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DeeSoul Carson: Hello, poets of the internet! I’m DC, and this is O, Word?, the podcast interested in craft, poets, their obsessions, and the things that keep them writing. Today’s episode is O Repetition! I’m here today with my friend, Summer Farah.
Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and zine-maker from California. She is the author of the chapbook, i could die today and live again, poems inspired by the legend of Zelda and published by Game Over Books in 2004. Her debut collection, The Hungering Years is forthcoming from Host Publications in 2026. She’s calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.
Summer, hello!
SF: Hiiiiiiii.
DC: How’s it going? I’m so exciting to to talk to you!
SF: I know, this is gonna be really fun.
DC: I’m looking forward to it. It’s been so long since I’ve been in California, so I’m really kind of challenging… challenge… oh my God. Channeling your energy over there.
SF: Yeah, it’s so weird ‘cause it’s like, you’re a California poet to me, but like, you’re not anymore. I don’t know, how do you feel about that?
DC: I think I definitely still feel like a California poet. I think New York has influenced me in a lot of ways, and I think that shows up in my writing. Right now we’re having a winter storm and I’m definitely feeling like a California poet. Like I’m not… you won’t get any romanticization of the cold from me.
I’m super excited for your, uh, collection coming out very, very soon this month, right?
SF: Yeah. Uh, February 24th.
DC: Oh, yay, perfect. Well, I’m so excited to have you on the show today. As you know, we are here to talk about repetition. I would love if you could start by telling us, in your own words, what repetition is.
SF: Yeah. I would say in the space of a poem, it’s the recurrence of a word or phrase, or device. And it is used in an abundance of ways. It can communicate, an urgency, a franticness, or it can communicate an important motif, a focal point for the piece. Or it can be a space of working something out. And many other things. But those are the worlds in which I most use it.
DC: Perfect. Yeah, and I was wondering, where do you feel like your affinity for repetition comes from? I know you use repetition throughout your work.
SF: Yeah, I am someone who repeats a lot of the art I engage with. If I were to say that any of my sort of craft moves are most representative of my life outside of poetry, I would say it is repetition. I’m a big rereader, especially as a kid. I would obsessively reread books. I would just cycle the same series over and over again in between new things, like I would read the Twilight Books. I’d get to Breaking Dawn and I’d just start over with Twilight again. I would read [A] Series of Unfortunate Events, get to that last... I think it’s 13 books. Just start back over again.
I repeat TV shows a lot. I had this… sometimes I’m like, “I don’t do that as much anymore,” but I did have this experience where I was on a plane and they had the third season of Parks and Rec on there, and so I was like, “I’m just going to watch Parks and Rec on the plane.” And then when I got home I was like, “I’m gonna keep watching Parks and Rec.” And then when I finished I was like, “I didn’t watch season one and two on this watchthrough, so I’ll do one and two.” And then it turned into me just going through the whole series again. And it’s like, I’ve watched Parks and Rec so many times, like I don’t need to do that. Especially because I was a little reluctant to start, ‘cause I was like, “what a strange show to watch in this political climate.” Like, Joe Biden appears, like he’s there. It’s like, “oh my God, you evil man. Get off my screen.”
DC: No, for real. Yes.
SF: But that used to be really common. I just, I don’t know, I’m really into that revisitation. And it is sometimes from a place of comfort where like, maybe I don’t have the mental capacity to really absorb something new, and I do want to be a little passive in my enjoyment, But I do think that, more often it is this kind of, “What else will I notice this time? How will it change? How have I changed in the course of this experience?”
I did a watch through of Gilmore Girls recently, which is a show that. I watched a lot when I was 10 years old I think it’s the first show I, like, binge watched ‘cause my family got the DVDs and I would just watch on a loop, the DVDs, and it’s a show that I’ve watched many times throughout my life, and now I’m like very close to the age that Lorelai is in first season. And it’s like, she’s a mother. And thinking like, wow, like I’m 28. Like, this woman is my peer and she has a 16-year-old daughter. That’s crazy!
DC: Yeah.
SF: Like the premise kind of setting in, enabled by the repetition, yes, but … yeah. And so I think when poetry came to me, the thing I always cite as sort of being my epiphany of poetry is, I was reading the introduction to Crush, Louise Glück’s introduction. And that first line is, “This is a book about panic.”
