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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Palilalia

Palilalia

Donaldson, Jeffery

Paperback

Series: Hugh MacLennan Poetry, Book 19

General Poetry

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 0773533834
ISBN13: 9780773533837
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: Feb 25 2008
Pages: 88
Weight: 0.18
Height: 0.33 Width: 6.56 Depth: 7.46
Language: English

Palilalia is disordered speech. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this lesser known vocal tic is an involuntary repetition of words, phrases or sentences. Sister to echolalia (repeating what others say), and distant cousin to the more forbidding coprolalia (the involuntary use of obscene language), palilalia can feel, on the one hand, like an affliction to be suppressed, and on the other, like a kind of meditative mantra that focuses and intensifies your thought.

Your repetitious tics, the ghost of the poet's mentor, Northrop Frye, tells him, are the ecstatic rhapsodist's / St. Vitus Dance, slangster's whizzle / and conjuration, philologist's hullabaloo. It isn't a question of how to stop them, but of finding how far they will take you.

Jeffery Donaldson offers poems about Tourette's Syndrome, about his loves and blessings, about the erotic life as flavoured by all these, and about the grace of a stillness in the midst of so much mental noise. Paul Valéry said that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. All poets have palilalia, or should have....

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