This essay was first published on writing.ie
1 Poetry and punctuation
Recently a friend took me to task for not punctuating a poem of mine that he otherwise liked. He didn’t see the aesthetic or political argument for it, he told me, although, in declaring it ‘a fine poem’ he rather undermined the argument that it needed punctuation in the first place.
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I’ve been working towards this unpunctuated style for a long time. My first collection, Mathematics & Other Poems used an ampersand in place of the conjunction ‘and’ under the influence of Berryman most probably, though Ginsberg uses it randomly in ‘Howl’. It seemed strangely transgressive to me at the time; now I don’t know why. The style of the book in general is more conventional with many sonnets and substantial stanza forms. I experimented with what I think of as a ‘stripped back style’ in my second collection – Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me (2004) – which has a bare minimum of full stops and commas, shorter lines, a more colloquial phrasing and a more ironic tone, but it was in Ghost Estate (2011) that I abandoned punctuation entirely. I found it personally liberating in much the same way that I imagine the modernist experimentation with free verse must have been a liberation. Ultimately, I was persuaded to drop the beloved ampersand – friends found it an irritation, though in some ways that irritation was the point of the whole thing. I abandoned it with an irrational regret. They say it was invented by Tiro, Cicero’s slave-secretary.
Why do I not punctuate my poems? It’s a reasonable question. After all, I also write novels and short stories which are (I hope) impeccably punctuated despite the fact that I am an admirer of Jose Saramago whose novels barely contain a handful of full stops and commas.
But it’s not just some whim, or some form of egotism that drives me to dropping those familiar dots and commas. My reasoning was (and remains) as follows:
- The ‘stripped back’, minimalist style that I favour can look cluttered by the whole apparatus of commas, colons, semi-colons, m- and n-dashes, question marks, exclamation marks, full stops and capital letters.
- I subscribe to the view that the reader of poetry expects to have to work a little, and in that regard I believe in making it strange, making demands. In some ways the poems are deceptively simple so the absence of punctuation demands that the reader assess each line and each sentence a little more closely.
- Ambiguity or uncertainty are important values in poetry. They ask the reader to invent meaning and allowing this space of invention is very important to me. The more the meaning of the poem is defined by the writer the less space there is for the creativity of the reader. There are lines in my poems which can be read equally well with the line above or the line after – it’s a matter for the reader which reading she chooses – and the absence of punctuation helps to create that space.
- Ultimately, not punctuating makes demands on the line length and stanza shape. I try to make each line a unit of sense – not necessarily a complete sentence but at least a clause of a sentence. The line break occurs where normally one would pause for breath (a comma or full stop). There are some exceptions to this, and again the aim here is to ‘make it strange’, to challenge the reader to interpret for themselves. But I remember well that first decision to try to do without punctuation, and at the time it was as much as challenge to myself as to anyone else.
My poem ‘In Time Of Quarantine’ (from Smugglers In the Underground Hug Trade, Doire Press 2021) exemplifies many of these points. Here’s the first stanza:
and some of us will be smugglers
in the underground hug trade
black market kissers
purveyors of under-the-counter embraces
solicitors of indulgence
intimacy pushers on the bright side of the street
our only law will be affection
our currency will be love
from which there is no default
In many ways the absence of punctuation has forced me to clarify the ideas I bring to poetry. In particular, many of my poems are inspired by my readings in political philosophy. A poem like ‘We imagine the police’ from Ghost Estate is based on the thinking of some of my favourite political philosophers. It begins…
we imagine the police
cameras catching other people
doing things that irritate us
in their cars
this is the police state
of mind
& we are sensible citizens
of the commonsense…
In the first two lines you can see the ‘make it strange’ imperative at work. If you stop at the end of the first line the sense is that we create the police (a classic Marxist concept), but then the word ‘cameras’ forces you to re-read the line and now we’re imagining police cameras catching other people doing things. Then the simple statement that imagining police cameras catching other people doing things that irritate us is ‘the police state of mind’, a phrase which hovers on the ambiguity of ‘police state’ and ‘state of mind’. There are other references – to Gramsci, for example, in the word ‘commonsense’ that I won’t bother to go into because this is not a politics lecture.
It would be easy to argue that the requirement to punctuate is a bourgeois imposition, that regular use of such marks is a relatively recent development in the history of language and the ancients seemed to get along fine with scriptura continua, or that rejecting such norms is itself a political act in a poetry that is frequently political. But, as I have already suggested I have much more personal reasons for choosing it and I make no such grandiose claims. In the end I fall back on Viktor Shklovsky’s declaration that the method of art is to make things strange. Strangely enough, I think that’s enough.
