Mentor and Muse: Essays from Poets to Poets

“Slapped:with;liGhtninG”: Poetry and Punctuation

107 Slapped:with;liGhtninG”: Poetry and Punctuation Susanna Rich Punctuation gives us the human voice, and all the meanings that lie between the words. —Pico Iyer WhenlanguagewaschiseledintostoneslabsinancientGreece,thewriters had to save space, so they left none between words. Words ran together and became confused. So the first punctuation element was a dot suspended between words to separate them. Later, space itself was used to separate— to punctuate—words. White space includes word spacing; paragraph, stanza, section, and chapter breaks; and book covers. Capitalization—a word derived from the Latin caput—was originally used to indicate either a new head(ing) or the name of a head of household. So white space and capitalization are punctuation, as well. Let’s remember that poetry has changed from the predominantly oral and physical art of the itinerant bard to an increasingly visual medium on the page. The voice inflections of the live poet have to be recorded on the page, like sound on a musical score, to indicate pacing, meaning, and emotional nuance. But we must also reconstruct the physical gestures of the poet. W. B. Yeats tells us that art comes from the “fountain jetting from the entire hopes, memories, and sensations of the body.”1 Through punctuation, we can record and re-embody the gestures of a bard. Considering that in terms of punctuation, most poetry falls somewhere between the pyrotechnics of E. E. Cummings and the spareness of W. S. Merwin, who punctuates only with white space, capitalization, and traditional apostrophes, we can better appreciate the synaptic and expressive power of punctuation. Here is an eleven-line excerpt from section XXXVIII of Cummings’s W [ViVa], which includes the title of this essay: “ )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 susanna rich 108 n(o)w 1 the 2 how 3 dis(appeared cleverly)world 4 iS Slapped:with;liGhtninG 5 ! 6 at 7 which(shal)lpounceupcrackw(ill)jumps 8 of 9 THuNdeRB 10 loSSo!M iN2 11 Cummingsrenewsoursenseoftheusesofpunctuationbyplayingmeaningful counterpoint with the norms. For example, in the first line he parenthesizes the “o” in “now,” creating a tension between the words that that suggests: “now,” “no,” “o,” “ow,” and even “nw.” How appropriate a response to a lightning storm, which forces a sense of urgency and nowness on us, and the ambivalent reactions of “no,” “o,” and the wincing “ow.” With the “o” dropped out, “nw” feels clipped, as if by a sudden stroke. Visually, the parentheses create a whirlwind around the eye-of-the-storm “o.” In line 5, Cummings capitalizes the second instead of the customary first letter of “iS,” thus aligning and amplifying the sound “S” with the capital “S” in “Slapped,” the following word. The sound effect sizzles, as lightning does. Had Cummings not capitalized the “S” in “iS,” the “is” would have had merely a “z” sound. Also, he would have lost the surprise effect of “S,” which mimics the surprise of lightning. Instead of white spaces to separate the three linked words in line 5, Cummings uses a colon and semicolon, punctuations traditionally used to separate much larger units of language. The colon functions like two pointing index fingers: LOOK AT THIS. “Slapped,” like lightning, is sudden and clipped, especially with the colon following it. The word “with” is slapped—struck—between the muscular punctuation marks of the colon and the semicolon (half comma and half period), as lightning is surrounded by the expansive dark before and dark after it. Because we have become accustomed to white spacing between wordsin the five centuries since Gutenberg, thereis tremendous tensionbetween our expectations and the surprise of this line. Even more unexpected is the word “liGhtninG,” whose capital “G”s flash and flash into our eyes, as lightning would. Cummings’s choice of capitalizing the “G”s is especially )DOFRQHU&KLQGG $0 “slapped:with;lightning” 109 meaningful, since the letter is often an initial morpheme in words related to visual experience, as in “glow,” “glimmer, “glance,” “goggles,” and “gaze.” In contrast to Cummings’s punctuational exuberance, Merwin has an ascetic aesthetic. Consider the last three lines from his poem “Just This,” in which Merwin also works with lightning: how did this haste begin this little time at any time this reading by lightning scarcely a word this nothing this heaven3 By not punctuating the first line of this excerpt, Merwin encourages us, as readers, to enact the haste about which he writes. We can read “begin...