What does a speaker with palilalia sound like? According to the Oxford English Dictionary, palilalia is 'disordered speech - an involuntary repetition of words, phrases, or sentences'. Listening to someone with palilalia, you might think he is emphasizing his point, pleading with you to hear him. But then you realize that he is talking to himself, quietly drifting away at thought's end. Palilalia is on one hand an affliction to be suppressed, and on the other a kind of mantra. 'Your repetitious tics', the ghost of the poet's mentor, Northrop Frye, tells him, 'are the ecstatic rhapsodist's verbal, whirligag, the slangster's whizzle, and conjuration, philologist's hullabaloo'. Abandon your scruples, give over to the energy that spends itself, and work that energy until every last word is right. Hearing his own ghosts, Jeffery Donaldson offers poems about Tourette's Syndrome, about his loves and blessings, about the erotic life, and about the grace of a stillness in the midst of so much mental noise. Paul Valery said that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. All poets have palilalia, or should have.