Punctuation Unrest & Anarchy

International Punctuation Awareness Month (IPAM) has covered a lot so far. We’ve debated whether or not exclamation points exude lousiness or provoke emotion; we’ve disputed the prettiness of italics and the necessity of quotation marks. Colons—not of the organ variety—gained a spot light as the classy dash. And, of course, the epic battle between ellipses and dashes was brought to light. Some of these blurbs had points to make; some were just ways to explore the weirdness that is English syntax and grammar.

Have I really gotten anywhere with this month? Possibly. If only one person’s awareness is raised, I consider that a success.

Because remember: it saves lives. No one needs to be eating Grandma when they can eat with her.

So, yes, we’ve covered a lot. What could possibly be left? (Trust me, I’ve got enough ideas for the next two IPAMs but I won’t bore you with details just yet.)

How about punctuation anarchy? There are poets, like e.e. cummings and William Carlos Williams, who throw punctuation out the window. They’ve got their own style of line breaks and capitals that upset the balance. There’s simply no room for punctuation in their pieces. Numerous OULIPO poets fall into this category, along with some Dadaists as well, I’m sure.

But this final post of IPAM isn’t about punctuation disappearance—it’s about a poet I’ve met who has created her own system of punctuation because the laws of syntax and grammar didn’t provide the effects she was looking for. It’s about Nataja Flood’s system of dashes.

Just take a quick look at the poem below and see if you can figure it out.

NATAJA FLOOD

My book.
My body.

My body.
Is not mainstream- – –
Manufactured and sold
in a small culture shop
in uptown Harlem,
but no one ever buys it
– – -they bypass it.

It is not a New York Times best seller.
It is not on reading lists.
It has not sold out- – –
My book.

My body.

No one has read it.
It is too big,
too heavy, too many pages –
small font, no spaces.
No one wants to read
my book.

My body
is not a library –
people cannot just check things out.
My body is a book.
You will have something to
walk away with after reading.

With beautiful trimming
around the edges, only made in hard cover,
my book is inscribed with thank you notes
to God for this body.
This book,
an eye catcher for wo(men)
looking for love
in hidden scriptures.

My book.
My body.
It is a classic.

Written in old English and Ebonics,
complex enough to fear,
deep enough to love,
to live in,
to be one with.

It is a collection
and these are my pages –
brown
and broken down into parts.
A classic.

Only one was made.
No copies or cats.
Just one book.
One body.
My body –
My book.

Read carefully.

It clicked after a couple reads for me, but a few of our peers in the workshop hated it. They didn’t understand why she couldn’t just revert to one form of dash to make it consistent. But it is consistent.

The system of dashes is simple. Each hyphen, the “-“ parts, resembles a beat. Put one and it’s a quick beat, close to a comma. But it’s more than just an intake of breath. It’s an interruption, a stumble.

Put two and it’s two beats, about the same length of pause as a dash. Put three and it’s similar to the trailing of an ellipsis, but there’s always the rush, the steady sense of interruption, of tension building. Put four hyphens together and…well, you get the idea.

It’s a system that creates the kind of page poetry that can be read as performance. It’s remarkable and underrated.

So the big question is: should everyone experiment with punctuation? Syntax and grammar exist for the sole purpose of making it easy for readers to understand and grasp the concepts we express through images and alliteration and onomatopoeia.

However, are we missing something? Does punctuation restrict us when it comes to expressing emotion?

I’m not saying that there should be Punctuation Anarchy—that would be awful. Look at old texts in Latin (and the like) where punctuation is absent and grammar bombs are present and it’ll send you running to excess commas and periods.

What I am saying is that perhaps we can (and should) experiment with the system that already exists until you create something that suits your style.

To Dash or to Elide, That is the Question

With the continuation and near end of International Punctuation Awareness Month (IPAM), this second to last post is dedicated to the greatest conflict I have seen in a workshop—and mind you, it lasted the entire semester and remains unresolved—which is whether to dash or elide.

Though I suppose it would be more accurate to say the battles were pro- or anti- dash/ellipsis instead of over which should be used. Because in my experience, poets fall into one of two camps: dash or ellipsis. You love one, you hate the other. It’s like a Sharks and Jets situation, another Montague and Capulet if punctuation marks belonged to families or gangs.

I’ve seen battles won and battles lost for either side. I’m still not sure if there was any rational reasons behind it. If you think about it, the distinction should be pretty clear—I mean, it’s not like you’d use a dash in the place of an ellipse or an ellipse in the place of a dash.

A dash mark interrupts or creates a punctuated pause similar to a caesura. It signals a slight shift, a continuation of thought but perhaps not in the direction initially expected. Dashes encourage the reader and speaker to push on, even if syntax grows muddled.

It does not provide the reader with a pause long enough to collect her thoughts. No, that’s the ellipsis. It’s a point that trails off without a complete stop like a period or semi-colon. Instead, ellipses incite tangents and rouse contemplation. It’s the sigh of a poem, the breath between rushes of ideas. It enlongates and emphasizes a line.

The punctuation marks result in remarkably different effects. So why, then, do dash-lovers fight so furiously against the use of the infamous ellipsis?

