme schemes to the patterned reiterations of tropes such as chiasmus, anadiplosis, and epistrophe. Just as intratextual repetition can “set up expectations and guide interpretation” within any given poem, the repetitions of forms, genres, and topoi throughout a diachronic tradition can create a sense of discursive continuity within change.² From a readerly standpoint, the recognition of repetition can be reassuring, even pleasurable. The danger is that too much repetition, formal or otherwise, risks a deadening predictability. As Williams Carlos Williams polemically stated in 1944, “To me all sonnets say the same thing of no importance.” It is no surprise, then, that standard narratives of modernism have tended to highlight a Poundian poetics of making it new, of breaking free from the rote of convention. “There is no poetry of distinction,” said Williams, “without formal invention.”³ Interestingly, some of the most distinctive innovations of modernist poetry have depended on making repetition itself new by employing it in unconventional ways that go well beyond familiar intratextual and intratraditional gestures of anaphora or allusion. For example, Williams extensively repeats nonpoetic language from letters, newspapers, and other historical documents throughout his montagic long poem Paterson. In criticizing the prosaicness of the so-called Cress letters in Paterson, Randall Jarrell complains, “What has been done to them to make it possible for us to respond to them as art and not as raw reality? to make them part of the poem ‘Paterson’? I can think of no answer except: They have been copied out on the typewriter.”⁴

Jacob Edmond’s Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media is a compelling study of what he calls “copy poetry” (4) from the 1950s (when Williams’s career was reaching its final chapter) to the present day. Informed by a wealth of meticulous research, Edmond shows how various methods of unorthodox copying—which might represent, to the likes of Jarrell, a scandalous renunciation of creativity—have enabled contemporary poets to creatively muster “an ethical and political response to the crisis in authority engendered by new media technologies and globalization” (7). One of the overall strengths of Make It the Same is its generous augmentation of “the usual, largely Anglo-American and Western European account of the rise of copy poetry” (3). While acknowledging figures and movements often associated with twentieth- and twenty-first-century appropriation—from John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, and Andy Warhol to the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, Language writing, and North American conceptualism—Edmond “adds alternate lines of development that pass not through New York, Paris, or London but through Kingston, Moscow, and Taipei.”

Make It the Same is, thus, a major contribution to the study of experimental poetry as it stages an intriguing cosmopolitan conversation about iteration and innovation among diverse Anglophone, Russophone, and Sinophone writers such as Kamau Brathwaite, Dmitri Prigov, John Cayley, Yang Lian, Caroline Bergvall, Kenneth Goldsmith, Brandon Som, Jonathan Stalling, and Hsia Yü. Whether through sampling, remixing, transcription, or remediation, all of these poets are invested in repetition and copying, and Edmond is correct in claiming that “in the field of contemporary poetry, scholars and poets alike have tended to treat these various kinds of repetition as largely separate phenomena” (2). In Against Expression: An Anthology of Conceptual Writing, for instance, Craig Dworkin warns that conceptual writing, which emerged in North America in the late 1990s, “should not to be confused with the Kontseptualizme poetry movement that flourished in Moscow in the 1980s (associated most closely with writers such as Prigov and Lev Rubenstein).”⁵ Though Dworkin’s differentiation is not unwarranted, it is also worth mentioning that critical transnational comparison is not the same as confusion, and Edmond admirably takes up the former.⁶

