[Auto-generated transcript. Edits may have been applied for clarity.] So if you haven't.
Welcome. Can everyone hear me? Great. Um, I take as my text this evening an aphorism from Oblique Strategies.
Repetition is a form of change.
Oblique strategies, if you haven't run into them, is the name of a deck of cards.
Um. The first edition in 1975 contained 113 cards with various pieces of gnomic advice for recording artists and musicians,
but which nearly always apply equally well to any creativity, any creative act, and two songwriters of the ditties of no tune that we call poems.
Invented by the painter Peter Schmidt and recording artist and musician Brian Eno.
Um. The cards in Eno's own description quote, evolved from our separate observations on the principles underlying what we were doing.
Sometimes they were recognised in retrospect intellect, catching up with intuition.
Sometimes they were identified as they were happening.
Sometimes they were formulated. So it was a way to get around.
Um, I guess the recording artist version of writer's block.
Um, when you're watching the clock tick while you're running up a big studio bill, or for a painter in the middle of a heavy painting session.
Um, they realised that this pressuring time tended to get them away from the ways of thinking they found more productive,
and the strategies were a way to jog the mind, um, of how one might progress.
Um, so this here, a collation repetition is a form of change.
Um, and that's actually one of Peter Smith's paintings. Um.
Was something to me, a little bit like you can never step into the same river twice.
Very Heraklion. Um, the other oblique strategy that is my favourite was the first one, which is honour thy error as a hidden intention.
Um. Some others include. Use an old idea.
State the problem in words as clearly as possible. Only one element of each kind.
What would your closest friend do? What to increase.
What to reduce? Are there sections? Consider transitions.
Try faking it. Ask your body.
Decorate. Decorate. Faced with a choice?
Do both. Don't avoid what is easy. Work at a different speed.
Do the washing up. That really works about as well as anything.
Um, these act as a sort of sorts for Giuliani, for creativity.
And I think one of the things that appeals to me about them, um, is their introduction of that random oracular element that divination,
if you will, something that avant garde poets and poets who work and received form share is a belief in random constraints as a form of liberation,
a giving up of control to the universe, which is to say, the muse, the avant garde poet,
and the formalist are less in opposition to each other than they are both in opposition to the mainstream.
But I digress. Back to repetition in art forms whose medium is air and time, music and poetry and utterance.
For example, repetition makes visible and audible that hear a collection river that we can never touch as the exact same person.
Repetition makes time audible and invisible, because by returning we see that we are changed,
or the place where we were is not quite what we thought we thought it was.
Repetition may be musical. Rhetorical. Humorous, emphatic.
Dialectic. Epiphanic. There are many poetic forms of repetition that currently enjoy a great deal of popularity,
such particularly as anaphora, repetition at the beginning of a line,
um, and some of the popularity of forms of repetition may have to do with creative writing programs and their use of these as prompts or assignments.
Thus, we see a host of villanelle sustenance triplets panting as guzzles, though for some reason hardly ever any rondos or ballads.
And there are new inventions that take from several of these, such as Jericho Brown's Duplex.
Duplex. Often when I see a contemporary poem in repeated forms, the repetitions are not verbatim,
but in a sort of variation which can work wonderfully, perhaps most in literary blues poems.
But I realise I am more interested in the change wrought or brought to light by strict repetition and repeated forms,
but also in the use of return a motif,
chorus, refrain or burden, an element poetry has borrowed from song and psalm, and even singular instances in a poem of a repeated line.
Of these terms. I think refrain and burden are most potent as descriptions that both refrain and burden refer to a repeated element in a lyric.
They come to this meaning by almost opposite paths.
Refrain sounds as though it has something to do with restraint, but in fact comes from a breaking or interrupting, whereas burden,
which sounds so onerous and poets love to pun on burden like heaving a heavy sigh, seems to come from a French word meaning the drone of a bumblebee.
So it's a sort of obbligato.
So one is an idea of a thought, um, that is intrusive and breaks through and the other of something kind of always being there in the background,
a verbal earworm, the rain reigneth every day.
I'm going to start with a poem that probably is known to most of you, and yet it's something of a one off.
Perhaps there are many other poems by this poet, but this is the only one I've ever encountered.
It was written while he was awaiting execution in the tower,
and this execution would actually involve disembowelling before hanging, which seems overkill.
Um, impending execution is perhaps the ultimate oblique strategy for shaking off writer's block.
As Samuel Johnson has. It depended upon it, sir. When a man knows he is to be hanged, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.
Um. So this by two the tick borne.
I don't know if I'm pronouncing that correctly, if I am pronouncing it correctly.
Um, it sounds a little bit, um, like Lyme disease.
Um, so the tick borne, um, here we have my prime of youth is but a frost of cares.
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain. My crop of corn is but a field of tares.
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone. And yet I saw no sun. And now I live.
And now my life is done. The spring is passed, and yet it hath not sprung.
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green.
My youth is gone. And yet I am but young. I saw the world, and yet I was not seen.
