Author: anthonyddoyle

Poets and Punctuation

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In his sonnets, Shakespeare would use end-stops rigorously, with most lines ending in commas, semi-colons, and colons. Sometimes he relied on enjambment or exclamations, but as far as possible, he seemed to save his full stops for the very last line. 

Take Sonnet 18,  “Shall I compare thee…”: six commas, four semi-colons, two colons, one question mark, and one full stop. 

Ezra Pound, on the other hand, would often refuse to use any end-stops at all. 

Take these lines from Canto LII:

The empress offers cocoons to the Son of Heaven

Then goes the Sun into Gemini

Virgo in mid heaven at sunset

indigo must not be cut

No wood burnt into charcoal

gates are all open, no tax on the booths.

No commas, no colons or semi-colons, “midheaven” is split for emphasis or for pause. There’s as little punctuation as possible, down to “gates are all open, no tax on the booths.”  That solitary comma functions almost as a speed bump near an intersection. 

According to Daniel Albright, W.B. Yeats had ‘punctuational quirks’ which he was happy to leave to his editors to sort out.  It was as if those technicalities were above or below the poet, who belonged to another realm of language.  

T.S. Eliot, like his mentor Pound, would sometimes drop punctuation altogether, but then he would go and stick in a full stop just to confound the reader:

On Margate Sands.

I can connect

Nothing with Nothing

(“The Waste Land,” lines 300–302)

Most people read those lines as “On Margate Sands, / I can connect / Nothing with Nothing.” So why the full stop? Some say it’s to heighten the sense of isolation and fragmentation, but it actually spoils the drama rather than intensify it. “I can connect / Nothing with Nothing” is no longer restricted to this moment, here-and-now, on Margate Sands. It steals some of the bombast. Perhaps that was the point, who knows? 

One thing that seems pretty clear is that punctuation plays by different—or fewer—rules in poetry. 

In “Un Coup de Dés,” Mallarmé throws punctuation out the window almost entirely, relying on spaces and font size to convey the necessary pauses and emphases. Punctuation becomes visual and spatial, and all the more effective for it.

Compare that with Sylvia Plath, who was a heavy punctuator:

Clownlike, happiest on your hands,

Feet to the stars, and moon-skulled,

Gilled like a fish. A common-sense

Thumbs-down on the dodo’s mode. 

(Opening lines of “You’re”) 

Apostrophes, hyphens, and commas in all the right places. 

So, the question is: does punctuation really matter in poetry? 

Perhaps it depends on whether it’s intended to be read aloud or read off the page. At a reading, intonation and cadence work magic that is sometimes hard to replicate in print, where that same impact disappears somewhere between too much and too little punctuation. 

I suppose we’ve all got our own punctuational foibles. I often neglect end-stops. I know I shouldn’t, but putting in a comma, semi-colon or colon just feels wrong at the end of some lines. Not all, just some. I could not actually say why. It’s not a rational thing. It’s pure feeling. 

So whether you’re partial to Elizabeth Bishop’s em-dashes or agree with Joyce that quotation marks “are an eyesore,” rules are strange visitors in poetry. You can choose whether to follow them, or which ones to follow, and no one can really complain—except the reader, who will have to read in all the end-stops and what-nots we choose to leave out.

Anthony Doyle is a founding member of Old Scratch Press. He is the author of the novel Hibernaculum and the recently-published Jonah’s Map of the Whale and Other Poems.

Johnny on the Railway…

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Anthony Doyle

My grandmother was widowed young, and her sister and brother never married. The three lived together in the same flat in inner-city Dublin. My gran and great-aunt Fran worked at a chocolate factory for a time.  They also cleaned offices and, I think, a cinema.  

Aunt Fanny, as we knew her, was basically another grandmother to us. In fact, grandmother was very much a two-sided coin: May and Fran, Nanny and Fanny. There was also our Great-Aunt Annie, who barely moved or spoke, and spent the last decade or so of her life sitting in an armchair in the corner. She paid attention though, and if I didn’t get some Jaffa cake biscuits, she’d make sure that travesty was set to rights.  That corner of the flat felt irredeemably empty after she died. There may as well have been a hole in the floor. 

Aunt Fran, my mother’s aunt, was an unusual-looking woman. I suspect Roald Dahl would have turned her into a character if he’d ever met her. But she was also one of the kindest-hearted people I’ve ever met, and she had a wicked sense of humor. 

She also loved kids, and she had a good way with them, too; an instinctive knack at communicating with them. There were quite a few cousins on my mother’s side, and when Aunt Fran wasn’t threatening to “gobble” us all up, she’d sit us on her knee and launch into the famous, fabulous, ridiculous “Johnny on the Railway”. My mother didn’t approve, or feigned disapproval (probably the latter). She’d say this wasn’t the sort of thing you should sing to kids, but we all loved it. She’d bounce us on her knee and chant:

Johnny on the railway

picking up stones. 

Along came the engine

and broke all his bones. 

‘Oh’, said Johnny, 

‘that’s not fair!’

‘Oh’, said the engine,

‘I – DON’T – CARE!’

That simple little rhyme, delivered with her theatrical flair, never ceased to end in cackling laughter. 

I have never forgotten it. Funny and, well, cruel. 

Unconsciously, I’m sure its message was installed way back then, but I recently started thinking about it, and I was actually struck by its stark meaning. This evil relative of Thomas the Tank Engine is no simple train, and if you look past the obvious questions as to what the hell Johnny was doing (a) picking up stones and (b) on the railway tracks, of all places, there’s actually a frighteningly wise message here. One that our great-aunt, a woman with little or no formal education, but well-schooled in the ways of the world, thought important enough for us to learn early doors. 