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.” What can’t be overemphasized is that copying and related forms of poetic mimicry, which some might wrongly perceive as crude unidimensional techniques, can flexibly serve a myriad of cultural functions across a surprising range of sociohistorical contexts. Vanessa Place’s Boycott, for example, “reproduces feminist texts with all instances of feminine-gendered words replaced by their masculine counterparts” (3); thus “Simone de Beauvoir” becomes “Simon de Beauvoir” and Hélène Cixous’s “The Laugh of the Medusa” becomes “The Laugh of the Minotaur.” Place’s appropriations allow her to archly speculate on the uncertain inheritance of modern Western feminism and the fate of postfeminist protest. Edmond’s second chapter, “The Art of Samizdat: Dmitri Prigov, Moscow Conceptualism, and the Carbon-Copy Origins of New Media Poetics,” discusses similar “repeat and replace” gestures: “In ‘Verses for George’ Prigov begins with the opening lines of [Alexander Pushkin’s] Eugene Onegin but also inserts a dinosaur into other canonical Russian lyrics” (75). To be sure, Place and Prigov are invested in overlapping issues of parody, variation, and canonicity. But Edmond expertly guides us to an understanding of the latter in the specific context of samizdat or unofficial DIY publication as a response to official state-controlled media. He argues, “Samizdat furnished conceptual artists like Prigov with a way to think agency within system and improvisation within copying, enabling them to question both the cultural dominance of Western art and the ideological systems of official and unofficial late Soviet culture” (67).

Edmond is particularly good at establishing coherent through lines across large and complicated oeuvres just as he is, for the most part, convincing in his well-informed paralleling of writers from different national traditions. For example, in the first chapter, “Postcolonial Media: Kamau Brathwaite’s Reel Revolution,” he pays careful attention to Brathwaite’s early career, showing how a deep engagement with radio, tape recording, and photocopying in the 1950s and 1960s—what Edmond calls Braithwaite’s “search for post-colonial media” (60)—was of a piece with his famous “Sycorax video style,” a visually innovative method of composition Brathwaite pioneered in the 1980s and 1990s on a Macintosh computer. Likewise, Edmond’s fourth chapter analyzes Caroline Bergvall’s fascinating trajectory and makes a strong case for why we should acknowledge the performance writing of the late 1990s, which was influenced by “the rise of digital media and the network economy, and in response to neoliberal reforms” in the UK (120), as an important precursor to Anglophone conceptual writing, with which Bergvall eventually became associated. Edmond also usefully links the utopian cyberlibertarianism of Kenneth Gold-smith’s UbuWeb, an unauthorized online archive of avant-garde documents (founded in 1996), with his large-scale copying projects such as Capital (2016), which, as an assemblage of over 800 pages of quotations about New York City, updates Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project for the twenty-first century.

While Edmond is gifted at seeing discursive cohesiveness within densities of complexity, there is a notable instance when his usually deft use of comparison risks conflation. In what is likely the most contentious statement of the entire book, Edmond introduces the controversies surrounding Goldsmith’s notorious 2015 performance “The Body of Michael Brown” and Place’s retweeting of Gone with the Wind by arguing that “the same poetics of repetition used by Kamau Brathwaite to combat racial stereotyping and the degradation of black experience now came to be publicly associated with the exploitation of black lives” (152). It depends, of course, on what we mean by “the same poetics.” According to Walt Hunter’s largely positive review of Make It the Same, “Goldsmith’s performance, Place’s Twitter, and the Mongrel Coalition’s manifestos are manifestly not ‘the same poetics’ as Brathwaite, nor do they all demonstrate a ‘shared commitment to the copy,’ except in the very broadest sense of what a copy might be.”⁷ I know what Hunter means: for certain strategic and narrative reasons, Edmond’s book emphasizes Brathwaite’s early career, thus featuring “his experiments with tape, typescript, and photocopy” (60) and his select samplings of various sources—from a text of Akan drum language (41) to Chubby Checker’s “The Twist” (50). That seems a pretty far cry from Goldsmith’s signature poetics of longform transcription. However, Brathwaite’s “Pixie” and “Heartbreak Hotel” from the later re-versioned trilogy Ancestors (2001) might have been more plausibly linked to Goldsmith’s appropriations of public documentation. Nevertheless, it isn’t until the antepenultimate paragraph of his first chapter that Edmond mentions, and only in passing, how Ancestors includes “appropriated textual material such as newspaper articles and transcriptions from radio” (60). If not the “same” as the techniques Goldsmith uses in copy works such as Day (2003) and Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), “Pixie” and “Heartbreak Hotel”—Edmond never mentions them by name—are poems that are at least more in the ballpark of North American conceptualism. This is to say that while readers will certainly appreciate Edmond’s wide-ranging global perspective and powerful synthetic intelligence, they might want a clearer and more rigorous typology of different species of copy poetry. Surely it matters what exactly writers are copying and how.

