Habit Zero: Anaphoras, Repeatibility, and the Theory of Poetry

Abstract This article proposes a theory of poetic practice grounded in the concept of anaphora. While literary theorists like Ribeiro and Culler have emphasized repetition as a defining feature of poetry - either through intentional reference to tradition or through rhetorical activation - I argue that anaphora reveals a more complex temporal and pragmatic structure at the heart of poetic experience. Drawing on examples from both the poetic tradition and contemporary experimental poetry, I show that anaphora in poetry functions not only as linguistic repetition but as a habit based and habit forming dispositional structure that operates across textual, ritual, and agential domains. This anticipatory and reflexive mode of iteration, which I call “habit zero,” displaces intentionalist models of repetition and reframes poetry as a socially embedded practice of suspended and reconfigured habitual life-forms. Accordingly, poetry is best understood not as a genre or institution, but as a critical practice of deferred antecedence: a temporally bifocal structure of iteration that calls into being its own antecedents through formal repetition.