Karen McCarthy Woolf's 2026 long poem "Unsafe" includes an untitled poem with fourteen identical lines: "& white & white & white & white". In Ernst Jandl's 1969 "sonett", every line varies the opening line, "das a das e das i das o das u", to form a Petrarachan rhyme scheme "uoou / uoou / iea / iea". To keep track of where I am when reciting Jandl's poem, I pronounce each line as a line in a sonnet. I thought I would have to count to recite McCarthy Woolf's poem, but as with the Jandl, I can keep track of where I am with the cadences of Petrarachan or Shakespearean lines. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 16 July 2026)

Reciting repetitive poems by Karen McCarthy Woolf and Ernst Jandl without counting lines