Inching along now, word by word, not a complete thought in sight. Did have one once, a complete clause, gave me pause, didn’t last long, a mere utterance. Must move along, a kind of proposition neither true nor false. Paddled through the kelp around the point. Each wave a fragment of fancy, a figment of you know what. Nothing here, nothing there, may a touch of wit be with you.
Cartooned, too, motionless, almost, like a cartoon, barely enough. Threads. And beads. Even dismissal doubtful. Traveling light, stuff in storage, if you can call a household holding an industrial trial. Like paddling, nautical, head above water. Jarred, not stirrage, as in shaken, not stirred. Vespers as what light there is fades. Etymology: the evening star. Vespertine. And after night, matutinal.
Dawn and songbirds. Bees swarm the morning glory gold trumpets. Swallows and swifts dash the morning cup of black bitter coffee the paper cup. From vespers to bitters. While still cool. Morning lasts until noon. Why morning works best: allows for song to carry along no distortion from wind or the noise of other animals. Work and the sounds of work opening, the pulling on of gloves, the squeak of toolbox hasps, the last of the dew spots on the sidewalk and the rolling out of the blueprints on the makeshift table on the sawhorses.
Another April, another spring, perhaps (like a hand, e. e. sd) another poem (for April is Poetry Month, as if you needed a reason for being) to add to the pile of last year’s leaves still unraked yet to be submitted to the compost bucket. Is poetry yard work? Pots on the porch stuffed with oregano, thyme, rosemary. A pot in a windowsill catches some sun and the King of Herbs is brought in to the studio apartment and clipped for a sauce of solitude, basil on the rise for an Easter souffle. The sun also rises this Good Friday just a bit farther to the north, on the other side of the pine, inches past where it rose just yesterday. Basil is a commodity; poetry lacks fungibility – you can’t one for one swap a poem out for another, but you can cut a basil leaf in half. Maybe many a poem would have been more commodius cut in half. Basil Aristotle. Different kinds of basil: Sweet Basil, Thai Basil, Lemon Basil. Lime-green to chartreuse – now there’s a word waiting to be put into a poem, if not into a pasta sauce. And the smell of a pizza parlor when you first walk in, the chef tossing a flour pie up to a target on the ceiling, never quite reaching it, spinning and flopping like a playdough frisbee, ductile and malleable. Slide it into the big brick oven and soon it will be a friable disk. I sit and wait for one of the cooks to call out “Pizza for Joe!” And I’d rather have a piece of pizza than a poem. Though Spring is perhaps like a pizza thrown by hand and fingers sprinkle on the toppings, like adjectives, sundried tomatoes, green peppers, anchovies, mushrooms, bacon bits, green and black olives, pepperoni, sausage, barbecued chicken bites, pineapple rings, jalapeno slices, provolone cheese, mozzarella cheese, aged cheddar, pepperjack, parmesan. Ricotta, fontina, gorgonzola. Crispy crust, thick red sauce, garlic and herbs – basil leaves piled high! Raise high the roofbeam, Pizzaioli! I’m taking it home. “Pizza to go for Joe!” I carry the big heavy hot box out and put it in my red wheelbarrow and walk it home where they are all waiting for the Good Friday Pizza Feed.
This Spring Mars springs from the spoils of winter ruins and sends a motorized snake down the clogged sewer shaving the random roots obstinately finding like foraging ants every tiny fissure in a friable underground infrastructure.
The flowers Mars forces the mad dog tramples frothing spittle quick nimble and legs akimble on a first clear warm day with her slimy green tennis ball tossed to fetch tossed to fetch tossed little daylilies looking a bit bedraggled.
The dog’s form holds Spring’s unfolding and stays true to its arbitrary erratic no man’s land of free yard garden room where the dogs come and go speaking of portobello and Punchinello.
A march hare muddles up straw hatted mushing spring riddles that scare off common readers until Mars springs now forward and the dogs are late for work.
The gold movie lion his iron stare and lush loamy mane says Augh! roar from which the lambs retreat but Leo did not bellow for peace bells pealed the turn of the Hun.
And now this ruddy Spring heralds with reels and boisterous calls to protect the sprouts from passing rituals another year gone belogged befogged and begoggled.
We may have been taught in Grammar School to see the comma as a pause and the period as a stop, the comma a quarter note and the period a whole note. The semicolon a half note? The hyphen a rest. The dash a recess, the open parenthesis time to go home.
Adorno, in his essay titled “Punctuation Marks,” stops to consider a comparison to traffic signs:
“All of them are traffic signals; in the last analysis, traffic signals were modeled on them. Exclamation points are red, colons green, dashes call a halt.”
But Adorno quickly moves on to a consideration of punctuation as a kind of musical notation, but what then, he questions, becomes of that comparison when modern music begins to ignore tonality.
Of the exclamation point, Adorno gets historical, calling its use an example of expressionism:
“…a desperate written gesture that yearns in vain to transcend language.”
As for the dash – well, it no longer comes as a surprise:
“All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising.”
Why Adorno limits quotation marks to words being quoted suggests a fondness for rules that will always “call out” to be broken.
“The blind verdict of the ironic quotation marks is its graphic gesture.”
The loss of the semicolon Adorno attributes to market surveillance, not that anyone was looking anyway, but the use of the semicolon is perhaps the most difficult punctuation mark to establish conformity; the semicolon is the most personal of punctuation marks. It’s gone the way of the tie.
For Adorno, the test of a writer’s punctuation proficiency can be found or proven in how one handles parenthetical material; interruptions to the lineal flow of thought, which of course isn’t lineal at all, which is why we need punctuation. He uses Proust as an example of a writer’s need for parenthetical expression, where simple commas won’t do, because we are running on but actually stopping, without coming to a full stop, to check our shoelaces.
Interesting, even surprising, maybe, is that Adorno does not compare punctuation marks to editing in a film. Adorno disapproved of movies, jazz, and advertising, the sleep inducing drugs of what he called the cultural industry. Advertising makes enormous use of the exclamation mark, yelling and fist banging, even in ads without words – it’s the threat that numbs.
How does Adorno conclude in such a way that might be helpful to a writer either concerned over “correct” use of punctuation (incorrect, Adorno would say, that use of ironic quote marks; but it highlights – calls out – the irony of the rules as a kind of code, not code as in writing computer code, but as in work completed and awaiting inspection), or of wanting to use the tools available effectively, precisely, but at the same time creatively, interestingly?
It might come as some degree of solace to the punctuation befuddled writer (although some might feel worse) to know that Adorno considered all writing subject to an unsolvable “punctuation predicament”:
“For the requirements of the rules of punctuation and those of the subjective need for logic and expression are not compatible.”
Adorno’s essay “Punctuation Marks” is included in “Notes to Literature: Theodor W. Adorno,” Columbia University Press, 2019. ↩︎
35 mm slide taken with my Exakta 500 in 1969: An abstract, long-exposure photograph of lights vertically flowing in the foreground with squirrely lines of blue and orange streaks in the background created through intentional camera movement.
The Jimi Hendrix “Are You Experienced” album (1967) included a song, “May This be Love”:
“My worries seem so very small With my waterfall I can see my rainbow calling me…”
Turn the photo horizontal and we see an electric guitar effect.
adversative? when to whom conversative? with to which
adjourning? now here heretofore? to where
in room? ill lit elbow? move over
“Ill Seen Ill Said,” a novella piece by Samuel Beckett, appeared in the October 5, 1981 issue of The New Yorker magazine, first published by Les Éditions de Minuit in Paris, earlier in ’81. My poem above, “Q & A,” is a bit of a riff on Beckett’s themes.
On page 41 of The New Yorker, where the story begins, is a cartoon by Charles Barsotti. The cartoon shows a duck sitting at a desk. The duck wears glasses, is writing with a short pen or pencil on a piece of paper, a phone on a front corner of the desk, a stack of three pieces of paper on the other corner, the duck looking up, as if thinking of what to write next. Above the duck, still in the cartoon frame, the words: “Quack! Quack! Quack! Quack!” And above the cartoon box, a handwritten caption reads: “THE CALL OF THE WILD.”
There are 77 question marks in Beckett’s novella, including: “What the wrong word?” Just before, “Imagination at wit’s end spreads its sad wings.”
Near 8,000 words to the novella. I counted only 3 commas in the entire piece. Short, staccato sentences.
We hardly see anything of reality’s totality (“Ill seen”), but that is our syllabus, and even that may seem overwhelming, and suppose we could see it all, could we describe it (“Ill said”), let alone explain it, and with only 0.000375% commas! All that said, we sometimes seem to come close, or someone does, and shares, and that’s a pleasure. Not an argument, not a theory, not a grammar, just a pleasure, like at a circus.
Beckett’s piece ends with, “Know happiness.” No end of playing with words.
“Which say? Ill say. Both. All three. Question answered,” says Beckett, in “Ill Seen Ill Said.”
Sunday mornings, I fill our little blue watering can at the kitchen sink and walk around like a waiter at a cocktail party, offering drinks to the houseplants. In our first place together, we sprouted plants from avocado seeds. One spread from a ceramic pot on the ledge above the sink, the window never closed, where the cat Freely came and went. Oak Street.
One day, each of us carrying a bag of groceries, walking home down Main Street, we paused at the Realtor’s window at the end of the commercial strip to look at the photos of houses for sale in town. We lived in one of four small white stucco houses, one in each corner of a courtyard, a wooden barn-like garage out back with four open stalls. Our rent was $95 a month, the beach a mile away.
Standing at the window of the Realtor’s, I was surprised to see a photo of our place. The four house lot was for sale. We didn’t have a telephone, so I went over to my folks-iz home and called our landlord, who confirmed our house was for sale, sold, actually, and he just had not had the heart to tell us, but the eviction notice would soon be in the mail.
That summer, the four small houses were torn down and a large apartment complex with no yard space erected, but this little story is not about inflation. It’s about night and day, dancing the night away, surfing in the morning.
The Coming of the Toads 