That really moved 14-year-old me, and I was like, “whoa.” If there’s anything that I would write, it would be a book about panic. Like how can I externalize what’s going on? And so I think I’ve leaned into the frantic in a lot of my work and repetition is a great place for it.
There’s a lot of established forms that play with repetition. I think pantoums are a really incredible use of repetition, the kind of working things out. As I’ve begun to talk about my work with the chapbook, to be faced with these questions of craft and method and realize that repetition is something that appears on the page because it appears in my life and it feels cool to have this kind of close relationship with a tool and a device that feels inseparable from my personhood and also the way I find myself into art and poetry.
DC: There’s this really interesting thing that you’re saying here, a human inclination to reengage with art. People love to go to museums and see the same paintings each time and thinking about what that painting — it’s the same painting — but what that does for us each time that we see it? Books for sure, like we have collections of poetry and, like, what that art does for us. Thinking about movies and TV shows, like what drives us back to see a thing that we’ve seen before?
And I think what you’re saying about the Gilman Gor… Gilmore Girls — me and alliteration have beef, too many of the same syllables once is hard for me. But, like, being able to… even if the object itself is static, how different points in our own lives or different experiences will recolor the way that we look at something. So if you look at something before and after loss, if you look at something before and after the birth of a child, before or after losing or gaining a friend, there’s a lot of different things that change the way we engage with art. I think about this even with music, and I know music is big for you when you’re thinking about repetition.
I remember when I used to be five and being in the backseat of my mother’s car and listening to Mary J Blige. And she’s yelling like, never be without you, baby. And I’m like, five. I’ve never experienced the loss of a love or anything like that, but I was belting it. But now I go back and I listen to the My Life album stuff, I’m like, oh, this is kind of really different. Or like re-listening to like a Jill Scott album and I’m like, oh, she was really horny.
SF: Yeah! Yeah!
DC: And I didn’t know that as a child! I didn’t know what that was! But now I’m like, I get it. I get why she was for the people [laughs]. Love Ms. Scott. I would love to know if you feel like there is a particular kind of music for you that lends itself best to repetition or repetitious thinking.
SF: You know, I have a pretty… I was gonna say narrow music taste. That’s not true. I like every…. That’s not true either. I like a lot of things. I’m not picky, but I have a very narrow [range of] what I do listen to, in that, it is a cycling of a few artists and eventually someone else gets into that kind of coterie. Two artists in particular, Mitski and Samia Finnerty, I find myself gravitating towards their music. Especially I think if you look at my kind of music listening stats, it is mostly them and then a smattering of others that shifts over the last like five, six years.
But I think Samia in particular has an incredible, interesting relationship to repetition. A lot of artists do this, just to preface, like it’s not an uncommon tool in music to sort of end with repetition, the repetition of a phrase. I think Samia has a lot of internal repetition. There is a song that came out in 2025, called “Cinder Block.” Did you know if you Google ‘cinder block,’ it shows you a picture of cinder blocks, not the lyrics to the song…
DC: Who would’ve thought?
SF: …by a not-super-famous artist? But it’s really interesting because every single verse ends with the repetition of a different line. And so, like, the first verse ends with, You’ll do what you want forever./You’ll do what you want forever. Verse two, All the light here is a bargain./All the light here is a bargain. Verse three, Something in there for me to keep. Something in there for me to keep.
And that’s the form of the song. It’s all verses, no chorus, which is normally the site of repetition, right? The chorus is something that comes back and through, the sort of differences in the chorus is how we build kind of emotional complexity in a song, how we build sonic complexity in a song, indicating some shifts in the journey of the music.
And I find the chorus-less song that is employing repetition of different lyrics on the same melody throughout so fascinating. And it’s so appealing to my poetic brain because I think that it is a more poetic composition, rather than a lyrical composition of a song, in that poems don’t have choruses generally. It is combining the expectation of repetition in a song with the motif of a poem.
Her repetitions are often so longing. I think that repetition is a beautiful space of emphasis too. And music allows you to put inflection into that language, right? You are giving emotion to the words. It’s not just the physical, the written language, and that’s the opportunity of music.
