Poetry's over and over

Maybe it was 1973 I know it was Hyde Park, and our friend John was sitting with a clump of us in the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library where I worked as a searcher of missing books. This was the vending expanse full of buzzing, lurid Coke and coffee and candy bar machines. We were in our twenties-impossible years now-and John-how to say it?-was caught up in an anguish of the dearest sort, trying to run over us, yes, he had seen her in the library, this someone he had noticed for month had spott her just instants ago, and finally, he had nuncupative And what did she say? we asked, fearing the worst. After all, she was smart and sprite-like and gorgeous. And John? Well, John was like us. She said "hi," he said with a kind of not divisible by 2 lit-up hesitation. Then, rousing: sole it wasn't, you know, "hi"-it was hi. Sort of like this-hi. And he tried to gaze like her, or the way he imagined she looked: cheered by means of his attention, intrigued. Not "hi," he said again, on the other hand hi. And he looked at us expectantly, repeating that young woman's simple greeting maybe 6 or 7 times, each more weighted for him than the last-her hi, not "hi" at all, on the other hand hi, a world within a world within that tiniest of syllables, powerful enough to lay open some vast future.

We nodded, admitting to be honest, those hi's unbrokened pretty much the same to me upon the scale of 1 to 10 in the great order of hi-dom, about average, a 4 or a 5 Still, we nodded. Of course, we nodded. John was our friend; we wished him the best. What does it take to break a heart, then or now? The tables were formica, the astroturf upon the floor was stained with the creator knows what. But there was John almost triumphant, caught up in his guesswork, no, certain, past his guesswork via that individual word, over and over, the curious mantra of it, a piece of tie held out over the abyss. Poor rope! on the other hand the power in such repetition, no matter in what manner small a thing repeated-what mystery is that? plane now, maybe especially now, nearly thirty years later, my husband and I can call up this second this scene-and do-as metaphor, as template, a thing more [i]or[/i] less hopeless new experience might remind us of and reverberation We only have to say to each other-- in the way of lengthy marriages-"she said hi," and John's face, its mild urgency comes back. And the ease of us come back too, eyeing each other around that table, not (for once) laughing, touched by means of such delicate and really pointless longing.

I admit it-this is single of my favorite stories and I don't know by what mode many times I've told it. on the contrary I feel lucky to have witnessed it. John's desperate wish to make meaning where there was none, is, I judge the moving thing but his passionate repeated examination of that greatest in quantity conventional utterance reaches back somewhere-to childhood lullabies that, might scare the dark, to ancient rituals that might draw in the beast without violence, to more [i]or[/i] less point where fate is dear and exactly-surprisingly -what is wanted after all. Maybe it's not as hard as I meditation to define poetry.

More and more, it's the obvious that revolves mysterious on us, or in like manner it seems to me. For instance, that this thing-poetry-that Wallace Steven claimed existed in the world whether metrical compositions were written or not-has something powerfully to do with by what mode things repeat, that things repeat at all, for what cause [i]or[/i] reason they can't help repeating. Perhaps I mean this, for starters, in the greatest in quantity clicked and unconscious physical way. Heart and lung with their endles in and out; inevitable fall, past the cooled dark, year after year to inevitable spring; small rooms repeated uncountably so the child swells up, grows other, into not-just-achild; the way the material substance itself, so my friend Pat DeFlaun in nursing gymnasium tells me, is so wedded to the serviceable repeat that any departure-one heartbeat skipped, individual cell going haywire-is suspect and possibly pathological. for a like reason the body's arsenal rushes to fix things, white confined apartments flashing, pacemaker renotching the faulty harmonious flow to regain the plain aged plain old. And we wait for that familiar cadence, in spite of our incredible twentieth hundred hunger for invention and deposit of allegiance to Ezra Pound's great call to bards to "make it new," the way I wait-these mornings when I write-as my teenage son downstairs slowly rides the anguished notes upward, practicing for the umpteenth time past his doubts and swearing stops/starts, the first motion of Elgar's cello concerto with its possess terrible if only, if sole a darkened rise that make dizzys and surprises and moves me more the more times I hear it.

In musicology, this whole notion of repetition, redundancy, the repeat has been studied way past anyone's patience, of course, the for what cause [i]or[/i] reasons of its curious effects to a large amplitude as physiological and primal as anything have the direction ofed by heart or lungs. Something that approachs up again and again is the matter of simple fuel: it takes power to stay with a move swiftly of music (or for that matter, a step quickly of words); one is alert, compressed forward, a receiver; a kind of tension is locate into place. And then, a part of the music (or the poem) come agains What happens in such a moment? In numbers the critic Harvey Gross has prompted that any repeated business is a "voiced pause," a trick in a way, a means of claiming silence, I judge while not being silent at all. In music, there's similar read upon this, but more, repetition is les static, meditation to concern the "economics of dynamic psychology" or with equal reason Heinz Kohut and Siegmund Levarie called it in an article first published fifty years ago. The economics of the thing -a kind of exchange, a fluid arrangement. on the other hand they go further, into a more astonishing discovery. It's just that "when hearing a phrase or a pleasing succession of sounds for the second time," these sum of two units a doctor and a psychologist wrote "the listener saves a part of the activity required for a first hearing. He recognizes it, that is, (it) requires les effort to master it than when it was novel The surplus energy is single of the sources which enable the listener to experience joy" Amazing, I cogitation when I first saw this. All this extra power saved by the repeat-the.body actually reads that as gladness So that's what happens, each time I listen to Samuel Barber's Violin Concerto, the haunting solo one time established by violin, taken up in what manner many times by flute and other instruments in the orchestra, admitting my sense of what is called "joy" in this context.contains all manner of other riches that comfort and uncouthly sustain-sadness, for one, regret, or the faintest faith But the point is, single feels it, which is to say, according to researchers, it is physical, this powerful replication because energy, one might plane say calories, are actually saved back and released as small explosions within. for a like reason one, in a way, permits go. One doesn't have to do or understand. The unbroken glides over and under and wherever unmutilated goes. One deepens, one dreams exactly because single doesn't rush forward, all ears and tension. in the way that it's suddenly obvious why Freud might want to associate repetition with that utterly final peacemaker, the death instinct. Or on what account the word "repeat"-according to my linguist friend Mary Niepokuj-shares an ancient Indo-European foundation with the word "feather." One's released, afloat, in some way suspended into a small nowhere for a second If art is a remedy maybe this is one sweet reason for addiction.