A Common Strangeness, the inspiring title of this book, is a phrase taken from Maurice Blanchot and here used by Jacob Edmond to encapsulate a poetics that brings together six very different poets: Bei Dao (1949–), Charles Bernstein (1950–), Dragomoshchenko (1946–), Lyn Hejinian (1941–), Prigov (1940–2007), and Yang Lian (1954–). The study's temporal frame covers the last three decades, a period of time during which a series of historical, political and economic factors brought the Cold War to an end and globalism to the fore.
While many comparative literary studies have used textual and contextual analysis to examine authors and literary movements so as to show commonalities and differences, Edmond employs a different methodology. The domestic political and literary contexts, although a constant presence in the background, are only lightly sketched, and focus is directed on the concerns that have shaped the work of these authors in the world, as members of a transnational poetic community. Translation is yet another diffused activity that touches upon the selected creative and conceptual practices, providing an extra motive for gathering these poets together in this book.
The author thus sets out to offer an alternative reading of “global” poetic interactions that is able to overcome the binary oppositions produced by a Cold War mentality, and an emphasis on the differences between them and us, between the native and the foreign, the global and local, and between commonness and strangeness. Rather, Edmond proposes to take these six poets, two each chosen from the linguistic contexts of Chinese, Russian and American, as exemplary members of “an imagined transnational poetic community” (p. 6) who share pervasive cross-cultural encounter, dislocation inside and outside the national borders, and a strong disbelief in the unity of signifier and signified.
Of great interest to this reader is the section dedicated to Charles Bernstein and his view of poetic styles as following the rapid logic of business and fashion (p. 178). The idea is perhaps reminiscent of the 16th and 17th centuries' understanding of commerce as a principal mechanism guaranteeing social vitality. The same could easily be said of translation mediated movement of ideas and forms and the ways these facilitate the dissemination of poetic devices and concepts. I greatly appreciated Edmond's discussion of the claims Bernstein makes in relation to his “ideolectical” poetics, which uses devices such as the inclusion of various modes of nonstandard English to question and undermine the centric point of view (pp. 164–92). The issues discussed in this section are still highly relevant to contemporary Sinophone, Lusophone, Anglophone, Francophone and other centric-phone texts that despite their avowed intentions are still unable to transcend the centre–periphery mentality.
The chapters on Hejinan and Dragomschenko are very persuasive; the strong links between these two poets' approaches to estrangement in creation and translation make the reasons for their inclusion quite self-evident. The other chapters are also relevant to, and inform, the main argument, but I have at times wondered about the reasons behind the choice of these authors over other possible ones. Yes, we can recognize in Yang Lian and Bei Dao clear signs of transnational poetics, but why them and not others? Answering this question should not compromise the argument of the book. If anything, the existence of more cases that would purport the same poetics would further strengthen the validity and applicability of the adopted methodology. However some sort of explanation of the criteria of selection of the presented authors might have strengthened the commonness of their strangeness.
For a number of reasons, this book reminds me of a project carried out by Amie Elizabeth Parry in Interventions into Modernist Culture. Both books, for example, triangulate among geopolitical poetic spaces and read them as subversive of the anachronistic (but still in use) binary epistemological grid of the Cold War. Both books are about reading poetry (a less explored genre) in its global interactions and in its cultural and political context. Both books still engage at various degrees with the poetics of the fragment and of difficulty.
To this reader's mind, there is no doubt that A Common Strangeness, with its focal point in the aesthetic concept and device of estrangement, is a valuable contribution to recent scholarship that aims at finding new ways to look at the intricate network of relations of poetry to the world.
