A poet I do know, reluctant to outline what poetry can or can’t be, as soon as advised (considerably facetiously) {that a} bag of dust could possibly be a poem if the poet deemed it so — calling to thoughts Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, the urinal become artwork by contextual/conceptual gesture alone. This acquired me fascinated by what my very own bare-minimum standards for poetry may be. A bag of dust in a gallery may be an set up, however I wasn’t fairly prepared to concede it may be a poem — a poem should at the least, on some degree, I believed, be verbal. However was that fairly proper? What about Aram Saroyan’s well-known visible poems, particularly the lowercase m with an additional hump — not even a phrase or a part of a phrase; an unletter. Perhaps poetry solely requires typography — however doesn’t it additionally require sound, the sense that at the least in concept you can hear the poem? I do really feel I can “learn” that lengthy m — it has a sonic high quality — and the Saroyan poem “lighght.” An ampersand alone on a web page would characterize a pronounceable phrase. However what a couple of parenthesis, or a semicolon?
I’ve at all times cherished when a poet makes a punctuation mark her personal — take Emily Dickinson’s dashes, usually standardized as em-dashes in print, although in her handwritten originals, the marks had been extra ambiguous, some showing extra like sloppy durations or commas, some strains slanted like slashes and even vertical, suggesting an idiosyncratic diacritical system. Alice Fulton invented a punctuation mark, a double equal signal she known as “the bride” (a reputation for the background threads that give construction to lace) or “the signal of immersion.” In a 2010 interview that I’ve returned to many instances, Fulton relates these to Dickinson’s dashes (the bride is a “sprint to the max”) and to A. R. Ammons’s colons, glyphs which might be “each current and silent,” “reticent but seen.” Maybe essentially the most insistent instance of foregrounded punctuation is the citation marks in Alice Notley’s “The Descent of Alette” (1990), which seem round each phrase and a few single phrases, such that no phrase within the ebook is just not encased in quotations. It begins:
“Sooner or later, I awoke” “& discovered myself on” “a subway, endlessly”
“I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I used to be” “precisely”
As such we understand all of the language as a sequence of discrete utterances, communicated haltingly, with problem, which has a mesmerizing impact, as if the poem weren’t the message itself however the medium, the channeling. In all of those cases, I do begin to hear the punctuation, far more than I normally hear it. Punctuation usually serves to power a pause, however the pause isn’t silence.
In a number of new books I learn over the previous 12 months, poets use punctuation and extra-linguistic symbols, like asterisks and different part markers (such a marker could also be known as an asterism or fleuron or dinkus, relying on its styling), to conjure nonverbal that means and nonverbal sound. THRESHOLES (Espresso Home, 112 pp., paper, $16.95), by Lara Mimosa Montes, makes use of a novel glyph, identified in ebook design as an decoration: a bit define of a circle that seems between fragments, a few of that are verse, normally an remoted line or two; a few of that are prose, an essayistic paragraph or a number of in a row; and a few of that are attributed quotes, as in a commonplace ebook. In some circumstances, Montes makes use of a single circle as a divider; in others, a sequence of three, like a vertical ellipsis. These ornaments operate like punctuation on the degree of the complete textual content, reasonably than the phrase or the sentence.
The circles underline the ebook’s central query: Is absence a presence, isn’t any place a spot? (The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes that holes are “an fascinating case examine for ontologists and epistemologists,” in that “we regularly attraction to holes to account for causal interactions,” and but holes aren’t strictly talking materials objects.) “Nowhere is just not a spot,” Montes writes, in verse; “It’s a modulation.” Later, in prose: “Generally residing in two locations without delay (Minnesota and New York) brought about me to really feel as if I didn’t reside wherever as a result of nobody ever knew the place I used to be.” And in verse once more: “What if the nothing is just not a spot the place one can reside”; “What if there’s nothing? What if there’s not.” The circles, the titular “thresholes,” mark the thresholds between fragments (fragments which interrelate and accrue however by definition don’t fairly cohere), placing an indication that claims “HOLE” on what was already a gap, thereby making the opening much less empty. It’s like a web page in a authorized doc that’s printed with “This web page deliberately left clean,” which is then not clean. In Montes’s work, these labels appear to say, don’t skip the white area — the gaps between language are a part of the language.