Skip to main content

REPETITION in poetry


What do you do when you want to remember something? 
Do you say it to yourself again and again until you learn it? 
That’s using repetition. 
Repetition in poetry may include a word, a phrase, a line, or even a stanza the poet wants to use more than once for particular effect. We hear it, We see it. We begin to feel its presence.
When using repetition the poet must make sure that what is repeated is important to the poem, otherwise it can feel or sound overdone.

 In the poem, Bully For Me, I consciously repeated the words, 'But ours left' in each stanza hoping to create a sense of relief in the mind of the reader.




 Bully For Me

 We had a bully at our school
I think every school has one
-But ours left
Now, I can ride to school
Relaxed

We had a bully at our school
-But ours left
And now playtime is fun again

We had a bully at our school
-But ours left
I wonder if that person is happy?
Like me and my friends 
Are now

If we want young poets to use repetition effectively we need to ensure we plan for it in our teaching of poetry.

 Some Things to Consider:
  • Collect and share poems that include word play such as onomatopoeia and alliteration. Discuss how these literary techniques enhance the reader's connection to and enjoyment of the poem.
  • Alliteration enhances memorization. The young poet will be more likely to recall the words.
  • Have students investigate poetry books in order to find their own examples of alliteration and repetitive refrains. Encourage them to begin creating their own and start to use them in poems of their own. Collect examples of interesting word play in their own notebooks for later reference.
  • Create anchor charts for onomatopoeia, alliteration, words and phrases. keep these lists visible and refer to them regularly as examples that may further inform their poetry writing.
  • Develop catchy words into phrases and sentences, and consider how these special words grab our attention. the questions for the poet is, how could they be used in a poem?
  • Often these catchy words are floating in the playground. help students to think about everyday language. Encourage them to listen closely and collect these special words. Words that possess rhythm 
I recently compiled a list of some poetic phrases I found in a book I pulled from the shelf and shared them with students. I wanted them to be aware of how such gems are lying hidden on the page, waiting to be discovered by an alert reader. I adopted the guise of a text detective and went searching for phrases that could be used as repeating refrains. I can see the potential in the assembled words for use in a poem. Building a poem around a refrain becomes easier when we have identified a few catchy words.
Here is some of my treasure...


Now, that’s unusual

In the night

I have a dream
In the sky
When I was little
Oops!
In my hands
This is the shape of anger
Tucked in tight
Last time
In the ocean
That was a mistake

Let me repeat, -repetition is fun when it's not overdone.




Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poetry Inspired by Images and Objects

There are many ways pictures and photographs can be conscripted to support the writing of poetry. Allow me to share a few ideas with you: Old photographs are a great source of inspiration. Cynthia Rylant explored this idea with great success in her book 'Something Permanent' where she employed the Depression era photographs of Walker Evans to add a new voice to the starkness to the lives of people experienced under extreme circumstances. I have used this strategy to spark many individual poems. In ' I Bet There's No Broccoli On The Moon,' I used a photo I had taken in 2004 while living in New York to inspire a poem. The poem was based on a story related by a friend who grew up in New York.  I regularly combined poetry and pictures in my writer's notebook, drawing on inspiration from the photograph and my personal memories. We can also utilize existing cartoons and illustrations to create ekphrastic poems. I frequently use the illustrations of Jim Pavlidis to co...
30 comments
Read more

Peter Dixon -Teabag Poem

Today I'm highlighting the poetry of Peter Dixon. Peter Dixon was not just a poet. He was a performer, educationalist and artist.   He grew up in London during WW2, and as a boy his schooling was far from successful. He struggled with spelling and the understanding of word, form and grammar, so he tended to write secretly at home, drawing and writing of things largely ignored by schools.   Despite this difficult phase of his life, Peter eventually became a school teacher and then a senior lecturer in education. It often mystified him as to how all of this came to pass. As a teacher, he strived to be unbiased and did not neglect the children who experienced learning challenges.   Peter Dixon became a full time children’s writer and educational consultant. His first book was published in 1978. Whilst living in Winchester, Hampshire, with his family, he   contributed to over 100 poetry anthologies and had seven collections of his own work published including Grow Your O...
18 comments
Read more

Poetry Friday 'Storm On The Island' Seamus Heaney

Given the fact that we recently celebrated St Patrick's Day, it seems appropriate that I take this opportunity to continue the Irish focus and recognize one of Ireland's leading literary figures... Seamus Heaney was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland in 1939 and died in 2013. He became a multi award winning poet. His first collection of poems, 'Death of a Naturalist' appeared in 1966 and helped to establish Heaney as one of the major poets of the 20th century. From that first anthology, I have chosen 'Storm On The Island.' This poem tells us about the stoic resistance of people and structures to an incoming storm. The island is not named. Poetic scholars believe this is a poem that can be taken literally, as a monologue on the life and attitude of island people facing a storm, or it can be understood as a  metaphor of political struggle on the island of Ireland. Heaney knew both worlds.  The poems of this first collection are grounded in the soil...
12 comments
Read more