My thread is cut and yet it was not spun.
And now I live. And now my life is done. I sought my death and found it in my womb.
I looked for life and saw it was a shade. I trod the earth and knew it was my tomb.
And now I die. And now I am but made. The glass is full.
And now the glass is run. And now I live.
And now my life is done. I'm used to calling this stanza form the Venus and Adonis stanza.
Um, it rhymes b a, ab, c, c.
Except this poem is from 1586 and Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis.
Adonis is from 1593. So perhaps I've got it the wrong way round.
This poem, moreover, links the stanzas so that each stanza ends on the same rhyme sound and repeats the same last line.
And now I live. And now my life is done.
This poem makes me think about how, like light a poem is, both particle and wave.
When spoken or read aloud, um, or silently, the poem is experienced in time,
sequentially washing over us or through us, but we are also swimming through it, written down.
The average lyric poem can be taken in whole at a glance.
The poem exists all at once, like time, perhaps.
So when we first encounter and now I live, and now my life is done, we are aware there is two thirds of the poem to go,
and in this second instance that there is still something more to go.
But the last line is utterly final.
Not only does the last line repeat, but as with a lot of poems that involve repetition, there are many other kinds of repetition within the poem.
We have is, but is, but and yet and yet and yet.
Now, now nine times in 18 lines, most urgently, as the poem and the life nears its end now totals five times in the last three lines.
The imminence of death is realised, is pushed back or postponed and finally fulfilled.
Um, I'd also like to put in a word for tears here.
Um, this is a biblical word for weeds. It's such a wonderful word and such a great rhyme word, and I, I keep wanting to use it,
but I, I'm told it's it's it's a little bit too antique, but it's a wonderful word.
Um, this poem also makes me think of a rather famous Johnny Cash song.
Um, 25 minutes to go. I don't know if you know this song.
It was actually written by the American poet, uh, for children, Shel Silverstein, who had a very dark side.
Um, it's about a man about to be hanged. Um, which starts while they're building a gallows outside my cell.
And I have 25 minutes to go, and the whole town's waiting just to hear me.
Yo. 24 minutes to go, and it goes all the way down.
So that at the very end I can see the buzzards. I can hear the crow.
I have one more minute to go, and then it just ends. And here I go.
Whoa, whoa whoa whoa. Let me skip ahead.
367 years or so to an American poem that nonetheless puts me very much in mind.
Of. I'll just get my clock back going. Very much in mind of, um, this elegy of tick borne.
Um, the Waking by Theodor Rafiki. I feel that Theodor Rafiki has somewhat fallen off the radar when I was coming up as a baby poet.
Um, he was still a huge presence. Born in Michigan in 1908.
He was one of the most accomplished and influential poets of his generation.
James Dickey described him as the greatest poet this country has yet produced.
That may be, again, a bit overkill, but, um, his students did include James Wright, Carolyn Kaiser, Tess Gallagher,
Jack Gilbert, Richard Hugo, David Wagner, and he was an outsized influence on the young Sylvia Plath.
Um, this poem is not in Venus and Adonis stanzas. It is in a villanelle.
Um, but at the same time, I'm very much put in mind of the elegy, The Waking.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate and what I cannot fear. I learn by going where I have to go.
We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear. I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
Of those so close beside me. Which are you?
God bless the ground. I shall walk softly there.
And learn by going where I have to go. Light takes the tree.
But who can tell us how the lonely lowly worm climbs up a winding stair?
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
Great nature has another thing to do to you and me.
So take the lively air and lovely. Learn by going where to go.
The shaking keeps me steady. I should know what falls away is always and is near.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.
This is a villanelle, so it's a 19 line poem.
The villanelle is taken out of French and kind of more codified and more popular in English, but originates in the French.
Um, a 19 line poem. And it's it ends with a quatrain.
There are two rhyme sounds and two repeated lines, refrains, if you will, that waltz around and around each other but never touch.
This is, I think, the third most famous villanelle in the language behind, in no particular Order.
Do not go gentle into that good night and Elizabeth Bishop's one art like do not go gentle.
It has achieved a certain pop culture of visibility, and is quoted in novels by Kurt Vonnegut and Stephen King.
To me, though the poem strongly echoes. Conscious or not.
Tick borne. There is the simplicity of language with its repeated assertions.
It's flirting with paradox I wake to sleep, this shaking keeps me steady, etc., and its awareness of the fleeting moment going, going, gone.
Here is repetition as the river you cannot step into.
Twice the river flows and you are changing and everything is falling away.
And everything is always. Its appearance in Slaughterhouse-Five is in the context of the mystery of time.
This is from chapter one. The time would not pass.
Somebody was playing with the clocks, and not only with the electric clocks, but the wind up kind too.
That's certainly true in the examination schools. The second hand on my watch would twitch once and a year would pass, and then it would twitch again.
There was nothing I could do about it. And as an earthling, I had to believe whatever clocks said and calendars.
I had two books with me, which I meant to read on the plane.
