Marianne Boruch: Poetry’s Over and Over (July 2000)

Marianne Boruch draws on music and neuroscience to explore the different kinds of effects that repetition can have in poems—it serves, at times, as a voiced pause, a resting place; other times it creates a sense of increasing threat. Using jazz her base line, Boruch suggests the way repetition establishes a pattern from which crucial, expressive departures can occur; through a close reading of Bishop’s “One Art,” she shows how the relationship between repetition and variation gives this poem its power.