When I’m playing with repetition in my work, I am thinking a lot about a song and the variations in a song and what do various repeated phrases do and mean in that moment, and what can it do for an arc, for a reader who is hearing it as a song in their head?
DC: Something that I’m also thinking about is the repetition of images, especially if you’re reading a collection of poetry and the images come up throughout it. I think about this as I think about your stunning chapbook,
i could die today and live again. And I’m wondering, how do you feel images or characters reoccurring in a text inform the book’s project?
SF: Yeah. So, the chapbook is a broad Zelda book. There isn’t one game necessarily that the book is taking from more or less than others. There are ones that are more prominent, just because of either I was playing them at the time, or perhaps their materials felt more tangible and applicable. But I was thinking a lot about the sort of identifying features of a Zelda game and what makes a Zelda game, and music is one of the big things in it.
Music, not necessarily just the score being awesome, but music as a way of making things happen. It’s not as present in the newer introductions into the series, but past games it’s, you play a song to make something happen: to open a door, to make it rain, to make the passage of time that is critical to figuring out a dungeon, et cetera. There’s a sort of inherent repetition in that you’re hearing the same simple song over and over and over again. And that builds an interesting kind of familiarity.
And then also throughout this Zelda series, there are recurring characters and goals, motifs, plots. You got Link, you got Zelda, you got Ganon. But then there are also smaller little characters that kind of appear throughout. There is the couple in Majora’s Mask and in Ocarina of Time. And so that’s a beautiful little point of familiarity between those two games. There’s the kid who has the big snot nose in Wind Waker and in the DS games. I wanted the chapbook to be filled with this familiar iconography alongside a sort of glossary of image that is relevant to my work and my life.
And I always wanted them to be able to touch, I didn’t want to use images from the games that felt otherworldly to me. I wanted there to be a tight allegorical sort of relationship between the recurrence of images both across like the kind of general poetic images and what I’m grabbing from the game.
I think the core things that make a Zelda game a Zelda game are like why I like it. I love medieval fantasy as a genre. I am very attached to it. I think swords are awesome. But a lot of the warmth of the games, like the Koroks, — some of the characters that recur and who are kind to Link — as well as the thematic recurrences: A relationship to the moon in a disaster. A relationship to song and progress. This cycle of empire and domination. Those are things that I’m very interested and invested in.
I think video games, at their heart, there is repetition involved in them, right? Like you build a muscle memory to perform the gameplay. You’re smashing buttons, you are backtracking to dungeons or whatever, depending on the type of game. It was interesting to play with that poetic space that I’m comfortable with, of repetition, with a[n] art object that has repetition baked into the mastering of it alongside these structural themes where repetition can be devastating. The return, or the recurrence of empire, the failure of resistance or the attempt of resistance again and again against a similar enemy.
DC: Something that I love about the chapbook and something that I really enjoy about the way I’ve seen you approach ekphrasis I never know the correct is being able to, as you were saying, identify features of the thing, and so that the poetry is not necessarily a one-to-one recreation of the inspiration, right? It’s not like you took the Legend of Zelda and you gave us a portrait of the landscape of Legend of Zelda, although I think that’s in there. It’s really being able to distill what’s most important about these games, these characters, like what themes are coming out from them, and then being able to put that in the poetry, because anyone who has the knowledge of the characters already has that knowledge. And it just expands…
And it’s also like, if people don’t know anything about that game too, it’s still a nice entry point because it’s like, well, I actually don’t necessarily maybe need to know these things. It’s easter eggs.
SF: It’s kind of like, what is the function of the work? I think that’s a really useful question, and it’s one that I started sort of asking myself after reading Capable Monsters, Marlin Jenkins’ chapbook, or just their Pokémon poems before that where they do such a good job with taking these interactions with the world of Pokemon and then kind of asking, so what is this doing to me, mentally? Like, why am I responding in this kind of way? What is my attachment to this? And then unraveling that attachment into a beautiful, beautiful poem. And yeah, I think that’s kind of what I’m interested in with ekphrasis, rather than an ode to the work, but an investigation of attachment.
What am I projecting? What am I rebuilding from my memory of this thing? There’s also a really interesting experience where, when writing the chapbook, I think the games that I replayed while writing it, were Majora’s Mask — my brother and I did a play through together, which was really fun because that game’s hard.
