It’s been a little bit since my last post. But with the semester now over (and, indeed, my undergraduate career over), things are starting to calm down a little. The last couple months have put me in a bit of a weird place. While usually one to create a lot, I have been writing very little. Rather than a poem or two a day (my usual writing pace), it’s been more like a poem or two a month. Given that my plans for this summer include a lot of revision and writing, I hope that I break out of this strange slump soon. I imagine it has been largely a result of my being stuck at home all the time — I find that travel is a lot of what helps my writing and that being stationary too long least to stagnation in my poems. So being in the same place all the time ends up in me feeling like I’m just writing the same poem over and over and when it feels like that it’s hard to keep writing. But anyway, I’m back this morning to talk about something I’ve been thinking about a lot and for a long time in poetry: repetition.
Repetition is a strange bird. (I think lots of things are strange birds.) On one hand, it’s been a device used in poetry pretty well since poetry became a thing. It’s well-established and bears a lot of meaning. Plenty of poems I love use repetition. On the other hand, I tire of it quickly when writing. For some reason, I find myself avoiding repetition as much as possible. I jump to synonyms to avoid using the same word twice, and I rarely use refrains. My own aversions aside, however, I want to focus here on how wonderful of thing repetition can be. Who knows, perhaps thinking about it just that much more will help convince me to use it more in my own writing.
When thinking about repetition, perhaps one of the first things our minds may go to is the Iliad. As a result of the meter used (dactylic hexameter), the Iliad features a number of epithets that show up repeatedly (most notably or memorably, perhaps, “fleet-footed Achilles” — sometimes also translated as “swift-footed Achilles”). Another notable thing found in the Greeks that will come back later is the use of the chorus.
The chorus, of the other sort, is another place we readily look to regarding repetition. After all, nowhere does repetition of words feature so blatantly and regularly as it does in music. Rhymed poetry features repetition of sounds, and villanelles and pantoums (among other forms) repeat lines. But the average song repeats an entire “stanza” (the chorus) an average of two to four times. That’s a lot of repetition!
And, of course, considering our lives on the larger scale, the presence of habit makes clear that we are no strangers to repetition. It is, more or less, the backbone of our lives. There are occasional variations, but the theme is the same and usually contains eating, sleeping, and trips to the bathroom. We have sleep patterns, which are formed as a result of repetition, we have preferred eating times, many people watch the same shows at the same times every week, we set our alarms at consistent times. That we are called creatures of habit is no mistake. Repetition is everywhere.
But part of what makes repetition so interesting is the multitude of ways in which it can mean. Often, these meanings overlap. And some of these functions are richer than others. Some are more rhythmic, others more intellectual. Here, I want to begin looking at a number of these possibilities.
Though there are almost certainly other ways to think about repetition, I want to look more closely at five of those ways: repetition as response (as in call, or question, and response), repetition as pattern, repetition as music, repetition as mantra, and the hauntedness of repetition. The first four are things that repetition does, the fifth is something the rest of the poem does to the repeated parts. It is worth noting that the first and the fourth of these bear some similarities.
Due to the interests of keeping this post from getting too terribly long, I want to just focus on the first of these functions and will address the other four in subsequent posts.
The first, repetition as response, is where the Greek chorus comes back. Early Greek theater was built around an actor and a chorus. Later plays sometimes added more actors, but even plays that had more than one actor kept the chorus. The chorus featured, among other things, as a response to the actor’s call. (These terms, I should note, are being used loosely here, this isn’t a strong sort of call and response as you would see, for example, in spirituals). The chorus sometimes functioned as another actor, but also often commented on the actions of the main actor. We can understand choruses in songs to be carrying out the same function. Loosely speaking, the verse asks a question that is then answered by the chorus. In Tom Waits’s song “Get Behind the Mule” when the first verse tells us about Molly and how “She’s going to the bottom / And she’s going down the drain / Said she wasn’t big enough to carry it”, we as listeners are implicitly asking the question: So what does, or what should, she do? The chorus then answers: “She got to get behind the mule, yeah, / In the morning and plow.”
Though I refer to Greek chorus as having call and response in a loose/weak sense, as all dialogue does, it is important to note that call and response in the strong sense finds its roots in Africa. When we think of call and response in the contexts of church and music, the explicit use of one voice calling and another (or others plural) responding is something of African, not European, descent. So when we look at how choruses function as responses today — sometimes literally with a leading voice and a chorus response — it is well-worth recognizing the origin of this. Repetition is not exclusively African by any means, but call and response, in the traditional, strong sense, is. And I think that the poem I will be referring to uses elements of this stronger sort of call and response as well as elements of the weaker sorts.
