All writing was originally unpunctuated in ancient Greek, Latin, Old Persian, Hebrew, Chinese, and other languages that produced some of the earliest bodies of written poetic texts. One curious side note: we think of unpunctuated verse as an invention of modern poetry, In fact, all poetry was unpunctuated in classical times. How banal and overstated these lines seem with punctuation without punctuation, how mysterious and filled with awe. When the evening illumines its coppered hills! When you don’t use it the poem becomes more a thing in itself, at once more transparent and more actual.” Imagine if Jean Follain had punctuated those lines: Merwin famously wrote, “Punctuation nails the poem down on the page. These words radiate pathos because they are not contained within the sealed lead boxes of punctuation. When the evening illumines its coppered hills Here’s the opening of a poem called “October Thoughts” by the French writer Jean Follain: In unpunctuated poetry, the words can be suspended in a borderless space that makes certain phrases resonate like a final chord played on a piano. Unpunctuated verse can involve a more discrete use of language where each phrase vibrates on its own. Interestingly, unpunctuated verse not only allows for a more fluid pouring of words onto the page-it also can create the opposite effect. The result: a hallucinatory cascade of ecstatic images. Without the obstacles of periods, commas, and exclamation marks, Breton’s poetry flows right from the writer’s subconscious onto the paper. (translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow) Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of AsiaĬan appear at the top of the invisible stairway Here’s part of an unpunctuated poem by the French surrealist André Breton that begins “I dream I see you endlessly superimposed upon yourself.” The writer recreates the quick movements of the unconscious by describing a lover simultaneously at various times in her life: It can grab those moments that happen so spontaneously or rapidly they’re difficult to catch. That is one of the strengths of unpunctuated poetry: it can be really fast. Unpunctuated poetry can provide a high-speed train for moving among ideas and settings, reflecting both fast-paced technology in the external world, and the fast-paced internal world of stream of consciousness that psychoanalysis opened up in Apollinaire’s time. Here you are in Rome under a Japanese medlar-tree Here you are in Coblentz at the Giant’s Hostelry Here you are in Marseilles among the water-melons In his poem “Zone,” not only did Apollinaire throw out the convention of writing with punctuation, he tossed out the conventions of time and space, zooming from the ancient world to the modern, and leap frogging from one country to another: Even if you wanted to add punctuation to the line “This morning the bridges are bleating Eiffel Tower oh herd,” how would you do it? Weary of living in Roman antiquity and Greekīy eliminating punctuation, Apollinaire also allowed words to group themselves in ways that did not conform to grammatical sentences. This morning the bridges are bleating Eiffel Tower oh herd In the end you are weary of this ancient world Guillaume Apollinaire threw down the gauntlet to traditional poetry and culture in his groundbreaking poem “Zone” from his collection Alcohols, published in 1913.Īpollinaire started “Zone” with these memorable lines: In modern poetry, not punctuating verse first became a common practice in France in the early twentieth century. cummings (who also did away with capital letters in some of his writing), William Carlos Williams (but only in some of his poems), and W.S. best known for unpunctuated verse are e.e. It’s about when punctuation works best in poetry, and when it gets in the way of expressing something very different from prose. But the question of whether poets should use punctuation is not just about semicolons and dashes. One of the most innovative sides of modern literature is that many poets have swept all punctuation out of their work.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |