Moons ago, I had to write a review of a poetry book which was full of soul, wind, sky, stars, moon, the sun and the rivers’ beauty, the lushness of landscapes and the vastness of plains, the constellations, the weather, the seasons, the rain, the flash of an eagle’s flight, the light in the eyes of a girl, smiles and more smiles (your smile melted my smile), a long list of the faunal and floral elements (the flowers: chrysanthemums, lilac, morning glories, sunflowers, rose what?, and so on), all expressions of beauty or the purportedly beautiful, words and images, of which I label as echolalia in poetry.
This happens, usually, with the new poet, who perhaps hasn’t encountered language as he should, girdling him for the work at hand, but is impassioned by the desire to measure up and put into words the electric feelings in his heart. I invoke dear Shlovsky: “Images are given to poets; the ability to remember them is far more important than the ability to create them.” What I am driving at is that for the neophyte with an electric heart, what are the images first given to him? Does he perhaps turn to the elements? How many times has he heard “smile bright as the sun” “beautiful as a flower” “like a river” “the cool breeze of your love” “the moon this, the moon that” (no other word or object has suffered more injury in juvenile poetry than the moon) “the fire of passion” (needless to say that there’s redundancy here), and the many, many iterations of such metaphorical echolalia bereft of any real essence, but simply being expressions so overused, so dead?
Before I chastise further, I have been a victim of this too. A line remains haunting: “true love where my heart rings with joy,” in my first days of writing poetry. It is not a crime, therefore, when the new poet is a victim of echolalia. The crime is to accept it to be poetry. For one cannot say the line cited above is better than “tread the musical airs regained,” which replaced the former, years later, after many forge-like revisions. But even looking at this last line now, even though it is mine, it reads a little too grandiose in comparison to the kind of poet I have become today; which is to say, writing poetry is a journey that never ends. Hitomaro, perhaps, would have written: “along the shores of the Iwami, alive again.”
What this imagined Hitomaro line accomplishes in comparison to the lines above is how well strung his emotions are laid in reality—by the mention of the Iwami River (place)—than the abstractness of the former. We can therefore trace and see the human, the person, and even touch, by way of synaesthesia, the poet’s emotions. Now, this makes great sense of the idea of poetry. Let me backtrack so we don’t lose sight of the topic at hand: it is not necessarily the accentuation of place in the poetry (lest we imagine poetry is all about place), but the accentuation of life force, or metabolism, that gives the poem its personality; for it to be able to walk up and meet its reader and say hi. Which I’d like to say is a quality almost always absent in echolalia poetry.
There is no person in echolalia poetry. The word “echo” already signals this problem—and why is this so? It is because the poet, as stated above, electrified by emotions, refuses to speak from his heart, from a deeper place of his interiority, his true feelings which originate in his self; choosing rather to employ the elements (the air, sunshine, or moon) to express himself. This act only echoes his emotions. It never truly expresses them. Even more so, it also echoes the elements, which for as long as we know, everyone has tried to praise in many different ways, which all sound the same but hardly ever bring to light their true beauty because of language lethargy. And because he has joined others who have done this before, to write poetry with words like soul, river, wind, ethereal, aurora, mountains, glaciers, horizon, et cetera, without any personality (or should I say “soul”?), it is simply echolalia.
To reinforce the last sentiment here, what I mean is these words are mostly used without the poet’s genuine attachment to them. “Your love is a river, endlessly nourishing”—well, let’s add, “endlessly nourishing to me,” to include the poet. Of course, a good editor will say “to me” is not necessary, and I agree. But let’s say we choose to be more verbose, to include the poet by all means, we’d have: “Your love is a river that endlessly nourishes me.” In all iterations, we cannot touch the poet’s emotions. The line is impotent—a mere echo of emotions. Is this all the poet thinks of his lover?
But listen: “I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I / Did, till we loved . . . My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears” (John Donne, “The Good Morrow”). Listen again: “I see how you are, hair silky still / Greyer than a year ago…” (Richard Ali, “Still”). “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why, / I have forgotten…” (Edna St. Vincent Millay, “What lips…” In these lines you feel the presence of the metabolic. The movable. Life force. That something beyond an echo is happening. Not just of the poet’s emotions, but that his or her life has been tangibly affected by externality, causing a stir, or response, which we also respond to—so that the poem no longer belongs just to the poet but to the reader who becomes affected by it.
In echolalia, the reverse is true. The reader is hardly moved, affected, or inspired by the poet’s words. For what is moving or stirring in an echo? Per its literal meaning, an echo is dead substance. We come across it as the passing wraiths of things, or in its mechanical semantic, as the last trace of a weakened sound wave, which is the substance of what we feel when reading such works of echolalia. (This also applies to prose with tired language.)
