by community member Rethabile Masilo

Repetition is a useful tool. Perhaps one of the finest. Anyone who wishes to make a memorable point uses repetition, be they poet, scholar or person on the street. As poets, we repeat everything and anything: sounds, words, sentences, rhythms and/or ideas.

Some poets use this technique more than others, and a poem I read recently reminded me just how good it can all get. That poem was Albert Goldbarth’s “Marble-Sized Song,” in which he repeats an idea. The overall effect is pleasantly disturbing, like a rubber hammer thumping the same thumb over and over. The effect penetrates, the message reaches in.

Does she love you? She says yes, but really
how do you know unless you undress that easy assertion

It is that very undressing that never leaves. In every possible way, the reader is reminded to take off covers, to get at some underlying truth, something sorely needed and therefore peeled, denuded, uncovered.

A single word, like a lilting rhyme, does the trick as well, as evidenced in Rustum Kozain’s “Kingdom of Rain.” Kozain is one of my favorite poets, and I suggest you read his work at Poetry International and listen to him read it at the same time. He says in the second verse:

At the highest point of the pass
we stop to eat, and he, my father,
this strict and angry, fearsome father,
my father whom I love and his dark face,
he pries open a universe that strangely
he makes ours, that is no longer mine:
a wily old grey baboon, well-hid
against salt-and-pepper rock, eyeing us;
some impossibly magnificent bird of prey
rarely seen, racing to its nest as the weather turns.
And we are up there close I think
to my father’s God, the wind howling
and cloud rushing over us, awed
and small in that big car swaying in the gale.

Dorianne Laux also uses repetition with great expertise, as in “Dog Moon,” a poem in which she describes the moon’s appearance in many different ways. Laux repeatedly depicts the object. Each picture is as forceful as the next, each true about the object under her microscope: It’s “as big as a kitchen clock,” a “manhole cover sunk in the boulevard of night,” a “monocle on a chain,” a “frozen pond lifted and thrown like a discus onto the sky,” etc.

To the prompt for this week: Look through your archive and pick up a poem that doesn’t seem to work. You might have to look over a few. Settle on one that allows you to either do an action repeatedly in different words (as Goldbarth does, going in), or elevate a character or object by repeating the same word(s) (as Kozain does about his father), or discuss something by means of as many appropriate figures of speech as allowable (as Laux and her moon).

If you feel gutsy, go ahead and write a new poem. If you feel gutsier, write three poems, each based on one of the techniques above.

Rethabile Masilo is the father of two. He enjoys writing, reading, playing soccer and cooking. His poems have previously appeared in Orbis, Kintespace, Canopic Jar, Poetry Friends and Ascent Aspirations and are forthcoming in The Mom Egg. His website is Poéfrika.