“…the secret of the Great Stories is that they have no
secrets. The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear
again. The ones you can enter anywhere and inhabit comfortably. They
don’t deceive you with thrills and trick endings. They don’t surprise
you with the unforeseen. They are as familiar as the house you live in.
Or the smell of your lover’s skin. You know how they end, yet you listen
as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you
will die, you live as though you won’t. In the Great Stories you know
who lives, who dies, who finds love, who doesn’t. And yet you want to
know again.”— Arundhati Roy on Indian mythology and folklore, in God of Small Things (1997)
“It was only once – once – that an audience went to see Romeo and
Juliet, and hoped they might live happily ever after. You can bet that
the word soon went around the playhouses: they don’t get out of that
tomb alive. But every time it’s been played, every night, every show, we
stand with Romeo at the Capulets’ monument. We know: when he breaks
into the tomb, he will see Juliet asleep, and believe she is dead. We
know he will be dead himself before he knows better. But every time, we
are on the edge of our seats, holding out our knowledge like a present
we can’t give him.”— Hilary Mantel on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in “Can These Bones Live?”, Reith Lecture, 2017
“So what makes this poem mnemonic is not just repetition. Rather, it’s
the fact that with repetition, the repeated phrase grows more and more
questionable. I’ve remembered “Come on now, boys” because, with every
new repetition, it seems to offer more exasperation than encouragement,
more doubt than assertion. I remembered this refrain because it kept me
wondering about what it meant, which is to say, it kept me wondering
about the kind of future it predicted. What is mnemonic about this
repetition is not the reader’s ability to remember it, but that the
phrase itself remembers something about the people it addresses; it
remembers violence. Repetition, then, is not only a demonstration of something that keeps
recurring: an endless supply of new generations of cruel boys with
sweaty fists. It is also about our inability to stop this repetition:
the established cycles of repetition are like spells and there’s no
anti-spell to stop them from happening. The more we repeat, the less
power we have over the words and the more power the words have over us.
Poetic repetition is about the potency of language and the impotence of
its speakers. In our care, language is futile and change is impossible.”— Valzhyna Mort on Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, in “FACE – FACE – FACE: A Poet Under the Spell of Loss”, The Poetry Society Annual Lecture, 2021