One was words for the Wind by Theatre Rescue, and this is what I found there.
I wake to sleep and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate and what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
It's worth, I think, pointing out, that Slaughterhouse-Five is that rare, or maybe not so rare instance of a prose work with a refrain.
So it goes. I.
We've started with some poems about, uh, mortality.
I thought we might shift to a poem about joy.
Um, this is Edna. Saint Vincent Millay is quite famous, Ricardo.
Um, and, uh, I don't know if I have. This may have got to race, but, um.
You can go on YouTube and hear Saint Vincent Millay read this poem,
but I don't necessarily recommend that you do that because her accent is going to shock you.
Um, Ricardo, we were very tired.
We were very merry. We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry.
It was bare and bright and it smelled like a stable.
But we looked into a fire and we leaned across a table, and we lay upon a hillside underneath the moon.
And the whistles kept blowing. And the dawn came.
Soon we were very tired. We were very merry.
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry. And you ate an apple.
And I ate a pear from a dozen of each we had bought somewhere.
And the sky went one. And the wind went cold, and the sun rose, and the sun rose dripping a bucket full of gold.
We were very tired. We were very merry. We had gone back and forth all night.
On the ferry we hailed good morrow, mother, to a shawl covered head, and we bought a morning paper which neither of us read, and she wept.
God bless you for the apples and pears. And we gave her all our money but our subway fares.
Um, this is, uh, a favourite poem by Saint Vincent Millay.
Um, and very different from the poems that we've looked at and is using, maybe repetition in a different kind of way.
Fairies in poems tend to be one way, and nocturnal and infernal crossing alone the night at ferry, as Housman would have it.
But this one is iterative, joyful and mature to know.
There are two origin stories of this poem.
Um, one of them, Floyd Del, who was a very charismatic, very left wing newspaper editor in Greenwich Village at the time,
and one of her early lovers, um, writes in his autobiography about a night, um,
when the armistice was about to be announced and he and John Reid and Edna Saint Vincent Millay went back and forth
on the Staten Island Ferry from Manhattan to Staten Island all night long and celebrated the end of the war.
Um, I don't know that that necessarily tracks as closely onto this poem as you might think.
And there is a 1959 letter, um, that Floyd Doe writes to Edna Saint Vincent Millay,
Sister Norma, when he explains that that isn't what this poem is about at all.
This is about another crossing all night long, perhaps on the ferry, um, with the Nicaraguan poet Salomon de la Selva.
Um, also one of innocent Vincent Miller's lovers.
I think all three of the people I've mentioned, um, uh, although one which is not in, um,
Savage Beauty, Nancy Medford's Milford's, um, biography of Edna cements place so she missed one.
Um, the Staten Island Ferry is free, and it's one of the few sightseeing things that you can do in New York for no money.
Um, I only recently did it this January, um, with my son.
It goes constantly back and forth between Manhattan and Staten Island and passes by the Statue of Liberty.
It is free, and it's an exercise in freedom. The Staten Island.
Um, I think we simply cannot ignore the Spanish of the title.
Um recuerda, which is, um, memory or souvenir.
So while it might contain memories of this armistice celebration, it is more intimately,
I think, nodding to the romantic excursion with the Nicaraguan poet.
If so, we might also think about the Statue of Liberty promised to immigrants in the background,
and we might also consider the foreign formality of good Morrow, mother, which served several people have written about to a shawl coloured hat.
Shawl covered head is less strange if we consider that this conversation might have happened in Spanish or with a non-native English speaker,
and that the shawl covered head may partly be an indication of a recent immigrant.
The frenetic singsong, the wonderful rhythm of the repetition.
At the beginning of each stanza we were very tired.
We were very merry.
We had gone back and forth all night on the ferry, helps to blur the various trips back and forth into one gilded and giddy memory.
It isn't at all clear whether each stanza represents a trip, or whether they are all part of one day,
dawning over and over again, alighting their iterations into one joyful souvenir.
Um, I, I looked up at the Staten Island, um, terminal, and I realised there were these giant letters everywhere,
and suddenly I realised that her poem was all over the terminal, and that's one of my favourite sightings in the wild.
We were very tired. So this poem is doing something else with its repetition.
We've had refrains.
I'm also interested in kind of one off repetitions, um, when suddenly, um, two lines are repeated, not 3 or 4 times, but only once.
And what happens?
Especially in a very short poem, if you think about a poem of 12 lines, what happens when it's only ten unique lines within the 12 lines?
This is a favourite poem of mine by William J.
Smith. He was born in Louisiana in 1918.
Um, he was the 19th Poet laureate consultant to the Library of Congress.
That's the American poet laureate. Um, he's arguably the first American poet laureate of Native American descent.
Um, despite looking at the name, he was part Choctaw, and he wrote an epic poem about the Trail of Tears called The Cherokee Lottery.
He's also an Oxford person. He was a Rhodes Scholar at Wadham and was the first Rhodes Scholar of Native American descent.