Maybe the use of either mark reveals something about the writer. Perhaps a person is just naturally inclined to use one over the other. Maybe we just don’t understand each other.

In the midst of a six strong-willed peers, an epic battle between Team Ellipsis and Dash ensued. Each side boasted of its might and superiority through mockery and wit. One of them is featured below.

Which team are you?

ANDREW DOMINELLO

Ode to the Fairest Mark

My dear dot-dot-dot, triple-dot glyph, suspension point, et cetera…
I am of the humble persuasion that you are undoubtedly
the most exquisite, delicately arresting form of punctuation
in all the English language. And I implore you, sweet ellipsis,
to ignore the derisive remarks imparted by disciples of the dash,
with its dreadful, obtrusive terseness. You are no such trollop for attention!
On the contrary, you cut short the extraneous when I seek brevity.
You orchestrate aposiopesis when a musical line tapers into silence.
You allow me the liberty of calling my cessation a pause
when I am unsure whether or not I have said enough…

Colons: The Classy Dash

As IPAM passes the halfway mark, I bring you colons with this next post. And no, it’s not the kind you can find nestled around your small intestine. Though maybe in another dimension, I’d be a doctor writing a medical blog. Do people really write posts on goopy human insides? I guess that’s not that weird. I’m writing about a piece of punctuation, after all.

Just, no pictures—please.

All digressions aside, what inspired this post was the following passage, taken from William Strunk, Jr.  & E.B. White’s The Elements of Style:

A colon tells the reader that what follows is closely related to the preceding clause. The colon has more effect than the comma, less power to separate than the semi-colon, and more formality than the dash.

Granted, it’s talking about prose and composition.

But for me, that sums up its use in poetry. A colon is not an anomaly but it’s not exactly a common piece of punctuation to use either; I see commas and dashes more often. But perhaps that’s just the way voice and syntax fall together when composed. Maybe it’s not usual for us to speak with colons, unless we’re listing—and list poems consist of a genre in itself.

Still, the excerpt begs consideration. The colon offers a unique advantage to other forms of punctuation and is incredibly successful when the situation fits. It acts like a beacon, a sign that what’s about to follow is “closely related” to what began. It’s a direction of insight, whereas the dash incites more of an interruption, a deflection. And unlike the semi-colon, colons provide a connectedness. Plus, it has that dramatic pause factor that you just can’t get with a comma.

Here, it’s easier when seen in action. The following quirky poem has not one, not two, but three colons in addition to a myriad of dashes, hyphens, parenthesis, and an ellipsis (which is a topic for another post).

THOMAS LUX 

Wife Hits Moose

Sometime around dusk moose lifts
his heavy, primordial jaw, dripping, from pondwater
and, without psychic struggle,
decides the day, for him, is done: time
to go somewhere else. Meanwhile, wife
drives one of those roads that cut straight north,
a highway dividing the forests

not yet fat enough for the paper companies.
This time of the year full dark falls
about eight o’clock – pineforest and blacktop
blend. Moose reaches road, fails
to look both ways, steps
deliberately, ponderously… Wife
hits moose, hard,

at a slight angle (brakes slammed, car
spinning) and moose rolls over hood, antlers –
as if diamond-tipped – scratch windshield, car
damaged: rib-of-moose imprint
on fender, hoof shatters headlight.
Annoyed moose lands on feet and walks away.
Wife is shaken, unhurt, amazed.

– Does moose believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
Speaker does not know.
– Does wife believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
Speaker assumes as much: spiritual intimacies
being between the spirit and the human.
– Does speaker believe in a Supreme Intelligence?
Yes. Thank You.

Nowadays, colons are used to convey emotion.

😀      🙂        😦      😛      😐            :3
But plop them into some poetry and I’ll ask: aren’t they doing just that?

Quote Me On That

When it comes to dialogue in poetry, what the battle really boils down to is whether lines should be embraced by quotation marks or distinguished in italics.  There are certainly pros and cons to each. But in the end, is it just personal preference?

I fight for italics. The number of times I have supported quotation marks over italics can be count on one hand. To put it simply: I just don’t like quotation marks. They’re ugly. They stand out. They pull the reader out of the poem. The small flecks on the page mess up the alignment and positioning of words on a page.

But maybe that’s just me. I mean, it sounds a little obsessive, doesn’t it? There aren’t any valid reasons to shun the punctuation mark from poetry, except for the subjective opinion that it might distract the reader for a moment.

Do they do more good than bad, if we move past quotation marks not looking pretty on the page? It makes a clear distinction that what you’re reading is dialogue. You can use italics elsewhere in the poem to add emphasis in stressed areas without having to worry if it conflicts with italicized dialogue, or if italicized dialogue looks like it might be a thought instead of a spoken line.

All reasonable concerns. I have also supported quotations when the poem is bi- or multilingual, as other languages tend to be italicized.

But if anyone tried to put a quotation mark in one of my poems, it would happen only over my dead body. Even if I don’t fully understand why, quotation marks in poetry just rub me the wrong way.

For example, Rebecca Morgan Frank wrote this quirky poem called “Dialectic” (from Little Murders Everywhere) that spins off of language, contrasting the juxtaposed concreteness and abstractness of words. In it, the two subjects speak the words aloud to feel them out.

