Tag punctuation

* discoveries in the disparate & kenneth p. gurney

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

I remember reading that the semicolon is the most poetic of punctuation marks because of the way it holds two or more disparate things together, things that, under scrutiny, would not be thought of as usually being connected.

Which is what poems do: just replace “it” in the sentence above with “a poem” and finish the sentence: you’ll have a pretty succinct definition of the art.

This week’s poem “Selfish,” by friend and fellow poet Kenneth P. Gurney, charmed me in its ability to bring together so many disparate things – cookies (yum), tea (yum), Civil War figures (hmm), a clock (yum?), etc. – all within the context of a casual moment in a relationship.

What seals the charm for me is how the narrative leads us through various moments of knowing and not knowing, and ends with the speaker at a loss themselves for what the person they’re with finds “so funny.” We are left to wonder alongside the poet, which is how some of my favorite poems end.

* yum *

* yum *

Selfish – Kenneth P. Gurney

We bought Italian wedding cookies,
even though no one we knew
was getting married,
and some fragrant tea
the shop owner admitted he didn’t know
because the container
arrived without a label
and he couldn’t place the flavor.
You, out of politeness I think, asked,
Who was Patrick Cleburne?
And I told stories of the Irishman who served
in the Forty-First Regiment of Foot in the British army,
who emigrated to the United States
to settle in Helena, Arkansas,
then became one of the Confederacy’s
best fighting generals.
And the whole time I spoke,
I watched your eyes shift focus
from my lips, to my eyes,
to the divots on my right ear,
to the napkin that removed
white wedding cookie powder
from your fingers, to the tea,
to a hangnail on your right ring finger,
to the shop owner’s bird clock
that sounded sand hill cranes at eleven.
Before I got to Cleburne’s demise at Franklin
you laughed about something
that resided only in your head
and would not share what was so funny.

 

***

Happy not sharing!

Jose

* published in Decanto

* poets in novels and countdown update

José Angel Araguz Leave a comment

“Coming on the scene, he thought what a mercy shipwrecks were, how clean, their horrors swallowed by the sea.  Not so here.”

***

The above is from the book I just finished, Bruce Duffy’s Disaster was my God: a novel about the outlaw life of Arthur Rimbaud.  The book covers in a meandering manner the life and death of a poet who, after five years of brilliant writing that changed the course of poetry for years to come, swears off writing and runs off to be a sort of mercenary merchant in Africa.

Having a poet as the hero of your novel is always a gamble.  Will they be believable?  Duffy’s Rimbaud, I’m happy to say, is pretty convincing.

Not only is Duffy able to pull off lines like the ones above, that present an idea, a parallel verging on metaphor, and follow through, but there are several moments where you feel like he is trying to sneak in pieces of poems into his narrative.  Here is a snapshot of the poet Paul Verlaine:

“…squinty eyes.  The beard is thin and leonine, the forehead a looming moon, the mouth a single crooked horizontal line as might have been drawn by a somber child on a rainy day.”

Phrasing such as this means even more when you find it in a novel about the poet who brought the prose poem into use.  The focused wording, the leaps of logic – Duffy spins his story well-versed in the, ahem, verse of his subject.  Here is a snapshot of the young Rimbaud before he ran away for good:

“Perfect eyes.  Perfect hearing.  Perfect skin.  Hair still cut, nails clean: studious, well dressed, polite.  Perhaps most amazing under the circumstances is that fact that behind those angelic blue eyes burns a soul remarkably intact, million-leaved like a great oak lifting its branches, aroused, in the evening wind.”

The punctuation here is fascinating.  The initial clipped sentences, then the mix of details paced with commas and a colon.  Then that expansive description of the soul.  Read closely this excerpt has the effect of watching a card dealer change speeds while dealing out cards then stopping to look you in the eye.

***

The other gamble of writing a poet in your novel is attaining a sense of truth in your description of this specific writing process.  For me, Duffy gets it right, as in this interaction between an elder poet and the young Rimbaud:

“…but, Monsieur Rimbaud, surely as poets, it is our job to explain, to be clear.”

“No,” said the boy testily, “but you see, when I read your writings – many of you – you labor to explain.  To merely be clear, as if a poem were, what, a newspaper?  Read once, then used to wipe your — “

Rather than an argument between two people, this could easily be the transcript of an argument in a single poet’s head.

***

As for the countdown, I plan on going tonight to another East of Edith open mic.  I am going to be reading from my forthcoming chapbook, The Wall.  I haven’t read these in public yet, so, wish me luck.

J