TRANSCRIPT

I’m Maggie Smith, and this is The Slowdown.

The playwright Suzan-Lori Parks once said, “There are aspects of music that I borrow and use in my work: repetition and revision. A big part of jazz is repeat and revise, and repeat and revise. That’s what my work is all about.”

Repetition is often a way of building momentum as I write. With each repetitive word or phrase, I can feel myself chipping away at an idea, uncovering it, getting closer to what I’m trying to articulate. Repetition can also be a way of turning something over and over in my hands. Often I’ll vary the usage slightly, as if looking at the idea from various angles, noticing how the light hits each facet.

One of the magic tricks of repetition is that it enacts remembering. Think about it: Memory itself is a kind of haunting, and repetition is a kind of haunting in a text. Another magic trick of repetition is that you can do the same thing over and over with different results. You might deploy a line, word, phrase, or image, then redeploy it again and again. Each repetition engages the reader differently. The key is variation.

Think of it like riffing — there’s a slight rearrangement, a sense of improvisation, each time the element reappears. The variation on that repetition grabs our attention. We grow accustomed to what we’re receiving, and so a change jars us — breaks our expectation — so that suddenly that moment is emphasized.

Repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of lines, clauses, or sentences is called anaphora. It’s common in sermons and political speeches, because it’s incantatory and persuasive. Anaphora patterns Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech and Elie Wiesel’s speech “The Perils of Indifference.” In my own work, I’ve found that anaphora is a way of revving the engine and building momentum — or, to use another metaphor, a way of chipping away at an idea, like a chisel into marble.

Repeating the same word or phrase opens something up, forces us to finish the thought in a new way each time. I always surprise myself. With each repetition of the phrase, the sentence goes in a slightly new direction.

Today’s poem creates a mythology out of inheritance, mirroring the repetition of narratives and lineages.

Queen of Collapse
by Hadara Bar-Nadav

Queen of disappearing, the girl in me gone

Queen of sweet milk, blisters, sweat

Queen as the night opens its mouth and cries

                    The dreamthroat, blackthroat, barbaric guest

Queen seized by wide white jaws

My subjects all turn cannibal, animal, maul

Their love gigantic, their never-ending need

Queen claimed by the smallest fists

Queen of the body count, fingers, shadows, toes

Warped by war and sleeplessness, we are a thousand years old

Queen of the corpse I invite inside for a glass of rain
                
                    The rain coming down like gravel over our heads

My mother’s face ripples across my face, across my child’s face

Queen of collapse, our hunger everlasting

"Queen of Collapse" by Hadara Bar-Nadav from THE ANIMAL IS CHEMICAL © 2024 Hadara Bar-Nadav. Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Four Way Books.