My mother taught me this trick. If you repeat something over and over again it loses its meaning. -Phil Kaye
hen I stare at a word for long enough, I begin to think it’s spelled wrong, even though I know it’s right. When I read When I read headline after headline about politics, it loses its meaning. I’ve always thought that being an opinionated individual would make life hard, that I would spend too much time getting worked up over every news article I read. To have a strong opinion on every issue would surely be exhausting.
Headlines that should upset people have lost quite a bit of their shock factor. Yet I know their importance, even though there are times when I’m so sick of reading news articles that my only thought is “why.” That’s the only thing keeping me from unfollowing every news site. Sometimes all I want to do is get away from it all, to detach myself from it. But unfortunately, that news is the real world — and I cannot shut out the world.
Sometime during the break in December (the one where I historically refuse to do any work), I rediscovered spoken word poetry. I was binge listening until 2 a.m. to poets whose topics ranged from family and friends to mental illnesses and bicycle tires — you name it and there was a poem for it. Poetry in its simplest terms is releasing everything that troubles you into simple words on paper. These days, a lot of those troubles are political so it’s not that poetry isn’t political, because it can be — anything can be if you want it to be. It’s easy to forget that political things involve more people than just the politicians. But maybe the people who have something to say aren’t heard enough.
Phil Kaye’s “Repetition” is a lyrically worded general observation on how repetition numbs meaning – “You watch the sun set too often, it just becomes 6 p.m.. You make the same mistake over and over; you’ll stop calling it a mistake.” Yet that broad message is one that applies to everything and it’s the very reason that I struggle to shape opinions. With repetition, news articles are just words without faces. Yet that message is perhaps only true if you repeat it to yourself, because for every time you repeat something over and over again, there is someone reading. You’re sick of repeating it and someone’s sick of hearing it, yet someone else is reading it for the first time, and they’re blown away.
For those who still think poetry is an elementary school haiku, know that it’s more. If news headlines are starting you make you feel sick, remember that there are people behind every headline — people who created events, people who are directly affected by those events, people who hate those events with all their being. Modern day poetry isn’t separated from the 21st Century, stuck in the era of Shakespearean sonnets — it’s merged to provide a personal face to the headlines because repetition is important.
March 21 was designated World Poetry Day by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). Read those headlines, listen to a poem. Someone’s seeing that headline for the first time when you’ve seen it for the hundredth time. Fight the urge to throw your phone out the window when you see that every post on your news feed is about something political — read at least one of them. It’s important and that’s something I’ll repeat again.
