“A gargoyle in the shape of a man, whose spinal column and brain have been taken out to make a path for the rainwater”
— Franz Kafka in his 1911 travel diary, while on a trip to Paris with Max Brod
i
Spring-songs and other wing-sprung things abound. In recent travels, I have been collecting birds in my notebooks, particularly pigeons— and thinking (again) about rhyme and repetition in poetry.
Deciding what kind of rhyme to employ, or what sound to repeat, is often part of edits, or part of the fine-tuning in a poem. Using a pure rhyme in a space where you want subtly may argue against itself, when a slant rhyme might do the work of creating tone more effectively.
There is a poem by Jamaal May that does something remarkable with sound and image. The title, “There Are Birds Here,” carves out a very particular space and a terrain which is both the subject and the figuration.
The way Jamaal May pivots between repetition of the titular phrase and the meta-poetics of the metaphor. He qualifies — I mean, I don’t mean, I said, I was trying to say— and uses the poem as a vehicle for this effort to reclaim the birds from the metaphors others deploy to desecrate his Detroit.
Ruins, too, are beautiful. Only real estate developers and the Gentrification Committees of white supremacy consider the ruins to be an eyesore. This is what I told the man after he commented unfavorably about the crack in a porch tile yesterday!
Look at how much is growing from that crack— and how little we know of it. How much beauty in small doses we seek to extinguish in the name of social or aesthetic hygiene.
I repeat myself. Very well, I —
ii
Repetition: the spice and the vice of life, the strategy of birdsongs and spring’s efflorescence. Again, as if for the first time, April arrives with its lust-throated pink and magenta azaleas; wisteria sprawling over fences, luring bees closer. “Taste me,” it laughs. “If you turn away, I shall hound you with my scent, and plant words like succulence chamois islet zither in your mind, unbidden.” Pollen saturates the air with lust, covers tables and chairs and mailboxes with that gold dust.
“Spring is so blatantly sexual,” I thought while wandering through my favorite alley last night, a route with one single streetlight, a darkness perfumed with the scent of night-flowering vines seducing the moths. It is the same—-and yet different. And it is this difference which fascinates me.
Every April, I revisit Donika Kelly’s “Love Poem: Centaur” — a creature of marvel in its construction and articulation. It sacralizes as it profanes: the poem cannot do one without the other. Determining which line to sacralize by repeating can make a whole poem. In this one by Kelly, the repetition of the last line rubs it into our minds like a hoove pressing hard into dirt.
Like a perfectly tuned instrument, the poem begins with that “Nothing” that seeks to dispel (while perhaps also opening a shadow interpretation).
From the melodious friction between syllables—- the clicks linking “love” to “hooves”, the “burnishing” that expands into “a breaching”— each sound dances with the possibility of change in repetition. No barococo is needed. The poem advances by qualifying its statements—saying one thing, expanding upon it, and then going back to qualify it—before finally ending in those two culminating lines that feel like the whole purpose.
I pound the earth for you.
I pound the earth.
The final reiteration leaves plays into what it leaves off: the “for you” is gone and what follows is act that asserts the transformation of the speaker into creature who pounds the earth.
One sees similar moves in music, — certainly in lyrics, as with PJ Harvey and John Parrish’s multi-layered song, “Black-Hearted Love,” which I happened to loop last April, when writing some of the poems that would become My Heresies, where the lyrics foreground the “you” of the addressee:
And you are my black hearted love
In the rain, in the evening I will come again
Before reiterating this “you” at the end of the line:
I'd like to take you
And then cutting it from the end, leaving:
I'd like to take you to a place I know, my black hearted
Something is repeated; an expectation is set up; a new articulation re-shapes the addressee by defining them with that possessive pronoun. The direction established by the “for you” is extraneous. Although Kelly’s poem doesn’t reach for the possessive pronoun, one might detect it in a similar drive towards defining the other in relation to this space of possibility, what she calls “the point of articulation” fashioned from pursuit of the conditional (i.e. “I would make for you”).
I pound the earth echo-locates what Derrida called “the sort of animal I am.” This strategy of self-portrait as the impossible beast that plys the fantastic… I can't un-hear it. The centaur, this poem, an epistle to a love that locates it inside the body of the imaginary, where the trembling demands an other, a self that is no longer the prior self.
Rhyme, repetition, music, poetry— they make and unmake us. They wander off the track of realism into the realm of the conditional. Scandalous spring! Drizzle as soft as a jazz brush entering the jam! Outrageous pollen stains and weed-studded sidewalks! Azaleas and lascivious vines, I cannot wait to see some of your oracles and librettists in New Orleans next week at the NOLA Poetry Festival!