 

 

 

 

Now, which method do you think she used: quotation marks or italics? Which do you like better? Is it a personal preference or is there a reason you chose the one you did?

Or are you just wondering why the hell someone wrote a 440-word post on the positives and negatives of using quotation marks in poetry when it looks fine either way and do these kinds of things seriously keep me up at night? (My answer, by the way: more often than you’d think.)

This is one of the punctuation debates that I will never solve. To me, the italics (which Frank actually did use in her poem) will just always look better. And while it may be shallow, it’s enough reason for me.

Exclaim & Proclaim!

The first post of International Punctuation Awareness Month (IPAM) brings us the infamous exclamation mark.

I’ve seen it in page poetry on the rare occasion. But it seems to dot the end of sentences in stage poetry far more often. Why? Because we exclaim and proclaim! It’s only natural, especially when putting on some sort of performance and tapping into emotion.

So then why is the exclamation mark so cringe-worthy?

The addition of an exclamation mark seems to cheese up the line, almost as if it then displays too much emotion. But it is still used, and by big name poets, too. In fact, one of my favorite poems has three embedded in a modern sonnet.

RITA DOVE

Persephone Falling

One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful
flowers, one unlike all the others! She pulled,
stooped to pull harder—
when, sprung out of the earth
on his glittering terrible
carriage, he claimed his due.
It is finished. No one heard her.
No one! She had strayed from the herd.

(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
Don’t answer to strangers. Stick
with your playmates. Keep your eyes down.)
This is how easily the pit
opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

Rita Dove isn’t just some random amateur pulled from a high school auditorium. She has served as a Poet Laureate—the first African American to have been appointed under the title. She’s also the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for poetry; now, countless collections later, Dove teaches at the University of Virginia. (I’m a little bit of a fan, if you couldn’t tell.)

The point is this: if she can pull off three exclamation marks in a brilliant poem, what are the rest of us doing? Are we looking at exclamation points the wrong way?

Let’s just take a moment to look back over the poem. The use of each results in remarkably different effects, but all are used for tone.

EXCLAMATION #1
“One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful / flowers, one unlike all the others!”
How is it perceived? As the first line of a poem, it’s there to make a statement. It’s proclaiming a fact, a hyperbole claimed to be true. The exclamation point colors in this exaggeration while maintaining a semblance of satire on Dove’s part and wonder on the subject’s behalf. After all, it must be one hell of a flower to get Persephone to stray from her mother’s warnings.

EXCLAMATION #2
“It is finished. No one heard her. / No one! She had strayed from the herd.”
This one brings a sense of finality and disbelief, especially following the scene of Persephone’s fall, captured by Hades. It’s less sarcastic. It’s there for a longer pause to let the reader catch up. It’s there purely for effect. But then, you could ask, couldn’t a line break create the same pause? Probably. But would it fit the poem? How would it alter the already superb line choices?

EXCLAMATION #3
“Remember: go straight to school. / This is important, stop fooling around! / Don’t answer to strangers.”
Here we get voice. As soon as your eye lands on that exclamation mark, you can just hear your parents reprimanding you in their best strict voice, can’t you? This is the part of a sonnet where a shift occurs. A voice takes over and the tone changes, strengthens in its purpose. Without the exclamation, that shift is much more subtle, almost to the point where it is no longer successful.

A proposed challenge: Replace each with a period or semi-colon or line break. Does it still work the same way?

Before starting this blurb, I was among the exclamation haters. They’re excessive. They’re for performance. They don’t belong on the page.

I know that remains true for some poems—I’m sure we’ve all come across one before and grimaced, especially if there happens to be the double!! or triple!!! combo—but when I began researching, I found more good than bad. Just look around, they’re used by big names and small names alike. When used properly, the exclamation mark can create some effects in your poetry that are unmatched by other punctuation.

It’s just a matter of pride and a new perspective.

Welcome to I.P.A.M.

I have decided to deem January as International Punctuation Awareness Month—IPAM for short. May the odds of poetics and periods be ever in your favor.

Kidding. Sort of.

But strangely enough, the biggest debates I’ve had in workshops have been over punctuation. It was less vehement in fiction and nonfiction classes, but in poetry—all hell would broke loose when we came across a semi-colon, or a pair of dashes, or—god forbid—an ellipsis.

Which leads me to the real point of deeming January as National Punctuation Awareness Month—is there a standard for punctuation in poetry? I mean, sure, poetry still needs to be syntactically correct, right? Though, with the OULIPOs of the literary world, does syntax really hold up? Or does it just function in another way?

I don’t really know. I’m just asking the questions. All I can say is that I’ve noticed patterns in thought when using certain punctuation over others—I’ve even seen peers make up their own system when the official stuff doesn’t suit their style.

All these random questions and half-expressed examples finally clicked within some strange part of my mind—hey, I’m a poet, not a neurologist—and I found my next set of blurbs for the blog. Punctuation. The new, the faux, the unbelievable.

So, without further ado, I present to you: International Punctuation Awareness Month for poetry and hums.