On Individual Writers

From Joe Menchaca (posted in the Blog March 20, 2019):

Hi Joe,

I’m sure you’re aware that W. S. Merwin died Friday, March 15th. Thanks to you in the Masterworks: Poetry class I became a fan of his work. I read the linked article about Merwin in Lit Hub, and this particular comment about his style caught my attention: “Merwin’s spare poems, devoid of punctuation….” In a New York Times article about his death—also linked—the author cites Merwin explaining this style choice as: “‘Punctuation basically has to do with prose and the printed word,’ [Merwin] said in the Paris Review interview. ‘I came to feel that punctuation was like nailing the words onto the page. Since I wanted instead the movement and lightness of the spoken word, one step toward that was to do away with punctuation.’”

And then today I read this article (also in Lit Hub), “Andrea Dworkin’s Argument Against Punctuation,” which is an excerpt from Dworkin’s book, Last Days at Hot Slit: The Radical Feminism of Andrea Dworkin (no way to italicize). I’m always amazed by the serendipity with which the universe reveals reading material to me, and these three articles come at a time when I’m struggling with the grammatically correct application of punctuation versus its use to capture the “movement and lightness of the spoken word” in my writing. Dworkin’s contention about punctuation in the following quote gives words to my struggle: “form, shape, structure, spatial relation, how the printed word appears on the page, where to breathe, where to rest, punctuation is marking time, indicating rhythms, even in my original text I used too much of it—I overorchestrated. I forced you to breathe where I do, instead of letting you discover your own natural breath.” The paradoxical nature of the quote intrigues me greatly: Dworkin rails against punctuation yet makes full use of commas and periods in the quote, and even colons and semi-colons in an earlier paragraph. However, the last sentence in the quote is what I find most intriguing. At times, I use punctuation unconventionally to try to capture the rhythms of the English language as well as the cadences of individual speech patterns, but I hadn’t thought of it as forcing readers to “breathe where I do, instead of letting you discover your own natural breath.” This adds a fresh perspective to how I use and how I’ve thought about using punctuation. As well, the articles have given me new ideas about the artistic use and or omission of punctuation.

Poet W.S. Merwin Dies at 91

Andrea Dworkin’s Argument Against Punctuation