DC: Yeah.
SF: Just make him do most of it. And we had the original game guide still, which was really nice. But, Majora’s Mask, Skyward Sword. Maybe I didn’t replay anything else, but I played Tears of the Kingdom after turning in my edits. There are times when I would Google something, ‘cause I was like, “I think I remember this,” and then realizing the ways in which my memory had recreated something to be not what it was, and maybe be more relevant to me and my perspective and my thinking, even just some small language things.
DC: Which is maybe more interesting anyway, yeah, that mis… what’s the word —I think the word I’m thinking of, like aphasia. Like the slight shifting of a memory or what, what we think a thing is. Yeah.
DC: I love what you’re saying about the frantic and repetition as an externalization of that feeling of trying to get things down and out and to other people. I know there’s also the thing with poetry and repetition and thinking about its relationship to the divine, thinking about poetry and repetition’s relationship to chants and prayers and other kinds of conversations with a thing larger than us, kinda like a re- and reengaging of that conversation. I don’t know if you have any more thoughts on that. Just thinking about, what does it mean for repetition as we think about speaking to something outside of ourselves.
SF: Yeah, definitely. I think perhaps a repeated thing can become different throughout. The first occurrence of an image can speak to the hyper context of the text. The second appearance of an image can speak to the broader context of the text, and maybe it can happen again and it will apply to something else entirely outside of the text.
I am thinking about a film I watched recently, All That’s Left of You. It’s a Palestinian American filmmaker, Cherien Dabis. One of the opening scenes early on is a father talking to his son in 1948 Palestine. And he’s asking him to recite the poem that he’s been teaching his children to memorize. And so, his son is like, seven. He is an adorable little kid reciting this beautiful Arabic poetry. But, he’s like, trying to get his son to recite, and working on his education despite the escalations of Zionist militias.
And then the last scene of the movie is that son as an adult, in his return to Palestine since then, with his wife and, he’s like reciting the poem again, and he’s teaching it to his wife now. I think it’s really interesting to have both this art object that contains repetition repeated and how is it recontextualized in both of these scenes.
It’s a poem about the Arabic language being metaphorized as the sea and the desire to remain and grow. And there’s [a] very interesting kind of meta context of the recitation of Arabic poetry as people who are about to be expelled. And then the recitation of Arabic poetry, now within a state that has an active criminalization of the Arabic language. But then that poem is a real poem that exists outside of the text as well. And it’s by an Egyptian poet, I think published in like the thirties or something.
And so in that case, I think repetition functions as a sort of book ending in the film. And this reaffirmation of place, but then it also can lead you to a broader world outside of the text because maybe you wouldn’t have thought that there is a significance to this poem if it had only had that early occurrence. But the reintroduction of it, the repetition of it, makes it more of a thematic tether.
DC: [Are] there any particular poets that come to mind to you when you’re thinking of repetition?
SF: Yeah. Forough Farrokhzad. Yes. She’s an Iranian poet. This collection I’m showing — I forget, this is an audio medium — is Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, translated by Elizabeth T. Gray. This book was a big inspiration for me, syntactically, in i could die today and live again. She uses ellipses, which I was like, that’s crazy. I love ellipses in a poem. But, my favorite poem in this collection is called, “Grief-Worshiper.” It begins:
I wish I were like autumn….I wish I were like autumn. I wish I were, like autumn, silent and depressing
And then it goes through, other points of repetition are:
Oh… how beautiful it would be if I were autumn
Before me: the bitter face of youth’s winter Behind me: the tumult of a summer of sudden love Inside me: the home of grief and pain and suspicion. I wish I were like autumn…. I wish I were like autumn.
So, it is this really interesting poem where it’s bookended by a repeated phrase, that in itself is a repeated phrase. It’s:
I wish I were like autumn….I wish I were like autumn.
[Entire poem]
I wish I were like autumn….I wish I were like autumn.
And the second line of the poem introduces a little variation on the phrase:
I wish I were, like autumn, silent and depressing.
