P says for the pure poet, identity is irrelevant. O says if you mention it, you must define it. N says always mention your disability in poems. M says never mention your disability in poems. There are many opinions on how to write difference in poems. It arrived one day and required few revisions. "Semi Semi Dash" is a love poem first, and a protest poem in retrospect. I come to this scene as a poet whose leg is a computer. After years of phantom limbs in various poems, there is now a magazine titled Phantom Limb. It has gotten a little ridiculous, lately, with poems that use amputation as metaphor for Fragmentation or the Dead Father or Pick-Your-Sadness. We have been reading these poems since the Bible. We recognize these poems and we feel bad. This is poetry! What it means to you means WAY more than what it ever meant to the poet.Usually it goes like this: Able-bodied poet evokes disabled veteran, or friend in some accident/illness, or figurative language thereof. See how those readings change the meaning of the poem, the expression and the cadence and the sound. They can make up the rules as they go, which means that punctuation can mean just about anything. With poetry, pretty much anything goes so long as the poet is working within a set of rules for that poem. Ampersands mean “and.” You get the picture. Asterisks usually mean there’s a footnote somewhere. What about parenthesis? Asterisks? Ampersands? Colons? Tildas and umlauts and accent marks? Really, those are used the same as they are in prose. Take a big breath, maybe two when you see ellipses in a poem. Really slow down like those are three periods. While their function in prose is to indicate a truncation, poets use them to ask for maximum space. Sometimes known as three dots, triple periods, or a one-legged duck hopping away from the end of a sentence, the ellipses is wildly overused in texts and perfectly at home in poetry. While the hyphen is used to connect or combine words, the en and especially em dash are asking for time and breath between words or lines. In poetry all of these things could be true, but like commas and period, they serve to create space. I had been walking - running, really - before I found him.Hyphens are used to connect compound words.Įn dashes are the width of the letter n and are used to connect a range of numbers, express conflict, or make a compound out of a multi-word adjective.Įm dashes are the width of the letter m and are used to separate clauses, to draw attention to them, and to signify interruptions. If you already know, then throw that information out the window. Fortunately, in poetry, you don’t actually need to know how they each function in prose. If you aren’t a punctuation nerd, I’m sorry to break it to you, but there are actually three different kinds of dashes: hyphen (-), en dash (–), and em dash (-). In fact, they may be as ill-used in poetry as they are in prose. A little more breath than a comma and a little less than a period. In poetry, it sits somewhere between a comma and a period. In prose, it is used to connect two complete and intricately linked clauses. SemicolonsĪh, that most ill-used of prose punctuation, the strange hybrid of colon and comma, the semicolon. When you see a period at the end of that line, give it even more breath and space. When a line breaks on an enjambment, you naturally give a little space between the end of one line and the beginning of the next. Take a full breath when you see a period. In poetry, a period is more like a stop sign, like a comma, but longer. In prose, a period marks the end of a declamatory sentence. Commas can also be used in more conventional ways to separate lists or clauses, but poets are free to use as many commas as they need to slow down a poem. Some poets even read commas as small catch-breaths. A comma represents a break, just a little space between words or lines. In poetry, however, this is actually pretty close to the truth. This is absolutely wrong and any professional editor will tell you this. There’s a common misconception in prose writing that you use a comma whenever you take a breath.
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