Sheila Bender, July Poetry Column, 1295 words

When an author repeats the same word or words at the beginning of a series of sentences the technique is called “anaphora.” In Greek, it means “a carrying up or back.”  With repetitions, words gather power and resonance.  Anaphora offers an organizing strategy, which allows for deepening of meaning via the accumulation of images and information.  Let’s examine the work of political and cultural leaders as well as of poets to get the feel of how useful anaphora is in building writing lyrically.

Since this week began with a three-day weekend in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King and his impact on our country, you have probably read or heard at least parts of his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, often anthologized in texts as an example of persuasive writing.  How stunningly Dr. King uses repetition of the one line that most poignantly speaks to the idea that a whole people living in “the land of freedom” must still only dream of freedom:

I say to you today, my friends, that in spite of the difficulties and frustrations of the moment, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.” I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood.

 I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day the state of Alabama, whose governor’s lips are presently dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, will be transformed into a situation where little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls and walk together as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

Dr. King ends his speech utilizing another repetition of another phrase that has particular resonance because it comes from one of our country’s patriotic songs, “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.”

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

Other leaders who have had to stir a nation relied of repetition as well. When he penned the “Declaration of Independence,” Thomas Jefferson explicated the offenses of King George III against the colonists.  Each of his sentences begins with, “He has “:

He has refused his Assent to Laws… He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws… He has refused to pass other Laws … He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual… He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly… He has refused for a long time… He has obstructed the Administration of Justice… He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone… He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither … He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies… He has affected to render the Military independent … He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction…

In the next section of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson uses anaphora again, this time repeating the word “For” followed by a participle:

For cutting… For imposing… For depriving… For transporting… For abolishing…

Next, Jefferson resumes the “He has” litany for five sentences.  To end his writing, he includes another litany about the people of the colonies in which he writes “we have” three times followed by past tense verbs:

We have warned… We have reminded… We have appealed…

Repetitions have hypnotic power.  They grow emotionally insistent and emphatic while sounding well reasoned. These attributes worked for Jefferson when he had to persuade reluctant colonists.

The Civil War era American poet, Walt Whitman used the power of anaphora in many of his poems. Here is an excerpt from “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.” Notice the way his repetition of “out of” helps us travel from infancy’s initiation into sensation to childhood’s beginning knowledge of loss.  In addition, notice how repeating “from” in the latter part of the excerpt, Whitman resurrects a brother, establishing the point of view of the child leaving his bed:

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking, Out of the mocking-bird’s throat, the musical shuttle, Out of the Ninth-month midnight, Over the sterile sands and the fields beyond, where the child leaving his bed wander’d alone, bareheaded, barefoot, Down from the shower’d halo, Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting as if they were alive, Out from the patches of briers and blackberries, From the memories of the bird that chanted to me, From your memories sad brother, from the fitful risings and fallings I heard, From under that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as if with tears, From those beginning notes of yearning and love there in the mist, From the thousand responses of my heart never to cease, From the myriad thence-arous’d words, From the word stronger and more delicious than any, From such as now they start the scene revisiting,

(Click here to go to the Whitman page on poets.org website to read this poem and Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass”, among others, that rely beautifully and heavily on anaphora).

Much later, beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who revered Walt Whitman, relied on anaphora in the poems he wrote examining the post World War II culture in our country.  Here is an excerpt of his groundbreaking poem “Howl.”  “The best minds” of his generation, Ginsberg proclaims, are those:

who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes   on the windows of the skull, who cowered in unshaven rooms in underwear, burning their money in   wastebaskets and listening to the Terror through the wall, who got busted in their pubic beards returning through Laredo with a belt   of marijuana for New York, who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in Paradise Alley, death, or   purgatoried their torsos night after night

(Visit Ginsberg’s page at poets.org to read parts of “Howl” as well as his famous “Kaddish.”) Repeating the word “who,” Ginsberg can continue listing images that speak to the attributes, whereabouts, and mental states of the people whose anguish he wants to voice along with his own.  The repeated one-syllable word hammers in our ears.