You can see from his dates, 1918 to 2015, that he was a teenager during the Great Depression.
Probably the most traumatic, um, American memory from that generation.
Uh, I was able to meet him towards the end of his life. He was a very, um, lovely formal southern gentleman.
I'm a sucker for poems from the point of view of a child, especially if they are eerie or creepy.
Something about the innocence of the child allows for a special species of dramatic irony.
And another poem I would put into that category is Robert Graves's Wonderful and very creepy I Hate the Moon.
Um, we might consider the title again with short poems for the repetition.
The title is often doing a lot of work. American Primitive could refer to a style of primitive 19th century anonymous painting,
where you'd have itinerant painters go around and paint these very awkward portraits of
families where maybe the bodies were already there and they just put in the faces and so on.
Um, but I think the American primitive also is making some other moves here.
Look at him there in his stovepipe hat, his high top shoes and his handsome collar.
Only my daddy could look like that. And I love my daddy like he loves his dollar.
The screen door bangs and it sounds so funny.
There he is in a shower of gold. His pockets are stuffed with folding money.
His lips are blue and his hands feel cold.
He hangs in the hall by his black cravat.
The ladies faint and the children holler.
Only my daddy could look like that. And I love my daddy like he loves his daughter.
Yeah, the plucky aphorism of the first stanza gives way to an absolute shudder at the end.
And when we reread this poem, we realise that the child I am, I'm pretty sure it,
as a child, has been pointing us to a photo or portrait not of the living, but of the dead.
Look like that goes from the boast of pride to a realisation of ghastly horror.
Um, these are 12 lines of which only ten are unique.
But the state space travels between the two repeated lines is an almost insurmountable gulf,
and I think we have to then reread American Primitive in the, um, the light of, uh, brutal American capitalism and boom and bust.
And that I love my daddy like he loves his dollar.
I also like how we have this, um, shower of gold, which maybe suggests DNA in her coins.
Um, and then we have this wonderful, very idiomatic American expression, folding money.
Um, but this is a poem. I often actually share this poem with, um, young students.
And it does take them a long time to kind of tease out what is happening.
But when they do, it does come as a shock.
Another short poem that goes a long way, um, and does something maybe different with repetition is Elizabeth Bishop's Casablanca.
I could have done any number of Elizabeth Bishop poems. I didn't want to do one art.
Um, if you don't know that poem, you know, go revisit that.
Um, there's also the wonderful visits to Saint Elizabeth's, which is the kind of the House that Jack built poem about Ezra Pound.
This poem, I think, often gets overlooked, perhaps because it's reference has maybe slipped out of the public consciousness.
Um, Casablanca. When Bishop wrote and published this poem, the reference to the title would have been much better known.
Casablanca is a resounding ballad by Phylicia Harmon's popular poet, um, most famous female poet in Byron's time.
Um, and it was a poem that many generations of schoolchildren had to memorise.
In fact, it was such a popular chestnut for memorisation, um, that there are tons of parodies out there.
The poem um starts the Felicia Harmon's poem.
Um. The boy stood on the burning deck once all but he had fled the flame that lit the battle's wreck.
Shown round him or the dead. It's a poem about, in theory, an actual event that happened in 1798 during the battle of the Nile.
Um, when there were eyewitness accounts of the French flagship.
Um, uh. Young boy. Ten. 11. 12. The son of the captain stood on deck.
How anyone knows any of this? I don't know. Um, standing on the deck.
Um, who? Because his father has told him he must stand on the deck until he's told he can leave the deck.
And in the meantime, the powder magazine is hit and the.
The boat explodes and the boy goes up in flames. Um.
Humans specialises in poems.
About patriotic or pious suicides of women and children.
Just what it is. Um. The poem ends with mast and helm and pen.
An affair that, well, had born their part. But the noblest thing which perished there was that young, faithful heart.
Um. I had a thrill when I was watching the film version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.
Um, there's sort of that last scene, um, where Cumberbatch, who I think is playing Peter William,
is testing the recording device in the safe house, and he starts with the boy stood on the burning deck once all but he had fled.
And I thought, oh, is that in the novel? But it's not. So here we get all of this is to get around to Casablanca.
To give you a little bit of background. Loves the boys.
Stood on the burning deck trying to recite.
The boy stood on the burning deck. Loves the sun.
Stood stammering. Elocution. While the poor ship in flames went down.
Loves the observant boy, the ship, even the swimming sailors who would like a schoolroom platform to.
Or an excuse to stay on deck and loves the burning boy.
Hear the stammering repetition of the first line of humans.
Poem is the first stanza of Bishop where Cleverly Stood works transitively and then in transitively,
and it sets us up for a nesting box of references and repetitions of words,
and the nightmarish hall of mirrors, which is the humiliation of a schoolroom recitation gone bad,
presumably in front of a judge mental father Harmon's poem is all about obedience to a father unto the point of death,
where the boy reciting in the schoolroom is, in a way, as brave and as doomed as the boy in the poem he is reciting.
