Djelloul Marbrook: “Unpunctuation: Enabling Poetry to Sail Close to the Wind”

Forego punctuation and you forego caveat and the ace up your sleeve. Nothing is going to save you from yourself. You’ve entered uncharted waters. Count on there being dragons. You might drop off the end of the earth, or you might sail the Milky Way.

There is the music of gods, demi-gods, nymphs and dryads to be had, and rhapsody even Walt Whitman and Hart Crane failed to reach.

This is the testament of much of W.S. Merwin’s poetry.

The poem, “Bodies of Water,” goes on for 22 more lines without a single punctuation mark, its pristine musicality unhindered by any symbol halting the eye. The long lines convey the rhythm of the poet’s breathing; the line breaks are falling water. The poem is a spillway, and then it simply stops, like Japanese music.

Merwin is the grand heir to e e cummings, whose disavowal of punctuation was once controversial and now one way or another influences almost all poets. Both poets are keenly aware of the appearance of poetry on the page. But Merwin’s caesuras are implied while those of cummings are made visual.

More an abandoner of the upper case than a punctuation teetotaler, cummings used punctuation as if it was a radical cure for a terminal disease. His poetry is not unlike some modern dance. He never does anything we expect him to do. In a way, he’s all tactic, whereas Merwin is strategy. We expect to sail with Merwin, but with cummings we expect mutinies:

This compaction of words, this whimsical scrambling of styles—using both & and and, for example—suggested to contemporaries and later poets that they could dance giddily with words and language, they could clown around, and they could have fun at everyone’s expense, including their own. It was unimaginably liberating. But cummings initially met the same reception James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake met: the self-important critics simply couldn’t see the fun afoot.

It’s unlikely that poets would have launched their inquiries into the uses of punctuation if free verse, vers libre, had not already loosed the garments of meter and rhyme and set poetry to dancing nakedly. Vers libre was at first greeted as a Pandora’s box, but its contents, far from being evil, far from setting chaos on the world, made new demands and promised new heights to poets willing to meet those demands, poets like cummings and Merwin. These poets imposed extreme disciplines upon themselves, as even the scant excerpts here suggest.

The advent of vers libre might be compared to seafaring’s lateen rig, developed by the Arabs. Ships like the classical galleys and the Viking longboats depended on following winds and, often enough, on rowers. But the lateen rig enabled ships to sail close to the wind, as all modern sailboats do now, and as the Vikings found to their horror when they encountered the Arabs on the high seas. Vers libre empowered poetry to sail on all manner of winds. It made poetry agile.

Words have shape, heft and even preferences—that’s the cummings message to us. They like certain other words, and dislike still others. They have physical energy or lassitude. They harmonize or argue with each other. A poet can’t bully them. They’ll subvert the poem if bullied. They will allow themselves to be orchestrated only if their particularities are understood and respected. Their relationship to punctuation is dicey. If punctuation is an accouterment, that is different from its being an accessory. The poet who decides not to punctuate decides not to accessorize because the original impulse of the poem is to swim naked. In the 21st century the poet using punctuation decides that the peculiarity of intent, the poet’s own breathing, the whir of the poet’s mind, require these familiar symbols. Or, in other words, the poet decides that absence of punctuation would impede the poem. But even then the poet will in all likelihood be sparing with punctuation, because the pace of our times has accelerated, the language has quickened, and the reader is willing to accept what is implied rather than overtly stated.

A poem is not bereft of punctuation; in the right mind it is enriched. The austerity of punctuation’s absence, analogous to Victorian clutter, calls out of the poet a greater discipline, a holism that punctuation obstructs and even undermines.

The poet is no longer falling back on the conventions of others: he or she inventing new conventions, making new demands, casting the mind forward to arch over the entirety of the music. It’s rather like building the Verrazano Bridge; experience is no longer enough to carry through the project—an overarching vision is required. It may fail and collapse, but it summons daring, ambition.

We can see this in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. She doesn’t abstain from punctuation, but she foreshadows the day when it may be laid to rest. She demands more of her poetry than punctuation or any rule of prosody can deliver, and to meet the challenge of this demand she resorts to a laconicism that is a harbinger of Max Picard’s World of Silence and his ideas about the crucial role of silence.

Merwin, on the other hand, says to his lines, You are unfettered—I expect, I ask of you soaring flight. Carry my imagination, carry my imagery to new heights, he asks his poetic line, because I have liberated you from the minefield of punctuation.

Inherent in this liberation is the song apprehended and internalized by the ear alone, without benefit of the page and its apparatus. This is not to say unpunctuation dead-ends in sung poetry and the demise of printed poetry; far from it, as Merwin’s exquisitely patterned poems testify.