With those notes on history fresh, let’s move on to looking at this function in a poem. In the first letter of Jim Harrison’s Letters to Yesenin, we see the repetition of the word ‘nothing’ performing a number of different roles, but among them is this question/call response sort of function. Because I will be referring to this poem often, here it is in its entirety:
1
to D.G.
This matted and glossy photo of Yesenin
bought at a Leningrad newsstand—permanently
tilted on my desk: he doesn’t stare at me
he stares at nothing; the difference between
a plane crash and a noose ends up to nothing.
And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed
on so few of them? Again nothing. Regard his flat
magazine eyes with my half-cocked own, both
of us seeing nothing. In the vodka was nothing
and Isadora was nothing, the pistol waved
in New York was nothing, and that plank bridge
near your village home in Ryazan covered seven feet
of nothing, the clumsy noose that swung the tilted
body was nothing but a noose, a law of gravity
this seeking for the ground, a few feet of nothing
between shoes and the floor a light-year away.
So this is a song of Yesenin’s noose that came
to nothing, but did a good job as we say back home
where there’s nothing but snow. But I stood under
your balcony in St. Petersburg, yes St. Petersburg!
a crazed tourist with so much nothing in my heart
it wanted to implode. And I walked down to the Neva
embankment with a fine sleet falling and there was
finally something, a great river vastly flowing, flat
as your eyes; something to marry to my nothing heart
other than the poems you hurled into nothing those
years before the articulate noose.
I imagine I will also make reference to this poem in later posts about repetition considering how many ways the repetition is functioning in here, but, like I said before, I want to look here at how it is functioning as response.
In places, this poem is more explicit in making the repetition function as response. The calls that the poem makes are, many times, implicit. But in many places, this poem makes those calls explicit. Unfolds them, as it were. In particular, we are given, directly, the question: “And what can I do with heroes with my brain fixed / on so few of them?” The response? “Again nothing.” The hopelessness of this poem that happens for so long, is largely a response to this prolonged nothing. No matter what question is asked or what the speaker of the poem is presented with the answer is always the same: nothing.
In other words, “nothing” is a response given to every call made by the rest of the poem. In this way, it is very much like the chorus of a song which repeats after every verse. This gives it a certain familiarity and we grow to expect it again and again. As the poem goes on and we are presented with new things and people, with Isodora, with New York, the pistol, the vodka, I find myself almost shouting in my head, “Nothing! Nothing! Nothing! It all comes to nothing!”
And indeed, the nothing does begin to intrude in the middle of the “verses” as the poem goes on. In the early parts of the poem, ‘nothing’ is found at the end of sentences and phrases, but not in the middles of them. But halfway through, there’s a change and we get “the tilted / body was nothing but a noose.” It’s almost as though the anticipated chorus shouting “Nothing!” has spoken too quickly, before the question was even fully asked. The response is internalized by the speaker who continues to call, even knowing already what the answer will be.
This foreshadows one of my future posts a little, but it is also interesting to note that this repetition builds a sort of expectation that is momentarily shattered when suddenly ‘something’ enters the poem. However, this something is only ever “something to marry to my nothing heart,” and the poem ends, once again, on the noose, which, as we heard before, ends in the same thing as a plane crash: nothing.
One of the many things poetry does is give us answers. Sometimes these answers aren’t true. Often they are. And often they aren’t pretty. Harrison’s poem is unsparing in the truths it throws out. Throughout, one can almost hear Solomon in the background lamenting, “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” And when the poem ends on nothing despite its attempt to look at and to grab onto something near or far away — from his desk to St. Petersburg, Russia — it feels the speaker has reached the utter depths of Solomon: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and indeed, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”
The speaker calls out again and again, and again and again the response is nothing.
On a less bleak note, this discussion of repetition and of the word ‘nothing’ also has me thinking of the sonnet sequence by H. L. Hix, “The God of Window Screens and Honeysuckle” (which is found in his book Shadows of Houses). In the sequence, the phrase “God: nothing” is frequently repeated. Though too long to reproduce here in its entirety, I would highly recommend picking up a copy of the book and reading it.
Thanks for reading. Be safe, be well.
— D.C. Leonhardt
Today’s pen and ink pairing: Opus 88 Demonstator (M) and Taccia Ebi
