For the first meeting on Sept 28 (7pm-8:30pm, 124 Lincoln Hall), bring a piece that develops with a pattern of repetition (such as anaphora or epistrophe) in the manner of A.R. Ammons’ poem “The City Limits,” which builds in cycles of “When you consider….” Some other pieces that develop with this technique of repeated phrases include “Black Cricket” by Quan Barry , “Anchor Head” by Terrance Hayes*, and Rick Moody’s short story “Boys.”

Anaphora, epistrophe, and other forms of repetition do not create linear narratives; they offer opportunities to explore other ways to organize and understand experience, constellations of experience and suspended simultaneities, and they offer opportunities for surprising juxtaposition. Writing about the effects of anaphora (repetition of an initial phrase), Stuart Cooke, in Speaking the Earth’s Languages, writes:

Anaphora is an organizational device that produces an atmosphere of ritual or procession, or “when let loose produces an opposed sense of onrushing elemental force”:

Anaphora reinforces belief in a ritualized spell-binding poetic rhythm, whose force attains sometimes to religious ecstasy […]. The technique requires waves of segmented phrases whose repetition builds into pulsations rather than points and predications. (August Fletcher, A New Theory for American Poetry, 154-55).

The power of the anaphoric procession suggests that the poet’s voice has a powerful, orphic quality: words, phrases and even language itself can be moulded by the rhythm of the poem; thus, the poet can bring otherwise disparate elements into the same field. Language is transformed into an open-ended series that flexibly incorporates new additions, all the while allowing each part to contribute in small ways to the gradually shifting constitution of the larger structure.