Paul Cézanne’s bare areas of canvas say, I have nothing to say here, but this silence made visible has much to say. Cézanne would have savored the unpunctuated poem, and it’s no accident that it should make its appearance so soon after Cézanne’s bare canvas. The idea was in the air. No paint for paint’s sake, no punctuation for its own sake.

Corollary to the punctuated poem is the least punctuated poem, and its practitioners are many, including the poet L.S. Asekoff, who has been emboldened to combine with a frugal use of punctuation an almost magical use of the beautiful ampersand. In Asekoff’s poetry the ampersand, typically used as an addendum, becomes a cyclotron, a centrifuge, throwing out long spears of energy and thrust, winding up the energy of successive lines to hurl the poem forward. It’s a great feat, and perhaps we’re celebrating here for the first time:

Asekoff punctuates, as we see in this poem, “The Waters of Time,” but he is emboldened by poets like cummings and Merwin to revisit the uses of punctuation. He sees, for example, that the ampersand is more than an abbreviation. How is it more? It’s an arabesque. It has an energy, like natural geometry. So Asekoff harnesses it to a new use, and this too is a facet of the revolutionary reconsideration of punctuation. Here an old tool is put to a new use.

But to savor punctuation’s absence one must consider its nature, its demeanor. The comma, for example, turns a cold shoulder towards the rest of a line and therefore impedes its directionality. It presents itself as kind of bomb with a fuse. This is fancy, of course, but I’m hoping to show how punctuation may influence our sensibility.

The colon is inherently plosive, not unlike a double-barreled shotgun. But it doesn’t merely introduce the next thing, it doesn’t merely nudge towards the next thing, it also pushes the previous line back on itself, as a shotgun recoils against the shooter’s shoulder.

The exclamation mark, depending on the type font, thrusts upward and may distract us when we’re looking in another direction. In any case, it end-stops a line and invites us to consider why it is being used when in fact the sentence itself ought to have been sufficiently exclamatory.

The question mark casts a net back over the question that has just been asked as if perhaps the reader didn’t get it. It’s Byzantine in appearance, which calls more attention to it than is appropriate or relevant. Unlike Asekoff’s ampersand, it quarrels with the text in a kind of civil unrest.

The period is a bowling ball of another color. We can trip over this ball or we can roll it at the next sentence. But is it needed simply because, after all, we’re bowling, or is it needed because the work absolutely can’t be understood and savored without it? If it appears at the end of the line, it’s something the poem itself wants to kick off a cliff. If it appears in the middle of a line one might ask if a caesura wouldn’t have served better. So where should it appear? That’s the question the poet must address.

At this point, because it would be dishonest not to say it, I should say I have not solved these problems in my own poetry. I have written many unpunctuated poems, and some of them, I think, work. Others only partially work. I have written enough of them, plied the craft, that is, to see the glory of unfettered flight, to feel the thrill of making a long poem without punctuation. And it has empowered me to hear the jazz riff with renewed appreciation.

There are some thoughts, some strings of thought, that bear a hatred of any kind of impediment. They don’t want to imitate birds; they want to be birds. They don’t want to sing like someone else, they want to sing like themselves, because they are imbued with an innocent conviction of their own uniqueness. For these thoughts, these impulses, the unpunctuated poem was born.

It was the grandeur of the Arabic script that instilled this contemplation in me. How did it evolve? Was it from the experience of watching shifting sands or the experience of scanning the waves? The Arabs are, after all, nomadic by sea as well as land. Or was it from contemplating the heavens, the Arabs having pioneered astronomy? We understand the Roman and Greek scripts as chiseled in stone, painted on skin and papyrus. But how did the Arabs come by the fluidity of their script?

And as I meditated about this I began to dream of Arabic consonants as vessels bearing amphorae of vowels and flying vowel pennants. I saw the consonants bearing their cargoes all over the world, just as the Arabic language, like English, exported well and took root in new places. Visualizing Arabic script this way brought me, inevitably it seems, to the uses of punctuation, and the abuses.

Probably my experience as a bridge talker in the Navy played a role. You have to be concise. You have to make sentences that transmit clearly without benefit of qualifying punctuation. You have to talk straight. Lives depend on it. Just as lives depend on the poem. Is this true?

I think so. I make audiences delightfully uncomfortable when I say that what we call news is bottled fog. Poetry and art are the real news of our society. And lives do depend on it, because to misunderstand our society, as the press hourly invites us to do, is fatal to the ideals we have assigned to our society.

Remove the punctuation, walk without crutches. The poem breaks into a run or it spins in a vortex or it spreads its sails on a long reach, but it does what the seminal impulse called for or it fails. To unpunctuate the poem is, therefore, to celebrate the seminal impulse, to try to make the poem true to it, to eschew beguiling forks in the road, to resist sirens.

