Print This PostI figured I’d post these. Many poets employ them without ever knowing their names, and that seems to work, but I like knowing the names of things. There’s something thrilling and wise ass to me about going through the world, saying: “Oh look! A Eurasian tree sparrow!” At age six, I fell in love with a girl because she would say things like “isn’t the planet Venus lovely tonight? Look, Joseph, it is rising over the Chivas Regal billboard sign across the street!” Who wouldn’t love a girl who talked like that? I guess a lot of people might find her a trifle pedantic, but the pedantry of never being allowed to know anything gets on my nerves. It’s as if everyone were being stingy and saving it up for a test or waiting for me to make a mistake so that they could hammer me over the head with my own ignorance. This little girl was generous, and her bestowing of information seemed forthright. She taught me birds, and planets, and little facts about rivers that ran backwards. I loved her. So it is in memory of her, forever lost in the murky waters of my past, that I post rhetorical devices for the next two or three posts, hoping someday, a person reading these might turn to their companion and say: “Oh look James, a stunning example of chiasmus!”
Let’s start with Anadiplosis (and discover others along the way). I love this name. I think of it as “Anna Di Plosis, a stunning old woman from Florence who knows how to hold her scotch (in her herbal tea) Anadiplosis pretty much means to begin the next phrase as you ended the previous. It could be one word, or a couple words. I’ll give you an example:
Wind rousted waves,
waves tousled and torn
torn from all thought and all humor:
Humor me if you will:
Kiss the bright hem of my garment,
garment of silk, and inlaid pearls,
pearls milk white as your foam,
foam that has carried the stars,
and will carry them back,
back where all pearls are born.
kiss the gold sandaled feet of Deirdre,
Deirdre, of the sorrows
this pearl tossed into the sea.
Now even though this poem has no regular meter, it sounds metered. In point of fact, it sounds like something more than meter, and that something more is what I call “invocative pulse.” Whitman has invocative pulse beyond any American poet. Invocative pulse is born from rhetorical devices such as Anaphora, enumeration, apostrophic address, and, in this case, anadiplosis. Invocative pulse functions in both poetry and prose that is meant to give a sense of speechifying– not casual speech, but the speech of orators and bards. When the modernists came along, they purged poetry of more than just regular meter and rhyme. They took away most other rhetorical devices as well. Ginsberg, following along the line of Whitman, made popular again the act of speechifying. To many ears raised on modernist and postmodernist free verse, deeply invocative poetry sounds over blown and tacky, but, to many ears longing to hear something out of ordinary journalistic speech, the free verse written bereft of all rhetorical devices, sounds flat and drab. To those who hunger for sound, a poem stripped of all such devices is neither poetry, nor even well varied prose
No poet escapes rhetoric entirely. I see rhetoric (persuasion by ear) as a sort of ongoing address to the sea, to posterity, even when it’s being used to address a rotary club. Such poems have a sense of ritual. We might call it eloquence. Sounding appeals to us through more than mere information. Using Kenneth Burke’s definition of form, and modifying it somewhat: “The building of and fulfillment of a desire in an audience or reader beyond mere information.”These devices were a vital part of the oral tradition, and one can still hear their echoes in speeches and legal documents. Used in moderation, they don’t have to sound high-falutin. And that is your first mission: write a short prose piece or poem that uses anadiplosis. Example:
Fuck (A blow to The Head)
So, like she clocks her brother Igor upside the head with this enormous cabbage? Cabbages can be lethal, man. Man, the poor dude goes down for the count, I mean he’s out, and starts foaming at the mouth–Mouth, full of drool and blood, no shit, and she’s standing over him like the queen of Sheba… hey, what time is it? It better not be nine dude. Dude, If it’s nine, I’m fucked. Fuck it. I’m fucked.
Certainly not eloquent, but it can help render this idiot’s character just by the way it sounds and, here, the anadiplosis just seems part and parcel of his poverty of speech.
There are other rhetorical devices employed in the first example: personification, apostrophic address (talking to something that does not usually talk back: like the dead, or the sea, or America, or a microwave). Alliteration figures into the poem: wind/ waves, tousled/torn. Anadiplosis could also be considered identical rhyme (rhyming look with look). I want to call rhymes that take place at the end and the beginning of lines Anadiplosic rhyme. Example:
Diving Into The Sea
I dove into the sea,
me, who never swam.
Damn it was cold.
Old men ogled my tits.
Bits of sea weed got caught in my hair.
There is no way I’ll do that again.
Amen.
I guess the point of this beyond giving you some names is to show that there are hundreds of ways to create invocative pulse beyond rhyme and meter. Most of the devices of rhetoric are sonic, rhythmic, and mimetic—usually all three. They originated in a time when words were heard rather than read. Usually, when a poet declares that he writes poems that are meant to be read on the page, and only on the page what he really is telling me is that he hates “sounding.”In a sense, he has been won over to the rhetoric of silence and has a pure streak, but even punctuation “sounds.” It is meant to control and vary the speed at which we read. Even the white space is deeply rhetorical, whether we admit it or not. A period is a call to a full stop. A comma is a lesser pause. All this belongs to rhetoric since it is about pulse, the persuasion of varied or regular pulse.
If you want to escape all rhetoric, you are out of luck. Poets who hate their poems leaving the page often read in as flat and uninteresting a tone as possible. Often, very arrogant haters of poetry read aloud will ignore their own punctuation and just read through the periods, commas, or white space. This is childish and stingy, and is based on no aesthetic merit save meanness and hatred of sounding. Of course, too much rhetorical might can piss anyone off, but violent, “on the page” poets (I love calling them violent) are not being honest. The reader will impose a rhythm as he reads where none exists. Not finding any rhetorical devices, the reader will usually create them. So even if you are poet of the page, and nothing but the page so help me God, it is good for you to know the devices of rhetoric, if only to avoid them.
Assignment: write a poem using apostrophic address, anadiplosis, and alliteration. Then take the poem and strip them of all these devices. Good luck.
