While poetry on the page is certainly a temporal experience, I feel the poem as it exists in time most intensely when hearing poetry performed or simply reading it out loud. There is no skipping ahead, no dipping in and out, no returning to re-read, no absorbing a chunk of text all at once. Yes, the listening mind can wander, but even those moments lost to time’s forward motion only reinforce the experience of being present in both space and time at a reading. Poems that hinge on repetition highlight this difference between the poem on the page and the poem in person, as repetition allows itself to be passed over by the eye, but must be reckoned with (or endured) moment by moment as a poem unfolds aloud. This relationship with embodiment in time also links poetry out loud to ritual. I think of the Summary & Adenda to “Genesis I” in Rothenberg’s Technicians of the Sacred:
Repetition & monotony are powers to be reckoned with; or as the lady said to M. Junod after having heard the tale of Nabandji, the toad-eating girl, “I should never have thought there could be so much charm in monotony.”
Charm, in the old sense. (441)
In my last post, I wrote about the magic of reading alongside others, briefly mentioning recent readings I gave alongside Ishion Hutchinson in Baltimore at the Enoch Pratt Free Library and alongside Deborah Bernhardt at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900. Both of these poets (like Andrew Joron and Randall Mann, who I discussed in the previous post) have unique relationships with sound in their work, which made the experience of reading with them all the more powerful. From each reading, a particular poem that hinges on a relationship with repetition “haunts my ear” (borrowing a phrase here from Hopkins: “I had long had haunting my ear the echo of a new rhythm which now I realised on paper”).
Hutchinson’s poem “The Wanderer” begins:
Still clear from its very first shout, “Thalatta! Thalatta!”
is the clamour every wave brings, 10,000 voices
arched into one, shaking the mountain clouds down . . .
And ends:
All our heroes asleep in that aqua-grave, they will not drift
like Xenophon’s army to shore, and change their cry
to Triana’s “Tierra! Tierra!” Light, land: substance.
Both cries have congealed
into one coral wreath in my ears. I hear them everywhere I go.
While “Thalatta” is only repeated twice, not enough for the “charm in monotony” to set in on the page or in person, hearing the cry uttered aloud in Hutchinson’s own voice at the Pratt Library carried a particular power, especially since those, like myself, already familiar with the poem could feel the words reverberate through recognition both from Hutchinson’s written text in our memory and from the Greek text to which the poem alludes, Xenophon’s Anabasis, in which the thousands of Greeks cry upon sight “Thalatta! Thalatta!” (“The sea! The sea!”). Hutchinson bookends the poem with this Greek cry, and the mirror-image cry of Spanish sailor Rodrigo de Triana on Columbus’s ship La Pinta, “Tierra! Tierra!” (“Land! Land!”). Each double cry redoubles, as echo and allusion, as multilingual utterances and as the mind’s translations thereof. The poem engages in other kinds of repetition or echoing, for example, the phonic echo and the literal reference to repetition in the lines:
. . . Thunder
rifts the grain of his epochs, spinning Cortés from quartz,
repeating Pizarro along with all the names that depopulated
the trees of parrots and stuck a yellow disease in the sand.
One feels land and sea meeting in these repetitions, a kind of verbal enactment of Hutchinson’s imagination’s rootedness in the physicality of his origins (born in Port Antonio, Jamaica) in so many of his poems. Though “Thalatta! Thalatta! . . . Tierra! Tierra!” isn’t chiasmus, exactly, it has a kind of similar physical power in its symmetry. I didn’t know how much I wanted to hear “The Wanderer” read aloud until I did.
Here we feel how repetition functions as a kind of reaching out, in time as in space, the repeated words stretching toward their referents, while embodying the longing of sign not-quite-becoming signified, poem rising (almost) to the magic of incantation.