Life is full of trains like this one. 

They run on tracks, so they don’t—wont’, can’t—swerve. They follow their grooves, their natures, and they don’t have fast-acting brakes or the slightest inclination to slow down. They run full-steam ahead, and god help anyone who strays into their path, because they won’t stop. 

Johnny is you, me, my Aunt Fran. Just people going about our business, which may be simple, perhaps even pointless—like picking up stones on rail tracks—but it’s what we do, and we have a right to do it. Rights are words, not shields. They don’t stop trains. Rights only work if they’re respected, and the trains of this world respect nothing and no-one. It could be an actual psychopath or sociopath, or a narcissist who dazzles, then destroys, or a power-drunk boss, beat cop, bureaucrat, a CEO who sees only figures on spreadsheets, or even—who knew?—a president. There are trains for every imaginable set of tracks, just as churches run on beliefs, parties on ideologies, empires on big ideas…Trains one and all. And there’s no point arguing with them, no point complaining about how unfair it is when they mow you down.

Stones and bones—there’s a beautiful parallel there. Stones are the bones of the earth. Bones are the pillars and architraves of the body. We—“bags of bones”, another of Aunt Fanny’s favorites—go looking for stones to fill our bags (because we’re still, in essence, Paleolithic), but when we meet that iron behemoth powered by steam, we get destroyed. All broken. Scissors cuts paper, rock breaks scissors, train breaks the rock, and all Johnny’s bones.    

One thing I’m sure of today, looking back at all the times my Aunt Fran gave us “the Johnny treatment”, is that she probably knew, deep down, perhaps even somewhat unconsciously, that there was more to that ditty than just a funny and slightly wicked rhyme. She knew, I’m sure, that there was a brutal truth in it, a message which no end of idealism should ever gloss over, and which we’d all do well to learn early on:

Stay away from life’s trains, because they will crush you, given half a chance. And no, they will not care.

Anthony Doyle is an Old Scratch Press member, the author of the novel Hibernaculum and the forthcoming poetry book Jonah’s Map of the Whale.

Poems and cockroaches…call the exterminator!

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by Anthony Doyle

Pluriplaneta apocalyptica

Poor poetry. Such a bad rep. 

As Ben Lerner says in The Hatred of Poetry, writing a poem is a heroic gesture doomed to failure, because it attempts to do something nigh-impossible: be totally unique whilst speaking to universal experience—and doing all that with song. 

It’s not hard to be unique (we all are). It’s not hard to speak to universal experience (we’re born contributors). But try doing both at once, and set to a drumbeat made out of syllables… Poetry, he says, “arises from the desire to get beyond the finite and the historical . . . and to reach the transcendent or divine.” What could possibly go wrong? Tilting at fire-breathing windmills…it’s a strange occupation to choose, and a thankless one, too. 

When poets are not being scoffed at for being genuine failures, we can also be derided for being posers (inauthentic failures). That’s largely because being a poet is quite easy to fake. You can appear to be doing it without actually doing it. Just write down pretty much anything, break it up into shorter lines, throw in some indents, give it a catchy title and…voilà: you’re a poet. 

So failure or poser, the poet cannot win; paradoxically, we’re the only thing full of hot air that never actually rises.  

Individually, we’re an inconvenience. Collectively, we’re a plague. An infestation.

Yes, poets are everywhere, and so are our poems. You’ll find us/them on social media, on hand towels, on subway trains, graffitied on underpasses, printed on T-shirts. You’ll find us scrawled on the third tile from the left, three rows up from the floor of the school restroom, just under the leaky sink…

Yes…poems are literature’s cockroaches. Want proof?

  • They teem in their millions
  • They feed on literally anything at all
  • Kill one, ten more take its place
  • You’re never more than a foot away from one, know it or not
  • There are 4,600 different types
  • They will survive a nuclear blast

Okay, that last one is not exactly true. Contrary to popular belief, cockroaches would not survive a nuclear war. Blattaphiles (yes, “roach lovers”) reluctantly acknowledge that the intense heat would put an end to their beloved Gregor Samsas, one and all. 

But poems would survive. Poems will. 

When those post-apocalyptic, bunker-dwelling Adams and Eves re-emerge from underground, minus their smartphones, laptops, tablets, moleskines, poems will begin to appear all over the waste land, scratched into the walls of ruins or etched into rockfaces. Poems will mysteriously turn up on charred ground, like crop circles in corn fields, or old SOSes arranged out of wreckage on dead beaches. There’ll be elegies smeared onto the sides of burnt-out cars; odes scrawled with metal into blackened concrete; sonnets gouged into radioactive mud in some brave new cuneiform. With time, epics will strut triumphantly across abandoned concourses, the flagstones turned to stanzas, daubed, if need be, in human blood.  

If we survive, poems will survive. Because when our vast literature gets blown to pieces along with the badly designed Death Star that is our civilization, it’ll be poetry they take with them into the escape pods. No novels, no plays, just a volume of poems. Condensed poiesis. Poetry is the seed, the source code. An iamb’s all it takes to set the cogs in motion again. 

Perhaps on those long Fallout nights, with no streaming, no social-media feeds, nothing to entertain us, the poet will be appreciated for what Lerner calls our “tragic failures”, and for the occasional bawdy limerick or snide acrostic. Our day will come again. Our star will rise. 

And we still won’t sell, because there won’t be any money.  

As for the cockroaches, not even the anti-Noahs of the exterminating arts will keep them out of those arks. So they, too, will escape the purge. We’ll see them scuttle free alongside us to reclaim the world…with a haiku scribbled on their backs.

Anthony Doyle is the author of the novel Hibernaculum and the poetry book Jonah’s Map of the Whale, coming soon from OSP.