Anaphora Overuse: Why 'I Am' Poems Wear Thin
Repetition is the most exhausted device in contest poetry right now. A judge explains why 'I am' poems stall, how to test your own draft, and five ways to make anaphora earn its keep.
Every judging cycle, somewhere around the fortieth submission, I meet it again: a poem where every line begins with the same two words. "I am the storm. I am the calm after it. I am my mother's hands." The device is anaphora, repetition at the head of successive lines, and it is one of the oldest tools poetry owns. It is also, right now, the most exhausted. Anaphora overuse has quietly become the signature flaw of contest poetry, and the maddening part is that most of these poems sit two edits away from being genuinely good.
Let me be precise about what I am not saying. I am not saying repetition is bad. Whitman built a body of work on it. The Psalms run on it. Half the poems that have ever made me put a score sheet down and just sit there use it. I am saying that repetition is a loan, and most poets never pay it back.
What Anaphora Overuse Does to a Reader
Here is the mechanical truth. The first time a phrase repeats, the reader leans in. Repetition signals ritual, incantation, insistence: this matters enough to say twice. The second and third returns build a rhythm the body starts to trust. By the fifth identical opening, though, something flips. The reader stops reading the repeated words at all. The eye skips them the way you skip the header printed on every page of a contract. Your most deliberate device has gone invisible.
Worse, the frame becomes a crutch that replaces syntax. When every line starts with "I am," you never have to decide how one image connects to the next. The scaffolding does the connecting for you, which means the poem never has to think. Judges feel that absence even when they cannot name it. The comment says "structure feels static," but what we mean is: the poem promised a ladder and delivered a list.
Repetition is a loan from the reader's patience. Every return has to pay more interest than the last.
The Drumbeat Test
There are two kinds of repetition, and only one of them wins contests. A drumbeat gets louder, faster, closer. Each strike lands differently because everything around it has changed. A doorbell rings the same note no matter who is at the door. Doorbell anaphora is what fills my reject pile: technically repetition, emotionally a flat line.
Try this on your draft tonight. Cover the repeated phrase with your thumb and read only what follows it, line by line. Then ask one question: could these fragments be shuffled into a different order without losing anything? If yes, you have a doorbell. If the lines climb, if line six could never trade places with line two, you have a drumbeat, and your anaphora is earning its keep.
A few reliable symptoms that your repetition has gone stale:
- The repeated phrase is the grammatical subject of every single line, so the syntax never varies.
- You could cut every other line and the poem would mean the same thing.
- The final repetition means exactly what the first one meant. No accumulation, no turn.
- Reading it aloud, you hear your own voice go flat by line four.
Two Poems, One Device, Opposite Results
Last November I scored a poem called "Phoenix." Fourteen lines, every one opening with "I am," and honestly, four of the images were beautiful. "I am the key that rusted inside the lock" is a line I still remember eight months later. But the poem around it never moved. Line fourteen was interchangeable with line three. Each image arrived, glowed, and was replaced by the next, like slides in a carousel. When I filled out the score breakdown, creativity landed near the top and structure near the bottom, and the gap between those two numbers is the exact shape of anaphora overuse.
The same month, a different poet used the same device and placed in the top ten. Her poem repeated "we buried" five times, but each burial got smaller and closer to the bone: a dog, a grudge, a language, a version of her mother, and finally "the word for what we buried." The repetition tightened like a spiral staircase. That is the entire difference between the two poems. Not the device. The direction.
A Before and After Repair
Here is a stanza I wrote in the doorbell style, the kind I read forty times a month:
I am the ocean.
I am the tide that leaves.
I am the salt on the window.
I am the storm you never named.
Four decent images, zero movement. Now the repair. Keep the first "I am" as a keynote, then let the syntax evolve and let time enter the poem:
I am the ocean, or was in June.
By August, only the tide that leaves.
By October, salt drying on a window
in a house that stopped naming its storms.
Same images, almost the same words. But now the poem travels through a year, the speaker shrinks from ocean to residue, and the storm in the last line hits harder because nothing before it prepared the reader with an identical opening. The anaphora is still there in spirit. It has simply been converted from wallpaper into architecture.
Five Ways to Earn Your Repetition
- Cap it at three, or commit to a form. Three repetitions read as intention. Seven read as autopilot, unless the poem is a litany where abundance is the point. If you want more than three, choose a shape that disciplines repetition for you and study how a villanelle makes its returning lines change meaning at every return.
- Escalate the objects. Order what follows the repeated phrase from far to near, large to small, or safe to dangerous. The frame stays constant so the contents must move.
- Break the pattern once, on purpose. The single line that refuses the anaphora becomes the loudest line in the poem. Spend it on your turn, your confession, your knife. If every line obeys, no line can surprise.
- Mutate the phrase. "I am" becomes "I was" becomes "Am I." A repetition that conjugates is a repetition that thinks. The reader watches the certainty erode in real time.
- Move it to the end. Shift the repetition from line openings to line endings, the device called epistrophe, for the final stanza. Endings carry more pressure than beginnings, so the old phrase lands in a new position with new weight.
When Full Anaphora Still Wins
None of this is a case against the device at full strength. Whitman opens "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking" with a cascade of it:
Out of the cradle endlessly rocking,
Out of the mocking-bird's throat, the musical shuttle,
Out of the Ninth-month midnight
Look at what each "Out of" does: it reaches somewhere new. A cradle, a bird's throat, a month, and soon a whole shoreline of memory. The phrase is constant but the camera never stops moving, and the grammar suspends us, waiting through line after line for the main clause to arrive. That suspension is the payment. Whitman takes out the loan and repays it with interest, which is why his repetitions feel like tide and yours, in draft form, might feel like a dripping tap.
Anaphora also still earns its place in poems of protest and prayer, where the repetition is the argument: the speaker will not stop saying it because the world will not stop requiring it to be said. If your poem genuinely belongs to that tradition, keep every repetition and sharpen what surrounds them instead.
Break the Line You Love Most
Here is the assignment I would give you if we were sitting across a table. Take your most repetitive draft. Find the one repeated line you are proudest of. Now break it: mutate the phrase, move it, or delete its scaffolding entirely and force the image to survive on its own syntax. If the line dies without the frame, it was never alive. If it stands, you have found the poem underneath the pattern.
I see the results of this edit constantly. At Writory's monthly contest, where entries open on the 1st and close on the 25th, every poet gets a five-criteria score breakdown, and the poets who repair a doorbell poem almost always jump most in structure the following month. If you want a blunt reading of whether your repetition builds or stalls, send the poem in and see the numbers for yourself.
Repetition is not a style. It is a bet that the same words can mean more the second time. Make sure you are the one collecting on that bet, not the reader's patience. And when you find yourself typing "I am" for the sixth line in a row, stop and ask the only question that matters: am I still?
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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