Poets Online Archive

When I read that the poet Thomas Lux had died last month, I immediately had a rush of memories of a week I had spent in a workshop he taught in Provincetown.

The design of his sessions was that we would devote an extended block of time on a deep reading of one of each participant's poems. If it was your poem being discussed, you sat quietly, took notes and did not react to the praise, criticism and misunderstandings of the readers. It was a great experience, both being a reader and having your poem get a morning or afternoon of attention.

We talked about "the voice you hear when you read silently" and how
It is your voice
saying, for example, the word "barn"
that the writer wrote
but the "barn" you say
is a barn you know or knew.

And that barn that Tom wrote is the dairy barn of his childhood, and it is not the barn that I knew as a visitor coming to a place to ride horses.

I saw Lux again a few times at several biannual Dodge Poetry Festivals, and he was always said he remembered me. I doubted that, but it was nice of him to say it. I asked him at one of the festivals why his Newest Issue seemed to all be one stanza. He said that he needed a really good reason these days to break a line and especially to make a new stanza. He was opposed to you making a poem with stanzas of say 4 lines each just to have a poem with that form. He was opposed to poetry becoming "prose with line breaks."

One of Tom's most popular poems is "I Love You Sweatheart." It is pure Lux - witty, wise, funny and all those thing comes through on the page and especially when Tom read the poem aloud. (Check out the video of him reading this poem below.) I used that poem for a prompt here on "stupid love" and I checked the archive and discovered that I used Lux poems five more times as models for prompts: "what sustains you," "never born," "foreign words," "daughters," and a shared prompt on "fruits."

This month I chose his poem "Virgule" as our model. This ode to the / was one of the poems he read to our group that summer.

I am sure that Lux liked the word "virgule" for its foreign and exotic sound and because most people don't know the "proper" word and call it a slash (as with the "back slash/forward slash" of our computer age - which I divide here with a virgule). The ellipsis is another mark that is often unidentified and often misused (especially by poets). Tom would like having us think about how we use each punctuation mark in our writing for this prompt.

It will require some creativity and wit on your part to do this month's prompt, which is a poem about a mark of punctuation or punctuation itself.

I am broadening the choices beyond the ones we use most commonly in English. You can use the tilde " ~ " (which has a new life beyond Spanish as a separator between a quote and its source) and all those other German, French and other languages' exotic marks. How about that the French comma is called une virgule?

For more on all our prompts and other things poetic, check out the Poets Online blog

HOT STUFF

all the missing punctuation marks
decided to join forces with all the
missing socks. they met in a dryer
at the laundromat next to the bodega last
friday night at midnight sharp. it was a
melting pot of polyester, cotton, periods,
question marks, all flailing about, fluffing,
wrinkling, melting, some uttering
profanities, others caught up in the rhythm.

Marie A. Mennuto-Rovello

PILCROW

BLOCKS OF TEXT ALL IN CAPS NO PUNCTUATION
ANYWHERE TO KNOW WHEN ACHILLES GRABBED
THE STAFF CALLED HIS COMMANDER A DOG AND
AGAMEMNON SNEARED HIS REPLY SCRIBES BEGAN
TO PLACE DOTS AND PARAGRAPHOS TO INDICATE
BEGINNINGS ENDINGS MONKS IN GELID CELLS
WORKED TEXT SO UNICAL AND miniscule intermixed
printers sorted type into upper and lower cases now we
hit the shift and enter keys and paragraphs abound ¶

Robert Miller

UMLAUTS

On the way to German class my posture
was always slightly straighter, my rucksack
slightly heavier with Dieter and Petra inside dialoguing
about Bratwurst and Goethe and Turkish guest workers.
I could recite “Der Erlkoenig” by heart and my r’s
were perfect drum rolls. Nancy Baum sat in the seat in front of me
and pretended not to hear when I whispered: Ich liebe dich
into her umlaut: that pair of moles on her left earlobe.
I thought it sounded romantic, Germanic, productive
as a cough. Frau Spier thought so too, for she asked me
to repeat it for the benefit of the whole class. Nancy’s
earlobes blushed then, and her umlaut looked
like two watermelon seeds. Later that semester
I translated one of Rilke’s sonnets to Orpheus,
the one about the tree and the ear. My translation
employed an umlaut where no previous translator
had ever thought to. I thought it was brilliant, subtle,
Orphic. I published it in our high school lit mag
and waited. I waited twenty years. Then, suddenly,
there she was in front of me again, with her back to me
at the reunion, lifting a mixed drink to her lips with a slender
ringless hand at the bar, the umlaut right where I’d left it.
I whispered: Ich liebe dich, and she turned around, the wall
finally down, smiling a smile as wide as East and West.

Paul Hostovsky

ASTERISK

This little star with its ancient roots extending into the night sky
born of printers’ need to mark a date of birth on a feudal family tree
they used seven arms shooting from the center and tipped with a teardrop
but born in Greece two thousand year ago as a mark, asteriskos,
by someone proofreading Homeric poetry to mark duplicate lines.
* Take note here
Computer scientists and mathematicians will say “star” as in an A* search algorithm
and in English we like five-pointed stars when the typeface has no feet
but six points on serif type. You might use 4, 5, 6 or 8 when making them by hand.
Asterisks chuckle at rules and usage guides.
A character for censorship, a wildcard, sign of multiplication, 61* for a homerun record,
pointing to a footnote, 3 in a row centered on a page to divide a section.
On my first typewriter, I used them as a bullet in an unordered list, and now
1 of 2 characters on our ubiquitous phone keypads to pound and star our way through menus.
Long ago, three forming a triangle were an asterism – a group of stars –
floating on a page of text like a little constellation,
a Summer Triangle of bright Altair, Deneb, and Vega, the brightest star in Lyra -
that lyre of Orpheus that could drown out the Sirens as a reader proofed the Odyssey.

Ken Ronkowitz

Punctuation

&