“Repetition” by Phil Kaye

Summary: The speaker of the poem repeats many of the phrases/lines and has a stutter. He tells the reader that if you repeat something, it looses its meaning. The speaker relays how this was his favorite game as a child because he watched his parents repeat "I love you" to each other as they were going through a divorce. He saw this as a way to cope with the stress in his life until he literally got a stutter. 

Problems: I do not foresee any problems with this piece because it is not explicit or sexual in any manner. It simply is about choosing your words carefully. I would also be giving the students a physical copy, so parents shouldn't be upset about it not being "literature."

Purpose and Educational Significance: In my opinion, I think this is one of two great poems to close the whole unit with. I would want to accomplish two major things with this poem.

This spoken word poem is something that I hope really speaks to the students. One reason I have high hopes for my students’ interest is because the form is very different from the majority of the works in the anthology; not only is it a poem, but it’s meant to be spoken-word. I think this poem has a musical quality, much like rap. I would hope that my students that are musically inclined would especially enjoy the rhythm of the poem when it’s performed.

The first thing I want to use this poem to teach is how people of minorities still face the same issues as the majority. However, minorities face additional issues. This poem could be seen as a metaphor. All ethnic peoples face trials of the family: divorce, death, etc. However, when minorities face these issues, they are given additional handicaps, like the speaker’s stutter.

Additionally, I think this poem speaks to an important topic: words have precious and important meaning. If you aren’t careful, your words will lose meaning.

Kaye

Thus, secondly, I want to know if my students believe this message. Although we probably won’t talk about this in class, this poem is predicated on an interesting perspective on structuralism. While there is certainly a lot of truth to the poem, I’m personally not confident that the main purpose of the poem is true. If you’re told you’re ugly every day, it probably won’t lose meaning to you. Yes, perhaps the person who says it will forget the meaning, but the object of the teasing never will. I would hope that my class would come to this conclusion. I would want to use this opportunity to discuss social justice and how the language we use every day can affect others. Yes, we may forget the impact of our words, but we should do everything in our power to avoid this.

To go to Phil Kaye’s official website, go here.

For a transcript of the poem, click here.