2 Poetry and politics
A long time ago I took a decision to make politics and political theory a significant part of my work both in poetry and prose, or rather I decided to stop avoiding it. I laid out my reasoning in an article called ‘Riding Against the Lizard’ (2009) which was first published in the late and much-lamented The SHOp magazine and which can be read here . At the time poetry, as written in Ireland, showed very little evidence of engagement with politics. Now, I’m glad to say, there are many poets who take politics head on, but at the time it was considered ‘bad form’, a little too Left, a little strident, distasteful. It was difficult to find places to publish poetry that was overtly political, (and, in fact, it is still not welcome in certain quarters). Heaney’s liberal balancing act was the model, whereas Montague’s Rough Field was considered an intemperate aberration. My own position (as argued in that essay) was a simple one: we are all citizens and as citizens we are obliged to engage with the political in whatever way we can, otherwise we resign it to those who can wield it with power. A poet has no special dispensation to be outside of the political. Maintaining a strategic silence is not particularly brave or admirable.
Naturally, there is some truth to Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing happen’ (though that can be read in two ways), but equally, abandoning the field of politics entirely will certainly make nothing happen. What’s more, the old adage that ‘silence means consent’ is completely true, at least in the political as opposed to the personal sphere. If writers do not engage with politics in whatever way they can then writers are assumed to be happy with the status quo. And just to remind ourselves – the ‘status quo’ is a permanent housing crisis, a healthcare system that can barely cope in a bad winter, overcrowded prisons, gross dereliction of duty with regard to the climate and a politics that is driven by the ideology of the vulture fund.
So my decision to ‘be political’, in reality a simple decision not to exclude my political views as unfit subjects for poetry, brought with it the imperative to render political thoughts in ways that are accessible.
At its most ironic there is a poem called ‘A Riff On Marx’s Theory of Surplus Values’ which goes:
the philosopher makes ignorance
and the poet makes silence
the priest makes sinfulness
and the criminal makes the criminal law
The last line of the verse, a refrain in fact, is a quotation from Marx. By contrast there is a longish sequence called ‘Via Antonio Gramsci’ which moves between countries, places and ideas with fluidity and which an Italian critic called ‘un modo di ragionare in forma di poesia’ (a type of reasoning (or argument) in the form of a poem). It has, as an irregular refrain, the words ‘someone singing bandiera rossa/sotto voce’ (Bandiera Rossa is the Italian Communist Party marching song). The poem considers the rise of neofascism in Europe and links it with early Italian and Irish fascism and ‘fatherland’/‘mother Ireland’ imagery, the whole undercut by irony and personal or familial connections such as:
better my sons
freewheeling after midnightdown Tottenham Court Road
or watching the bankers
waving fifties
at the G20
face to face with the police cordonand the simple structural
violence of the state
Here, I think, the narrative requires no punctuation. Each line carries a ‘unit of sense’, a clause in the story, and the closing lines contain a classic leftwing view of the role of the police – the enforcers of the state, the visible expression of the state’s structural inequality as expressed by the G20 meeting in London in 2009 which drew enormous protests at a time of economic crisis.
At a more direct level are poems such as ‘The Ballad of Lampedusa’ written in Sicily at the peak of the refugee crisis (unless we say it is continually at peak) and at the same time that Syriza in Greece was struggling with the EU and Wolfgang Schauble in particular:
a cold storm throws foam and stones
on the coast of Sicily
a grecale blows
nothing to hinder it
between here and the Peloponnese
and I sit by a window translating
a poem about people drowning
half-way to Africa
almost in Tunisia
in Lampedusa
Or the poem ‘Ghost Estate’ which was considered safe enough to be on the Leaving Certificate course (and ultimately on the exam paper), about the economic crash of 2008 and the proliferation of so-called ‘ghost estates’ around the country. That housing crisis is still with us in one form or another. The refrain is from an advertising hoarding I used to see regularly at the time. The last two lines are intended to suggest that we have been ‘sold out’ by our politicians, or that the ‘first republic’ (thinking in French terms) has been sold out:
Ghost estate
women inherit
the ghost estate
their unborn children
play invisible games
of hide & seek
in the scaffold frames
if you lived here
you’d be home by now
they fear winter
& the missing lights
on the unmade road
& who they will get
for neighbours
if anyone comes anymore
if you lived here
you’d be home by now
the saurian cranes
& concrete mixers
the rain greying into
the hard-core
& the wind
in the empty windows
if you lived here
you’d be home by now
the heart is open plan
wired for alarm
but we never thought
we’d end like this
the whole country
a builder’s tip
if you lived here
you’d be home by now
it’s all over now
but to fill in the holes
nowhere to go
& out on the edge
where the boys drive
too fast for the road
that old sign says
first phase sold out