The task is breathtakingly demanding. The ante is raised. The perils are greater. The poet has decided to make terrific intellectual and musical demands on the self. Intellectual sloth is out of the question, but the unpunctuated poem is savage in its demand for focus and pitch. It will cut your throat if you compromise your vision.

For this reason I argue that this kind of poetry is more demanding than conventional metered verse. Let me come at this opinion in another way. The three greatest rhymers of 20th Century English language poetry were, in my view, W.B. Yeats, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Hart Crane. Poets were already abandoning punctuation and conventional meter as they wrote, but these poets synthesized most of what could be known to make of metered and rhymed verse one more unforgettable fête.

Vers libre had made its debut, misnamed as I think it is. It was meant to imply a liberation, not an unspringing—because poetry will always be sprung when it ought to be—but a freedom to achieve new heights unhindered by convention. And that’s just why it is misnamed. Because free verse is not, or should not be, liberation from the past but rather a completing and completed synthesis of the past with a yearning for the fitness required of intellectual and emotional wayfaring in the 21st century. Free verse should not imply an abandonment of something learned but rather an integration of what has been learned. But in the popular mind, and certainly in the mind of self-appointed pop critics, it has come to suggest poor discipline.

What could it have been more appropriately called? After all, the French term seemed so fitting, so appropriate when it appeared. New verse? No, because all that would have been a non sequitur. I’m hard put to say. Perhaps readers of this essay will suggest a term. I think the term vers libre also suffered from a certain Francophilia in some quarters, but that’s another story.

In any case, the free-verse poet is not escaping from stricture but rather using what it has taught. Equally true is that the unpunctuated poem is not a formless poem; if that were so it would be a failed poem. The unpunctuated poem derives its form from a number of esoteric sources:

• the way the words look; for example, the word whoosh looks entirely different from a word with both ascenders and descenders;

• the poet’s particular rhythm of breathing, which has its own stops, sobs, gasps, slides;

• the thought or imagery that winces at a line break, demanding a longer line;

• some mosaic that may have appeared in the poet’s mind;

• the interplay of the music inherent in each thought and image as it comes to the poet’s mind with the exigencies of the emerging poem.

The poet is witness to the emerging poem, since it has not been preconceived in anybody else’s laboratory. This process is analogous to the great projects of Yeats, Seamus Heaney and Thomas Jefferson in their old age. They chose to devote their aging selves to witnessing the self that was emerging. In Jefferson’s case it explains why he has been so elusive to biographers and historians.

In a poem that has slipped my mind I described Kufic Arabic script as a troop of lancers, their lances poking the clouds like Alexander’s hoplites. Over time I came to see ascenders as air catchers or sails and descenders as foot-draggers or anchors. Considerations like these, however whimsical they seem, shape our perception of a poem. A poem set in Helvetica or Cambria comes across to us quite differently from a poem set in Baskerville or Palatino.

I don’t know to what extent such considerations may have influenced 19th-century and earlier poets, but the digital era has heightened our awareness of the appearance of print. Every word-processing program offers a variety of type fonts. It follows that the poet who eschews punctuation will take a keen interest in how the poem will look. If the poem is rapturous the poet will not want the publisher to employ squat Helvetica, for example. A word in Helvetica conveys a different sensibility than a word in Palatino. This is no longer a printer’s preserve; it has become the poet’s. The poet does not want his craftsmanship trodden by a printer.

Tomes could be written on the impact on poetry of the transition from calligraphy to moveable type. And I think tomes will be written about the impact of typography and digitized type on contemporary poetry.

This propels us to a final consideration. Conventional metered and rhymed verse dovetailed with certain looks. The poem tended to be blocky. It tended to look like cabinetry or, more elegantly, like a ship’s hull. Or, put another way, it might look like classical geometry but not the natural geometry that now absorbs our attention. In other words, the poet has more choices, and those choices demand more intellectual discipline, not less.

---

Djelloul Marbrook is the author of three poetry books: Far from Algiers (2008, Kent State University Press, winner of the 2007 Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and the 2010 International Book Award in poetry); Brushstrokes and glances (2010, Deerbrook Editions); and Brash Ice (forthcoming late 2014, Leaky Boot Press, UK). His poems have been published by American Poetry Review, Barrow Street, Taos Poetry Journal, Orbis (UK), From the Fishouse, Oberon, The Same, Reed, Fledgling Rag, Poets Against the War, Poemeleon, Van Gogh’s Ear Anthology, Atticus Review, Deep Water Literary Journal, and Daylight Burglary, among others. He is the author of five books of fiction and serves on the poetry peer review board of Four Quarters Magazine. He lives in the mid-Hudson valley with his wife Marilyn and maintains a lively presence on Facebook and Twitter.