Poetic language today, however, has moved from such romantic adoration of the elements. There has been a shift in the tradition of linear imagery to hyper-mannerisms and meta-fluidity (a rather strained escape from simplicity). Thus, we do not read juvenile poems about the stars and moon anymore—such triumph!—and may assume our poetry suffers less echolalia. But this isn’t true. Echolalia in poetry, as I have attempted to establish, becomes glaring in clichéd forms of imagery, which is a symptom of used thinking—no thanks to Frank Kermode for that phrase—and if it is used thinking, it is an echo of language or trope that is stale.
Echolalia shows up in the poems that try to ape the imaginative impressions of an already bad work—and as kin of each other, both works perish in the echolalia of each other. Echolalia shows up in a poet’s lack of ideas, of any original thinking or creativity; in the contrived attempt of dead weight trying to pass as figurative language, all signalling the poet’s distance and disconnection from his very own words. It is the sort of poetry where place and persona are absent; the sort of poetry written without agency; the sort of poetry that seems to have been written by an artist whom we cannot see; the sort of poetry that, because we cannot see the artist, is like a shell with nothing in it. So alarming is the emptiness that leaves me wondering sometimes: why are poets writing poetry in which their distance from it is so glaring? What sort of art is this? Let us read these lines below.
The murky days when feet sticky with duty
Dig deep into the saucer-shaped moon river,
Her already creased craters are rippled towards
An infolding. The white seagull of air suffers
The slow traffic of translation: having offered
Herself to the drunk sailor of the tide that carpools . . .
The complete poem, titled “Old Weather,” by Adesiyan Oluwapelumi, continues in seven more lines of the same echolalia.
I agree all art is worthy of interpretation, and that even when a work of art refuses to yield to interpretation or meaning, it is the more reason why it should be cut up and dissected. For we have to look into the void it presents to see whether it is indeed a void, and if we are lucky it might reveal something to us we didn’t see at first, thus, formulating new discourse.
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This is not the case with the excerpts above: there’s a graspable amount of meaning or a progression of it. For instance, “murky days” and “sticky feet” are relatable and referential. “An infolding” and “the slow traffic of translation” are all right too. (Note that echolalia poetry is not bereft of meaning, but of personality.) Whatever progression of meaning is gleaned from the lines above becomes scattered—where are the words leading us to? You may want to read further to open up the poem and really see it, to dig deeper still into its god’s-swollen foot, but then this comes at you: “Needle-white hulls of stars jag the green canopy / Of evergreen trees with their infamy. In / The closet interior of perpendicular mirrors / Of sky against earth…”
I already mentioned hyper-mannerisms above, which I find this poem guilty of; although I am impressed by the line “Needle-white hulls of stars jag the green canopy,” I am not so sure stars shine bright enough to create such needle-white hulls. And I understand greatly what the poet is trying to accomplish here with high imagery, but his distance from the poem is too evident. Mannerism in the poem above is the emphasis of stylistic effort over content, a symptom of a poet having very little to say—as the earlier poet who can only think of his lover as “a river that endlessly nourishes me”—who, from such barrenness, writes what he thinks is poetry but which is echolalia.
The lesson for everyone here, I believe, is the elusiveness of figurative language which poets are not always equipped with as they believe themselves to be. Only in rare moments, which I like to call response, where the fevered dream of inspiration brews, does it find us or are we able to tap into it and produce works whose beauty is evident in themselves. Without this, there’s much room to falter. However, discipline can be regimented into our thinking and writing of poetry to avoid abuse. Essentially, there should be some level of discipline for the artist who claims to write anything worthy of literary merit (be it poetry or prose) in paying attention to language. We are all seduced by figurative language; we love it, we want to possess it, we want to be acknowledged for uttering it or penning it. But how well do we know it?
For the new poet, its pull is so strong he is carried away by his juvenility and writes about the stars, comparing everything to the sun, the smell of flowers, or the feel of a night breeze, forgetting that he could write about more visceral things, where he is present, and place is present, like what it means to be touched by the purity of his lover’s lips, or wet lips. Or instead of “I inhale the wind,” he may write “the evening inhales everything, even me.” Or that for his existentialisms, he should write “I am through with thoughts that drift over lands . . . whether it is / The city’s stone heart thumping . . . or just the hooves of my / Wrist / Watch kicking the world around” (Ahmed Maiwada, “Since the breeze began to blow”)—than penning another line about the soul, which no one wishes to read; writing words that are just air.
The problem is the mistake that figurative language is often thought to be out there, in the ethereal or what sounds ethereal, or in expressions that risk being outlandish, because this way it indeed becomes “poetic” and not ordinary, plain, or jejune—but this is the pitfall for catachresis. The lesson, generally, is that a poem should not be absent of the poet, or of personality. And the truer lesson is that when the poet fails to see himself or any life force in his poem, it is easier to walk away from it, to see its emptiness, than insist on it. This applies not just to poetry, but to most art, and even to life.♦
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Critic, poet, and editor, Carl Terver is the founding editor of Afapinen. He was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2024, and he is the author of Glory to the Sky.