To pick up a print newspaper today, let alone to turn it into a work of literature, is increasingly an act of nostalgia, a reference to a time long gone. And yet, poets and writers continue to turn to the texts and collage-like structure of the news because they provide a vital means for negotiating a world of proliferating media.
Tag Archives: poetry
Poetry and Breath: Resuscitating Literature, Reimagining the World
Last week, I delivered my inaugural professorial lecture in Dunedin. Here, in addition to sharing the recording, I also reproduce the text of the opening part of the lecture. Tihei mauri ora. The sneeze of life. The phrase is used to claim the right to speak, as I do this evening. The phrase looks back …
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World Literature in Stereo: Magnetic Tape and the Media Futures of Global Literary History
My essay on the lessons that the tape recorder offers for the future study of literature on a global scale is just out in a special issue of SubStance on “The Postlingual Turn.” My sincere thanks to the editors of the special issue, yasser elhariry and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, for including my piece and to …
Poetry and breath: Resuscitating literature, re-imagining the world
Hā ki roto, hā ki waho. Breathe in, breathe out. It’s the simplest thing, the in- and outflow of breath that keeps us alive, so automatic that, most of the time, we hardly notice it. And yet we ignore breath at our peril in an era when the struggle to breathe has come to symbolize …
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Dissent and Its Discontents in Cold War Poetry
My essay on “Dissent and Its Discontents in Cold War Poetry” has just been published in The Palgrave Handbook of Cold War Literature. Below, I reproduce the introduction and conclusion to the essay: A full history of Cold War poetry would require nothing less than a comprehensive global account of the art form from the …
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Modernism/modernity reviews Make It the Same
Anatoly Detwyler has reviewed Make It the Same in the latest issue of Modernism/modernity. I’m deeply grateful to him for his careful and astute engagement with my work and for carrying on the conversation about the copy in contemporary literature and culture. The review begins: In Make It the Same, Jacob Edmond weaves discussions on …
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Make It the Same reviewed in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal
I am extremely grateful to Vincenz Serrano for his extensive and perceptive review of Make It the Same in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Here’s how the review begins: In his chapter on Kamau Brathwaite in Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media (2019), Jacob Edmond demonstrates how the Caribbean poet …
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LRO reviews Make It the Same
Make It the Same: Poetry in the age of global media is an important, fascinating and timely discussion of poetry of the iterative turn. Via a finely curated selection of poets and their work, Jacob Edmond compares the ideas ‘original’ and ‘copy’, offering insight into the iterative work of particular socio-geographical contexts that highlight, but …
Verse Versus Virus
“Language is a virus from outer space,” wrote William Burroughs. It might seem wildly inappropriate to invoke this bizarre statement at a time when a real virus is infecting and killing thousands worldwide, upending the everyday lives of millions, and unsettling the global economy. And yet Burroughs gets at something important: certain ways of using …
A tribute to Sean Bonney
With the world’s attention turned to the Covid-19 virus and to the mass sickness and death that it is causing and has the potential to cause, I want to pause briefly to dwell on the singularity of each life and in particular the life of the poet Sean Bonney, who died in November last year. …
Make It the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media 