Make It the Same

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.

Short-listed for MSA Book Prize, Modernist Studies Association 2019

“With 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!”

Make 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 Technologies
Make 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 Medium
With 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
Treads new ground in clean, clear, mostly jargon-free prose that is complex but readable. Scholars of contemporary poetry will find much to consider and expand on in this volume. Journal of American Culture

Jacob Edmond is professor in English at the University of Otago. He is the author of A Common Strangeness: Contemporary Poetry, Cross-Cultural Encounter, Comparative Literature (2012).

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