Poetry Moves I Love to Teach: Repetition

I try to share poems with my students that they'll enjoy. I don't always accomplish this, but I do a pretty good job, I think. I want them to discover the joy of poetry and the beauty of poems. And since I also want to help them become better writers of poems, I try to teach them to notice poetry "moves" in the poems that we read.

I stole the phrase "poetry moves" from a poet/teacher named Joe Tsujimoto. I had the pleasure of meeting Joe last summer at a poetry seminar. He said that he tells his students that "poets have more moves than Michael Jordan." A poetry move is essentially a common characteristic of good poems, a characteristic that makes a poem an enjoyable poem to read.

The list of moves is obviously long, but I do find that if I can expose students to them in their reading of poems that they will tend to try to incorporate the moves into their writing.

One move I introduce early in the school year is repetition. It's one of my favorites...I am drawn in by repeated elements and patterns in poems. Repetition is also a move that's easily imitated.

There are oh so many poems I could hold up as an example, but I think I'll choose one by Jane Kenyon:

Briefly It Enters, and Briefly Speaks
by Jane Kenyon
I am the blossom pressed in a book, found again after two hundred years. . . . I am the maker, the lover, and the keeper. . . . When the young girl who starves sits down to a table she will sit beside me. . . . I am food on the prisoner's plate. . . . I am water rushing to the wellhead, filling the pitcher until it spills. . . . Please read the rest of the poem here. I realize this poem has so much repetition in it that it ends up reading  like a litany, but it's a pretty good example of what I'm talking  about. I also like to get students to notice poems with more  subtle repetition. Then I get to ask them, "Why do you think  the poet repeats that?" THEN, once they're on the look out for repetition and similar patterns, they'll be able to start noticing breaks in  those patterns and we can talk about why the poet would break the pattern. It  goes on and on.