I find this poem gutting. The burning boy at the end is Casa Bianca and the anonymous boy in the classroom and love himself.
Perhaps my favourite form, um, standard form of repetition is not the villanelle, which usually kind of spins its wheels.
They are more fun to write than to read as a rule.
Um, but the triplet, which is much shorter, um, and has some of the same elements, it has two repeated lines.
It has to, um, rhyme sounds.
Um, but it often covers vastly more space.
Um, there are two main masters of the triplet or truly in English.
Um, one of them is the comedic master Wendy Cope.
Um. I used to think all poets were Byronic, mad, bad and dangerous to know.
And then I met a few. Yes. It's ironic. I used to think all poets were Byronic.
They're mostly wicked as a generous tonic and wild as pension plans.
Not long ago, I used to think all poets were Byronic, mad, bad and dangerous to know.
So you can see how, um, the chill that sort of sets up a kind of statement and maybe a proof or refutation of that statement,
and then a sort of QED at the end. Um, Hardy also is a master of this.
He writes a number of them. This is my favourite. It does not go over well with students.
Um, I think it's because of the subjunctive and the counterfactual and maybe the word twain.
I don't know, but, um, I think this is a masterpiece at a hasty wedding.
If hours be years, the twain are blessed. For now.
They solace swift desire by bonds of every bond.
The best if hours be years.
The twain are blessed. Do eastern stars slope never west.
Nor pallid ashes follow fire. If ours be years.
The twain are blessed. For now they solace, swift desire.
Um. I like how the two repeated lines are kind of bound to each other,
and they try to escape each other, but they end up, um, you know, permanently attached at the end.
That seems to be part of what is happening in the poem. Um, the chill.
It picks more of a punch, though it's shorter.
It's almost has the power of a miniature sonnet, and the best ones have a bolt, uh, or turn or explosion.
And around the fifth or sixth line, um, uh, this basically covers as much emotional ground as Jude the Obscure.
And it's in eight lines. So.
There's that to say for it. Um, I'll just show you this one.
I won't read it. Um, but I think this might be the shortest or one of the shortest plays in the English language.
It's a triplet. Um, he's got a whole set, a setting of scene and a set of characters, and it's quite delightful.
This does go over well. I sometimes assign people to read these parts.
Um, there are several contemporary, um, cellists that I am a great fan of.
This might be one of the only poems by a living poet that I have by memory.
Um, if I could do it, I don't know. They're over now.
Forever. This is called Cold Turkey by Joshua Morgan.
They're over now forever. The long dances are.
Woods are quiet. The God is gone. Tonight.
Our girls, good girls, have shaken off their trances.
They're over now forever. The long dances. Only the moonlight.
Sober and real. Advances over our hills.
To touch my head with white. They're over now forever.
The long dances. Our woods are quiet.
The God is gone tonight. This is another short poem where the title is doing a lot of work.
Uh, cold turkey would imply that someone is giving up something addictive drugs or alcohol.
I think the implication here is alcohol.
I also like the extreme contrast of, uh, the register of cold turkey, um, with this very beautiful, um, trance like poem.
Maybe there's even a suggestion of Wild Turkey in here. Um, we can figure out who the God is, I think, and who the girls are.
I believe the god would be Dionysus. And the girls are the Buckeye.
Um. One of the things that this does there is the shock of cold turkey going off the source.
And repetition is often about finality and endings.
So that there is the abruptness of the title. Yet they're over now.
Forever keeps getting repeated. They're over now.
Forever. That's how the poem starts. Um, but it comes back.
It comes back again in the middle of the poem. They're over now, forever.
The long dances. And it takes a while before the long dances really are over.
Forever. I think this is a very honest poem in the sense that, um, if the speaker is is giving up something like alcohol,
there is also a fondness and a nostalgia, um, uh, longing for the wildness that's being left behind.
Um, I have spoken to Joshua a little bit about this poem and, um, how much I just love these repeating lines.
They're over now, forever. The long dances. Our girls, good girls, have shaken off their chances.
And he pointed out that he had actually kind of, um, fetched the phrase the long dances out of the Eve ru penguin version of the book II of Euripides.
Um, so I went and looked at that. And part of that is will they ever come to me ever again?
The long, long dances on through the night.
Till the dim stars wane. Repetition can also be used to humorous effect,
as we saw in the Wendy Cope poem pushing a joke close to tediousness before coming out on the other side of absurdity.
As we've seen, repetition is about time itself and our experience of it, and often prefers to be in the iterative present.
And Leslie Monster's villanelle, the Kiss which begins this kiss is growing less and less platonic.
What tastes and playing is starting to taste sweet. And yes, I'll have another gin and tonic by the end of 19 lines.
She will have had at least four and is delightfully intoxicated.
Parody and translation themselves could be thought of as kinds of repetition, repetition with variation, um, which we'll see a bit later.
Ballads have not had the kind of explosion of popularity in English that the villanelle has.