The overall rhetoric of “sameness” that frames the book—the introduction confidently begins “Everywhere the same story: our world is full of copies” (1)—might be a tad overstated. Is it really the same story? Or, as Edmond explains in his concluding section, are we dealing with “several stories” that “interweave” (238)? The very title Make It the Same acts as a colloquialism that, while catchy as a riff on Ezra Pound’s classic modernist dictum, necessarily gives up the precision of criticality, which is elsewhere on full display throughout the book’s pages.⁸ Nevertheless, this kind of hair-splitting shouldn’t detract from the considerable intellectual substance of Edmond’s study. His chapter “Copy Rights: Conceptual Writing, the Mongrel Coalition, and the Racial Politics of Digital Media” brilliantly argues that the Mongrel Coalition’s collective online art actions effectively synthesize the utopian dimensions of Goldsmithian conceptualism with the dystopianism of Place; it is an evenhanded and canny account of one of the most divisive moments in US poetic culture in the new century.

Ultimately, scholars would do well to follow Edmond’s lead in tracking how “copy works [are] remastering the rhythm of global literature” (239); the global archive of copy works is much vaster than many expect it to be. Moreover, we need “comparative iterature” now more than ever in these post-COVID-19 times of intensifying xenophobia and nationalism. Consider, for example, what it might look like to study comparatively the chapbook xeno/fremd: copy-book by the Chilean visual poet Guillermo Deisler (1940–1995) alongside “Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language” by African American experimentalist Harryette Mullen (1953–). xeno/fremd appeared in an edition of five in 1992, when Deisler was living in Halle, Germany, and “points to his experience as an exile and to the issue of refugee immigrants in Europe [apunta a su vivencia como exiliado y al tema de los inmigrantes refugiados en Europa].”⁹ Quite literally a work of copy poetry, xeno/fremd presents a series of photocopied pages containing dictionary entries for words such as “xenophob” (fremdenfeindlich).¹⁰ Deisler employs varying degrees of magnification and minimization to create incremental “zooming in” and “zooming out” effects as the book progresses. Ending with a view of the dictionary page that is so shrunken that it appears as a tiny illegible thumbnail, the book begins with an extreme close-up of the letter e (taken from the word “xenophil”)—right at the joint that connects the letter’s eye to its downward curving tail. The opening image resembles not so much a portion of a letter e as an isthmus, suggesting a focus on bridging and connection rather than ethnic tribalism.

With a similar etymological imagination, Mullen’s “Xenophobic Nightmare in a Foreign Language” concludes her 2002 collection Sleeping with the Dictionary. Recalling the “repeat and replace” poetics of Prigov, Mullen’s prose poem copies portions of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act with a key difference: as she explains, “In each instance where the law referred to ‘Chinese’ or ‘Chinese worker’ or ‘Chinese immigrant’ I substituted ‘bitter labor.’”¹¹ Mullen, thus, alludes to the derogatory term “coolie,” which some say derives from the Chinese word kuˇ (苦) for “bitter”; there is other speculation that “coolie” comes from the Tamil word kūli (payment for menial labor) or the Kol.ī people of Gujarat. In any case, Mullen’s poem powerfully confirms Benjamin’s pronouncement—whether we are dealing with an act of congress or a seemingly innocuous dictionary—that “there is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.”¹² To be sure, Deisler and Mullen come from different contexts; nevertheless, their interests intersect in a common socio-aesthetic xenophilia, in a desire to estrange (in the Russian formalist sense of the term) the language and discourse of xenophobia, whether through mimeographic manipulation (xeno/fremd) or lexical substitution (“Xenophobic Nightmare”).

Before reading Make It the Same, it would have never occurred to me to put Deisler and Mullen together in the same breath. I am sure that other readers will feel similarly impelled to create productive transnational juxtapositions, and I look forward to seeing the new lines of inquiry Edmond’s thought-provoking book will open up.

California Institute of the Arts