reprise
Aster Lit Issue 13 plays with the human need to return. What prompts continued revolutions—in literature, history, and our daily lives? How do we rise again and again to redefine reality, renewing experience with respect to time? How does writing and art evaluate reality to decide what needs to be continued versus what needs to evolve? To brave the theme of reprise, we ask you to send your best pieces exploring repetition and renewal in both form and content. What boundaries will you break as you find new rhytmns? How will your words bring us back?
reprise
noun.
1) repetition, further existence
2) a reimagined continuation (of the most vital components in a song or performance)
3) (in fencing) a renewal of a failed attack, after going back into the en garde position
forms that embrace reprise
1) ghazal
a form of amatory poem or ode, originating in Arabic poetry that relies on each couplet ending with the most vital word
2) villanelle
a highly structured poem made up of five tercets followed by a quatrain, with two repeating rhymes and two refrains
3) sestina
a complex, thirty-nine-line poem featuring the intricate repetition of end-words in six stanzas and an envoi
4) golden shovel
a poetic form wherein each word of one line from another poem serves as the end word of each line for a newly constructed poem
read “The Golden Shovel” after “We Real Cool “
repeat, redefine, reform
from the French “reprise,” meaning to be “taken up again”
archaic definitions of words:
reprise (verb) - to take back
silly (adj) - (things) worthy or blessed
awful (adj) - worth of awe, ex “the awful majesty of God”
cyclical motion
beauty is found in mundane cycles
wake up at dawn
make coffee
reflective commutes
deja vu from the window glare
embrace familiar friends
tap the same small black keys
meditate on the terrace
brew ginger tea before bedtime
read a page that leaves you wanting more for tomorrow
read the editors’ reflections
What does reprise mean to the Aster Lit team? What images, ideas, and emotions does it invoke? Read our editors’ reflections on the theme here.
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Submit to Issue 13 here.
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inevitable repetition of physics
even the physical universe gives birth to repetition, a phenomenon known as the Poincaré recurrence theorem: closed dynamic systems will return to a state that is close to or identical to their initial state after a finite but long enough time, just see the “Apple in the Box”Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Andrea Cohen
“I tell my mother / I’ve won the Nobel Prize. / Again? she says. Which / discipline this time? / It’s a little game / we play: I pretend / I’m somebody, she / pretends she isn’t dead.”
Adrienne Lenker
“I was born by a body. I’ll die by one, too.”
Dostoevsky
“What do you think, would not one tiny crime be wiped out by thousands of good deeds?”
Franny Choi
"By the time the apocalypse began, the world had already / ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending / world spun in its place."
Paulo Coelho
“Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”
Jean-Paul Sartre
“There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk.”
Louisa May Alcott
“I make so many beginnings there never will be an end.”