And so it is this sort of — I wish I were like autumn…. I wish I were like autumn — a longing. And it’s kind of like revving up to expand on desire. And then throughout she has these like mild repetitions and constructing a visual-emotional space —
Before me: the bitter face of youth’s winter Behind me: the tumult of a summer of sudden love
— that also mimics the calendar space of a season. And so I love her syntax of this kind of phrase, repeated, phrase repeated but with another phrase attached to it, a finishing of the sentence. Solmaz Sharif has a poem called “Into English,” and it’s from Customs, her second collection, and it starts:
from “Into English”
I think I will translate Forough. I am urged to translate Forough as soon as possible. In my hours, I find it is very private. It is very private to be in another’s syntax.
And so what I love so much about this poem is that she is talking about the act of translation and what it means to be in someone’s syntax while borrowing the syntax of the poet she is seeking to translate. And there’s all of the emotional relationship of translating a poet from your heritage/native language and the complication of like, what is your relationship to that language now? But then also the kind of broader political context of this poet in particular.
I love this poem so much because it highlights that method of repetition that Farrokhzad uses in a kind of unraveling of desire through repetition. It’s like, she has to say something a few times before she’s able to really let you know what exactly that is it means. And so there is a kind of tension of repetition as withholding, as indication of withholding rather than revelation or a franticness that I think that I am often seeing and drawn to. Yeah. God, love it so much. It’s so cool.
DC:. I think repetition also allows for a lot of transformation, right? So if we’re thinking about books or collections that have like a repeated poem title, what does that then get to do for expanding our idea of like, whatever that title is, or what the collection means. Very recently, I read my friend jason b crawford’s new book Yeet! and there [are] several poems in the book called “Essay on Yeet!” and thinking about, what is giving these poems the same title then allow us to keep saying about the same thing. ‘Cause they’re very formally different.
Like they’re contextually, they’re very different. They’re doing different things in different poems. They’re visually different. And so then it creates its own conversation within itself. I.S Jones also just put out her book, Bloodmercy and the title, “Bloodmercy” comes up twice. Each one is from a viewpoint of a different sister, Cain and Abel. And so, once again, thinking about, how are they in conversation with each other, now that this thing has a shared name? That was a bit of a tangent, but just thinking so much about the possibilities of repetition.
SF: Yeah. And in Bloodmercy in particular, she also breaks apart the title itself at some point, and that allows for this kind of dismantling of the kind of argument of the book of this kind of connector of blood. And is it possible to have mercy between blood?
You’re able to have a poem that successfully is like teasing apart the conceit because of the repetitions of it otherwise. It’s not just the container of the book being poked at, it’s the recurrence of the container appearing.
DC: Yeah. Now we have all these different images and the images that come in between and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It allows for a lot more room to play when you give us more to, to work with.
SF: Yeah.
DC: Summer, you have offered us so much great poetry from other folks today, and so many great words about repetition. So I’m so grateful for all of your thoughts, and I would love it if you could close us out by reading a poem of your own.
SF: Yes. Okay.
GAME OVER
“A moon will rise out of my darkness.” - Mahmoud Darwish
new moon blood moon moon with the ghastly face moon I took for granted moon that kisses the sea the little moon that dilates pupils to madness I worship whatever claims to make me sane I worship sun & sky I kiss the dirt & run from bugs I respect the spider living in the window I ask what have I done to deserve this I ask what have I done to deserve this I ask what have I done to deserve there is blood in places I could have never imagined wrists rimmed with time back of palms tattooed with wisdom courage power dust moon there has always been that possibility of madness when we encounter our shadow selves every once in a cycle reflective pools reveal our dance I could die today & live again I could die today & live again I could die today & live again I could die today & live
From i could die today and live again by Summer Farah, published by Game Over Books. Copyright © 2024 by Summer Farah. Originally published in Poetry Online. Used with permission of the author.
DC: Thank you all for listening to this episode of the O, Word? podcast, produced by me, DeeSoul Carson. If you are interested in this topic, I’ve added some folks recommended by our guest in the Substack Post. The music for O, Word? is provided by Esoteric Creations. Check them out on Spotify.
For this episode, I offer this prompt: Write a poem that begins and ends with the same line. Repeat one word in every line of the poem.
If you’re interested in repetition, Summer recommends:
“Grief-Worshipper” by Forough Farrokhzad
“Becoming Moss” by Ella Frears
“the ghosts of the dead sea rewrite the history of drowning” by George Abraham
from “frank: sonnets” by Diane Seuss