They are much harder to write. Um, but there are a few crackers and, um, this is a very famous translation from the French version.
Um, I have the Dante Gabriel Rossetti, The Ballad of Dead Ladies, uh, where we have this wonderful catalogue of the beautiful ladies of the past.
And, um, I think the translated, uh, version of the refrain.
But where the snows of yesteryear has practically passed into English idiom.
Um, tell me now, in what hidden way is lady Flora, the lovely Roman?
Where's who? Park here. And where is this? Neither of them.
The fair woman. Where is echo beheld of no man only heard on river and mare.
She whose beauty was more than human. But where are the snows of yesteryear?
It's the ultimate obedience limit. Um.
The catalogue of dead beautiful ladies, um, is a genre as old as the Odyssey.
The names melt away even as the snows recur and return.
But they, too, are ephemeral, cold and lost, and the repetition of them.
Emphasises their impermanence. Um, this is maybe my favourite parody of this by, um, the very satiric and sharp poet artist Gwen.
Uh, the Yale Younger series, um, is a very important series in the States.
It is like the debut if you debut your book of poems of the Yale younger.
Um, you're supposed to go on to fame and fortune.
Uh, but then if you actually look at the list of the last, uh, 50 Yale younger poets, it turns out most of them are not people that you have heard of.
Tell me where or where are they? Those younger poets of old Yale whose laurels flourished for a day.
But whither now? Beyond the pale? Where are Chubb, Farrar and vino, with fame as fragile as a bubble.
Where is the late Paul Tan? And where is Lindley Williams?
Hubble? Where's banks? Where's Boyle? Where's Grant?
Francis Claiborne. Mason. Where's T.H. Farrow? Dorothy Reid or Margaret Haley?
Simmering in bad poets. [INAUDIBLE] jingles, metaphysical sword hacking critics.
Weeds to stubble. Young Ashbery, that is John L and where is Lindley Williams?
Hubble? Um. A ballad always ends with a pitch to a prince or a lord prince of all poets.
Here I pray and raise them from their beds of rubble.
Where is younger Carolyn? For Shay. And where is Linley Williams?
Hubble? Gwen's ballad about the melting away of literary reputation.
Also, a list of names and the refrain itself is a name.
I am afraid that once a well-known poet and translator, Lynley Williams Hubble,
the insistence somehow on the middle name adds to the absurdity, as if he's not to be confused with another.
Lindley Hubbell will ultimately be known for this poem, um, in which the repetition of his name makes it more and more anonymous.
The Pentium is another. Poem of repetition.
Yeah. Um, the panting was a Malaysian form.
Um, it comes into English. A lot of these forms come in by translation.
The pantomime comes into English largely via the French and French Franco filmic poets like John Ashbery.
And you can see that every line gets repeated. They kind of braid through.
So the second line of the first stanza becomes the first line, the second stanza,
and on and on and on until the last stanza, where in theory the third and the first line are going to come round again.
Um, this is a painting by Donald Justice.
Uh, poet, uh, born in Miami. Um, he's the poet of Florida and a poet of the Great Depression.
Um, he's sort of the bard of the Great Depression in the States.
Um, I was lucky enough to hear him read this poem once in Suwannee, Tennessee.
Um, at the time, I don't think it made a huge impression on me. Perhaps it it felt flat.
Um, but now I've come to understand that the flatness is the point.
Pantomime of the Great Depression. Our lives avoided tragedy simply by going on and on without end and with little apparent meaning.
Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes. Simply by going on and on we managed.
No need for the heroic. Oh, there were storms and small catastrophes.
I don't remember all the particulars we managed.
No need for the heroic. There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
I don't remember all the particulars. Across the fence the neighbours were our chorus.
There were the usual celebrations, the usual sorrows.
Thank God no one said anything in verse.
The neighbours were our only chorus. And if we suffered, we kept quiet about it.
At no time did anyone say anything in verse. It was the ordinary.
Pities and fears consumed us. And if we suffered, we kept quiet about it.
No audience would ever know our story. It was the ordinary pities and fears consumed as we gathered on porches.
The moon rose. We were poor. What audience would ever know our story beyond our windows shone the actual world.
We gathered on porches. The moon rose. We were poor.
And time went by. Drawn by slow horses.
Somewhere beyond our windows shone the world. The Great Depression had enter or entered our souls.
Like fog. And time went by. Drawn by slow horses.
We did not know ourselves what the end was. The Great Depression had entered our souls like fog.
We had our flaws. Perhaps a few private virtues.
But we did not ourselves know what the end was. People like us simply go on.
We have our flaws. Perhaps a few private virtues.
But it is by blind chance only that we escape tragedy.
And there is no plot in that. It is devoid of poetry.
I think the point where I suddenly clicked the poem.
What is going on here is when I hit pities and fears.
Um, that should start to set off, um, some bells for people who have read, um, anything in Aristotle's Poetics about tragedy.
Uh, and then if you go and you look at that definition, tragedy is an imitation of an action that is serious,
complex of a certain magnitude and embellished language, arousing pity and fear.
