Incendiary Lit

OK, if you’ve ever been sitting, say way back in a sophomore English class, and the new teacher, the one who’s trying really hard to be hip, drops a random literary term on you like consonance or anaphora, but keeps on in his lecture/assignment like these are obvious words that you should know, like onomanpeia, which everyone learns young and feels smart for, until they find out that everyone else knows a fancy poetry term. So you’re stuck there trying to piece together the meaning of what sounds like a Great Aunt’s name, from the other poetry nonsense he’s spurting about extended metaphor and emdashes and then you’re assigned to write a poem utilizing your great aunt and have it in class the next day, leaving you wondering if Aunt Ana was short for a phora, then you know exactly what it’s like to not know what anaphora means, and if you’ve never been in that situation, IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU! Anaphora is actually pretty simple, it’s the repetition of the beginning of a line/sentence. For instance in the poem Warning by Jenny Joseph she repeats “and” and “I shall,” really, see:

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

Another “And” anaphora example is Mr. Ezra Pound’s “And the Days Are Not Full Enough”

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass.

Anaphora has an affect on how a poem is read, turning it into slightly more of a chant or litany, and when done right it injects energy into the poem, like it’s a 50’s musical about leatherclad hooligans holding themselves back from the inevitable rumble. Any moment the poem will burst free and hit you with that baseball bat of wisdom. If you can do that with your poem, do it my friend. But there’s always a thin line of overdoing it and lessening the tension, boring the reader.

There’s an article here at poets.org that gives you additional information, like that anaphora comes from the Greek meaning “a carrying up or back.” Word.

(small note, I found the two poems in this article in the fabulous anthology Staying Alive; Real Poems for Unreal Times which is a great well of wonderful poems. Did I gush about it enough? Come on, it has two of my all time favorite poems (which I discovered in its pages) Adrian Mitchell’s “A Puppy Called Puberty” and “A Dog Called Elderly“)

Posted: Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 11:56 pm
Category: Literary Terms, Writing Tutorials.