Whether in the hands of Dr. King, Thomas Jefferson, Walt Whitman, or Allen Ginsberg, the use of anaphora rivets listeners and incites in them a passion toward action and/or belief.  The repeated sound meets the expectations of listeners’ ears and sets them up to want to hear what’s next.  After each repetition, the listener feels more included, and new words added after each repetition arouse by adding ideas, facts, and images that ultimate build an idea. Listeners feel lulled and aroused, at one with the subject and moved to deeper feeling.

For the writer in the act of creating, the journey generated by anaphora allows a jump start in telling a story before becoming aware of the emotional meaning, but it guarantees that the emotional meaning will rise up out of the images and sound as the left brain is freed from having to make sense and the right brain takes over, inviting pattern to generate the true feelings that make sense of sensation.

When I decided to try my luck at imitating the Declaration of Independence, I was feeling frustrated in writing poetry.  I decided to try my hand at declaring my independence from the task. I thought about poetry as a tyrant and about the reasons I might want to declare myself free of poetry’s power, even though I love it. I found in writing that although I may become frustrated in my efforts to remain a poet, it is impossible to truly separate being a poet from living my life.  In my poem, I used the phrases “You have,” “I have,” and  “who are” as repetitions to get some of my feelings about being a poet onto the page.  I stayed with each phrase as long as I felt I had images to sustain my lines.  Then I changed to the next phrase and stayed with that one until I felt complete.  I used three phrases in repetition because my model, Jefferson, had used three.  I titled my work “Poetry” because that title lets the reader know what I am speaking about.  If I had chosen the memory of a beloved boyfriend or a deceased relative, the begonias on my patio for which I feel responsible, or the phone message machine I can never ignore, I would have used those subjects as titles.

Here is the poem I wrote inspired by anaphora and Thomas Jefferson:

Poetry

You have refused to come to me when I have called you directly; You have come joking in a fool’s rhymes when you did appear; You have dropped phrases leaving me to find the puzzle they complete; You have distracted me from living the way others think I ought to; You have ignited desire in me when boredom was the companion I thought I preferred; You have made me cry in public and left me speechless in front of students; You have come to me unbidden in the mail, on bus placards and city steps, hooking my eyes and reeling me in until I flutter and gasp; You have made me search you out in books I’d never heard of; You have made me a lover of frogs in ancient China, a collector of words I like the sound of like anticubital and eczematous. You have widened my circle of friends to old men in Chile and young girls in Greece. And you have made as foreigners those closer to home who don’t understand the calling.

I have reminded you I must earn a living; I have asked you to wait so I can sleep, rolling away from pad and lighted pen; I have turned my head when watching television or reading Sunday’s Parade; I have sometimes committed to organizations hoping deadlines and databases would keep you away; I have refused to watch a sunrise, forgotten to walk by the ocean, not named the feel of a dolphin’s skin. I have turned your corners down like hotel bedsheets and never returned.

Yet there are no vows that I can break with you, my fated life companion; you who are hidden under armor and naked in a waterfall, you who are gathered in flour sacks and geodes of amethyst, you who are afraid of light like rock crabs and as sighted as eagles, you who are unheld as shooting stars and harvested like pinion nuts, you who are both ocean’s ethereal spindrift and muscles of dangerous undertow.

Whether you have an injustice to write about or want to explore your passion for something that frustrates you or want to discover a passion, anaphora provides a powerful writing tool.  Think of topics you want to write about because you are weary of the way things are going — caring for an infant or elderly family member, parenting teenagers, having a desk that is piled up with too much to do, housecleaning.  Think of topics you want to write about because you are deeply sorrowful or angered about trends– war mongering, civil liberties violations, running traffic lights.  Think of topics you think you might be emotional about but aren’t yet feeling emotional about–animal testing, conservation, having friends over too frequently or not frequently enough.  Borrow phrases King, Jefferson, Whitman and Ginsberg used in their writing for your anaphora or bring in ones of your own.

If you would like to, email me the essay or poem you generate (info@writingitreal.com).  I would like to share some results with Writing It Real readers to help in the effort to use anaphora as a tool for generating and shaping lyric writing from personal experience.

And now I say pick up that pencil, I say point the lead at the white snow banks you’ll scale, I say leave your black prints with pleasure, I say…