anne waldman's "Marriage"
...can see immediately that its structure is different than that of most poems. First, it is rather long and there are no stanzas. The lines are put together in a paragraph form. There are no line breaks. Every line is continual and is ended with punctuation of some kind. Some of the lines contain commas, but the line continues to flow to the next phrase. At times, the word from the last line of a sentence is repeated as the first word of the next sentence. This is repeated many times throughout the poem. In the first two lines, Waldman writes, “you work all night. Night is an apartment. Meant to be marriage. Marriage…” In these sentences, this device occurs twice. Waldman’s use of repetition of phrases and words continues throughout the poem. Waldman’s use of repetition of words in her poem adds to the sound. Because there is really no structure, this repetition creates a steady scheme of sound. Waldman repeats many of the sounds of words, including words that sound the same but aren’t spelled the same. In the last line she writes, “Here, you hear here?” Repetition is the most prominent of structure in the poem. It creates a unique sound and adds emphasis to the subject, marriage. The speaker of the poem is obviously a married person. He or she sounds like they are talking through a stereo because of the many words repeated and because of the last indented word of the poem “stereo”. The speaker says in the sixth line to the last, “You will hear everything twice, through your ears and the ears of the other”. This comment describes t...