Palilalia

Don't you know that mine too was the ventriloquist's thrown voice, and that what I spoke was a stirred echo? 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 Valï¿1⁄2ry said that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. All poets have palilalia, or should have.... "Palilalia is disordered speech. According to the Oxford English dictionary, this lesser known vocal tic is "an involuntary repetition of words, phrases, or sentences." Palilalia can feel, on the one hand, like an affliction to be suppressed and, on the other, like a meditative mantra that focuses and intensifies 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 the tics, but of discovering where they will take you. Jeffery Donaldson offers poems about Tourette's Syndrome, about his love and blessings, and about the grace of a stillness in the midst of so much mental noise. All poets have palilalia, or should have." --Résumé de l'éditeur CONTENTS ONE Ultra Sound Blocks First Dream Gloucester’s Dover Palilalia Museum The Shambles: A House Garden Variation Vanishing Point Spoken For TWO While We Grow Tired, Like Swimmers Life-guard and Four Echoes Home Body Riddle Lesson by Candle-light THREE EROGENOUS ZONES Catch Cashew Cave Rescue Dock Seed After Eggplant Shopping Ode on a Henry Moore Sewer FOUR Still Life with Jar and Flower A Gloss on “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” Before and After Timed Exposure Hereafter I Hereafter II Where We Are Now Let Enter, Puck Acknowledgments Offers poems about Tourette's Syndrome and the author's loves and blessings.