Iterative Objects: Hauntings of Identity in Poetic Form

Abstract

Abstract Channeling Gertrude Stein’s assertion from her lecture “Portraits and Repetition” that there is no such thing as repetition because both language and other entities that compose the world are continuously undergoing change, this essay explores the question of iteration or recursion in two recent critical books, Brian Kim Stefans’s Word Toys: Poetry and Technics (2017) and Jacob Edmond’s Make it the Same: Poetry in the Age of Global Media (2019). Stefans develops a critical practice that considers poems to be autonomous, dynamic entities, akin to machines or living organisms, thus connecting to longstanding traditions in twentieth-century poetry, which have imagined words as objects that populate the open field of the poem. However, much as Stein suggests, such linguistic objects are not self-same or stable. This opens the question of the role of iteration with a difference in the constitution of such entities, and in the context of Edmond’s book Make It the Same this question is extended to poetic techniques, such as copying, in their variously mediated forms, ranging from the use of a tape recorder to digital media.[L]iving entities, which for Stein as for Stefans, can be defined as forms of subjectivity—as poems, roses or frogs—are not self-same and are, instead, iteratively created in each recursion or repetition.