Before the poem gives us a single sound that looks like a word, its speaker is already in motion: "I swim in the great, the vast." The adjectives stand in for nouns, so we never learn what the vastness is. It could be an ocean, or time, or simply the huge accumulation of everyone who came before. The next line, "our story is song upon song upon song...", settles the question of how that past is kept. It is not written down but sung, and the stacked "upon"s build it up layer by layer until the ellipsis lets it trail off, unfinished.
Then the language changes. The speaker's father, mother and own name are given as long, breathy strings of vowels and consonants: "Whuhhhh-uhuhhhhhhwwwaaahhh", "wheeeeh-wheeh-wheeehhwuuuh", "ahhhhhh-uhhhhhhwaaaahhhh". Judging by the swimming and the drawn-out, humming vowels, these look like the calls of a sea creature such as a whale, though the poem never says so. Even without that reading, the effect is the same: names that are sound rather than meaning. The father's line leans on low, rounded sounds ("uh", "wwwaaah") and the mother's on higher, brighter ones ("wheeeeh", "hwiiihhh"). The speaker's own name seems to borrow from both, with its "uhhhh" and "waaaah" echoing the father and its "wh" opening echoing the mother. That is only a suggestion, but it makes the name feel inherited, as if the speaker were a new combination of old notes.
The poem has no regular meter and no end rhyme. Its rhythm comes from breath. The hyphens and line breaks cut each long sound into phrases, and the stretched letters ("hhhhhh", "aaaa", "oooo") tell the reader to hold the note. Nobody can say for certain how long to sustain "wheeeeh", so the reader has to decide, which makes every reading a small performance. The music comes from assonance and repetition instead of rhyme: the same few sounds keep surfacing, and "song upon song upon song" repeats like a wave. The ellipses after "song" and after "uuhh" suggest these sounds don't really end. They just fade out of hearing.
The grammar of the three-part pattern is also worth noticing: "my father *was*", "my mother *was*", "my name *is*". The parents belong to the past tense, but the name is in the present. The shift quietly says that the ancestors are not gone. They continue in the speaker.
The final stanza is the only place where the poem speaks in plain, translatable English, and it works almost like a gloss on what came before: "my name is a song, a song / of my ancestors / singing through me." The stumbling repetition of "a song, a song" sounds like an echo catching up with itself. The key image is in the last line. "Singing" is a continuing action, and "through me" makes the speaker a channel rather than the source. The speaker does not claim to be the singer, only the place where the singing passes. The poem also stops without a full stop, so the song seems to carry on beyond the page.
Whatever one makes of the name "Quasar", which brings to mind distant light travelling across huge spans of space, it sits comfortably beside that opening "great, the vast". Both suggest something very old reaching us from far away.
The poem matters because it questions what a name is. We usually think of names as labels with meanings that can be explained in a dictionary, but here the name is closer to an inheritance, something sounded rather than defined. By filling most of its space with sound that cannot be translated, the poem also admits the limits of translation. The plain English at the end gives us the idea, but the long vowels in the middle hold something the idea can't quite carry. A reader who tries to say those lines aloud ends up giving voice to the ancestors, and that act of voicing is the poem's real argument: identity is something you pass on by sounding it, and the only way to understand it fully is to join in.