The catharsis of such emotion. It has a plot that means a beginning, a middle and an end, a Petya, a change of fortune or catastrophe.
We talk about virtues and tragic flaws, so you can see how the whole poem becomes a refutation of the idea of tragedy.
Um. The words that start to stick out at you.
Blind chance. There is no plot. There is poetry.
Um, but it's also more complex than that because it is spoken in the first person plural.
He says there is no chorus and no one is saying anything in verse while he is performing a chorus and people are speaking in verse.
It is a poem. And though he keeps saying it is not tragedy and there is nothing great,
there is a word great in there, and it's the Great Depression, and that perhaps becomes the tragedy.
Yet our lives escaped it simply by going on and on, something that the repetition emphasises.
I'm gonna talk briefly about the blues form.
Um, variation cannot really exist without repetition.
It is the shadow of repetition. Repetition that is altered and repeating.
Variation must maintain enough of the shape of the repetition to be recognised as such.
And here is perhaps where literary repetition is different from oral performance.
Um, literary repetition can purposefully make um, variations that maybe give us more information and so forth,
um, that seem um, to be oral but are in fact literary.
Contemporary novel, villanelle, s pen tum's, etc. often are employed quite liberal variation.
Um, but I'm going to explore a completely American and indeed largely African American form the blues poem.
Um, blues poems, literary poems come out of blues songs.
The formal aspect is basically rhymes, terse its which are complete and independent of each other.
Although these terse, it's may combine to form an overall emotion.
Besides bemoaning a down and out state or a broken hearts, blues are marked by a spirit of resilience,
and there's sometimes a witty twist in the last line of each terse.
That's a distinctive feature. So one line makes an assertion.
The second line repeats or elaborates on this assertion, and the third line has some kind of concluding punch.
I remember driving through Georgia and hearing on the radio a blues song with the lyrics, hey mister gentleman, your wife's been cheating on us.
Hey, Mr. Gentleman, your wife's been cheating on us.
Gotta find me a good woman. One we both can trust.
Um, I consider. So there's often quite a lot of humour.
Um. Uh, or consider these lyrics from Long Gone Lonesome Blues, which I mostly know in the Hank Williams rendition.
I'm gonna find me a river. One that's cold as ice.
And when I find me that river. Lord, I'm going to pay the price.
Oh Lord, I'm going down in it three times.
But I'm only coming up twice. The thrill or pleasure here is in the mathematical calculation.
I'm sorry, Housman, but I do have something of a weakness for a lyricist with an aptitude for doing sums in verse,
which, of course, Housman does himself. And loveliest of trees.
Um, Auden's Funeral Blues and Refugee Blues partake of the idiom and attitude of the blues, but not quite the form.
I'd also like to take the opportunity of putting up a trial balloon.
The form the blues, to me most closely resembles is, in my opinion, the Persian ghazal,
where couplets rather than terse it's exist independently in a kind of radial symmetry in relation to a central theme or emotion,
so that they can be reordered and are reliant on rhyme and refrain for wit and contrast, and which come out of a, um, spirit of performance.
This poem is Langston Hughes.
We got song for a Dark Girl.
Um, maybe not technically formally a blues poem, but I notice that Kevin Young includes it in his Everyman's Library blues poems.
And in fact, if you were to repeat the first two lines of each stanza, you would have a quite straight blues form.
Um. Langston Hughes is a poet.
I like to teach to my, um, group of refugee women who I'm teaching in translation.
And, um, these are women who have been through a lot, uh,
but maybe don't have a great grasp of English because Langston Hughes poems are often have a very simple surface, a very transparent surface.
Um, but quite a lot of depth, um, and subtlety in their structure.
Um, so song for a dead dark girl. Way down south in Dixie.
Break the heart of me. They hung my black young lover.
To a crossroads tree way down south and Dixie.
Bruised body high in air I asked the white Lord Jesus what was the use of prayer.
Way down south. And Dixie, break the heart of me.
Love is a naked shadow on a gnarled and naked tree.
That first line in each stanza is a quotation, of course, from Dixie, I wish I was in Dixie than 1859 defacto Confederate anthem.
I realise the actual anthem was The Bonny Blue Flag, but the de facto Confederate anthem was I wish I was in the Land of Cotton.
Um. And it ends with this refrain um, look away, look away, look away, Dixieland away.
Down south in Dixie. Um, so to have this white Confederate quotation way down south and Dixie at the beginning of each stanza in this poem, um,
which is about clearly a lynching, um, is quite something to have it quoted at the beginning of each way down south of Dixie.
And then it's immediately there's a parenthetical which feels to me much more in an African American, maybe blues idiom, break the heart of me.
And then there's this flat statement. They hung my black young lover to a crossroads tree.
Now he doesn't put in crossroads or a tree at the crossroads.
And there is a moment where you have that image of hanging on the cross.
You have that Christian iconography right from the very beginning.
Um, it's then more explicit, um, we have the black young lover is compared to the white Lord Jesus.
And what was the use of prayer? And then these two images kind of combine, um, to do this heartbreaking, uh,
work way down south and Dixie, break the heart of me, way down south and Dixie, break the heart of me.
Love is a naked shadow on a gnarled and naked tree.
And there we have both, um, the lynched woman and the Christ figure in one.
Natasha Trethewey, um, was the US Poet Laureate from 2012 to 2014.
She won the Pulitzer for Native Cod. This is one of the poems.
It's a terrific book. I recommend it to you if you haven't read it.
Um. Graveyard blues. Um, she, uh, studied at the University of Georgia.
I have some University of Georgia people here today, so do a shout out.
In fact, I think she was a cheerleader. That's sort of frightening. Um, and African American.
But I think also, you could say biracial. Her father was a poet and professor.
Canadian white put Professor Eric Tress away. Her mother, um, was African-American Gwendolyn and turn brown.
And when they married, it was a year before, um, loving versus Virginia.
So in Mississippi, that was an illegal marriage. And they had to get it, um, ratified in Ohio.
Um, her mother died, um, too young.
She was murdered. That's a long story. Um, but here we have a straight up blues poem.
Or do we? So we have this idea of repetition and variation within the repetition of graveyard blues.
And again, graveyards. Crossroads. These are part of the blues idiom.
It rains. The whole time we were laying her down range from church to grave.
When we put her down, the sack of mud at our feet was a hollow sound.
When the preacher called out, I held up my hand.
When he called for a witness, I raised my hand.
Death stops the body's work. The soul's a journeyman.
The sun came out when I turned to walk away.
Glared down on me as I turned and walked away, my back to my mother, leaving her where she lay the road.
Going home was packed with holes, the home going roads always full of holes.
Though we slow down times. Wheels still rolls I wonder now among names of the dead.
My mother's name. Stone pillow for my head.
I think if we look at this a second. Yes, it's a straight blues poem, but something else is going on here.
And probably you have cottoned on to what is going on here. It is also a sonnet.
Um, so this is almost like a new invented form, which I think is, is is is quite, um, attractive to me.
So that it ends with that couplet. It almost ends a line short, it's almost cut off, and yet it's fully embracing the sonnet.
And in a way, Natasha Trethewey is incorporating and fully embracing, um, the background of both her parents.
Um, the African-American blues form and the traditional English sonnet here.
Um, I'm going to kind of breeze past the duplex.
Jericho Brown, um, in his terrific, uh, book, the tradition invented this form, the duplex.
This is not my favourite poem in the volume. Perhaps I should say.
Um, this form has really taken off, and it's very repetition intensive.
He describes it as, um, write a ghazal that a ghazal that is also a sonnet.
That is also a blues poem of 14 lines. Um, and each of the lines repeat.
And the first line is also kind of the last line. So it's it's intensive, intensified repetition.
But I'd like to conclude, um, on this poem by Mark strand.
Um, the Canadian born American poet Mark strand, um, was also a poet laureate of the United States, also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
Um, he died some years ago. I was lucky to have met him several times.
And in fact, I co-taught with him two summers at Suwanee and got to know him quite well in as much as anyone could get to know Mark strand.
Um, I don't know if any of you have ever encountered him. He was very tall, very elegant.
He had the good looks of an ageing Hollywood star and kind of knew it, um, and, uh, was somewhat inscrutable, um, but could also be very funny.
And I heard him read this poem, I think, first at Warren Wilson College.
Um, and I hadn't encountered it on the page, so it did come as a surprise.
Elevator. One. The elevator went to the basement.
The doors opened. A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.
I'm going down, I said. I won't be going up.
Two. The elevator went to the basement.
The doors opened. A man stepped in and asked if I was going up.
I'm going down, I said. I won't be going up. When I heard him read this poem, he delivered in a jazzy, deadpan.
Um. And the verbatim repetition without commentary.
Um, of the first three lines came as something of a shock. The poem begins in the basement.
It seemingly has nowhere to go, and yet it does go down a whole other story.
Does the incident actually repeat like a recurring dream?
The poem is funny and dark with perhaps with something of gallows humour,
and we have seen that hanging and suspense is something that repetition seems to engage with quite a lot.
Scouring the internet, I was hoping to find, um, a video of Mark strand reading the poems.
I did not find a video of Mark strand reading the poem, but I found several videos of other people reading the poem.
I found Spanish and Thai translations of the poem, and I found a whole slew of after Mark Strand's versions of the poem.
So I would actually suggest that the elevator is itself a new form of repetition.
I won't be going up. Is perhaps the wry remarks of a condemned man.
Perhaps he had already got his diagnosis of cancer when he wrote this poem.
And we are all condemned as mortals, eventually, to death.
Repetition is what reminds us of the now being present in our changing bodies.
As the eternal day repeats, and as the river of time its current passes through us, or vice versa.
The glass is full and now the glass is run.
And now I speak. And now my speech is done.