The Point of Poetry

Let’s begin with a poem that uses most every tool a poet might employ—line, meter, rhyme, along with a thousand other niceties we’ve come to associate with the sound of poetry in the English language.

Th’ expence of Spirit in a waste of  shame
Is lust in action, and till action, lust
Is periured, murdrous, blouddy full of blame,
Sauage, extreame, rude, cruell, not to trust ...

The syntax of this opening quatrain of Shakespeare’s 129th sonnet contains two independent clauses, each taking the same simple form (x is y), except that in the second clause the y explodes into a long list of predicate adjectives (periured, murdrous, and so on). Reading these lines even as they were first published in 1609, we don’t pay much attention to the commas separating the nine adjectives (modern editors usually insert a comma between “blouddy” and “full of blame”) because we’re used to the way punctuation guides us through a sentence, taking us from the beginning of the poem to the end. But to notice the commas is to attend to a syntax that, in this case, threatens to overwhelm the organizational power of both the rhyme and metrical schemes with its swift accumulation of grammatical bits.

Now here’s a poem that gives up almost every tool a poet might employ—not only line, meter, and rhyme, but also punctuation.

now I say yes to the bridge the dead cross no thicker than a fingernail no wider than a knife eyes fixed on the Gates of  Paradise yes to the visible hills the actual hills olive trees with grey underleaf commas between each breath brief tremor smell of gunpowder then screams it was screams and screams all the way through

This passage from Michael Palmer’s “Idem 4” also contains two independent clauses: “I say yes” and “it was screams.” The syntax is more complex than in Shakespeare’s sonnet, but one might punctuate the poem as the syntax requests: “now I say yes to the bridge the dead cross, no thicker than a fingernail, no wider than a knife, my eyes fixed on the Gates of Paradise.” Something is lost here, just as something would be lost if I typed out Sonnet 129 as unpunctuated prose; Palmer wants us to associate a liminal world between life and death with a grammatical space where no commas exist, and his omission of punctuation dilutes the power of his syntax, just as Shakespeare’s highly agglutinative syntax blurs the integrity of his pentameter lines.

We’re used to reading poems that give up rhyme, meter, and line. Great poems have often eschewed punctuation as well, but probably because punctuation feels as basic to a poem as letters of the alphabet, we’ve paid less conscious attention to this fundamental element of written language. I don’t know of many unpunctuated prose poems: it’s easy to imagine giving up line, but once you’ve also sworn off punctuation, what do you have left? What would happen if we gave up the practice of separating words with spaces?

It’s instructive to remember that leaving a space between written words is a relatively recent convention. Before reading silently became a common practice, ancient and medieval scribes usually didn’t bother with spacing. Neither were the early texts of Greek, Latin, or Old English poems punctuated; nor were their lines registered visually. If you read the eighth-or ninth-century Old English poem we call “The Seafarer” where it was written down in the Exeter Book, it looks something like Palmer’s prose, even though the poem is organized sonically in lines. (I’ll translate this passage into modern English in a moment.)

Mæg ic be me sylfum soðgied wrecan siþas secgan hu ic geswincdagum earfoðhwile oft þrowade bitre breostceare gebiden hæbbe gecunnad in ceole cearselda fela atol yþa gewealc

But if you read a modern edition of “The Seafarer,” an editor will have adopted the convention of providing obvious visual cues for the sonic structure of the lines.

Mæg ic be me sylfum             soðgied wrecan
siþas secgan            hu ic geswincdagum

These lines aren’t distinguished by a relationship between stressed and unstressed syllables, as we’re accustomed to hearing centuries later in Shakespeare. Instead, following older procedures, every line has four stressed syllables, and the lines are further divided into two half-lines, each of which contains two stresses; a variable pattern of alliteration links the stressed syllables of each of the two half lines: “bitre breostceare gebiden hæbbe.” These lines are lines because of the way they sound, just as the metrical line “Th’ expence of Spirit in a waste of shame” and the free-verse line “so much depends” are lines because of their sound—even if now familiar visual conventions have made us aware of how lines look on the page.

Here’s my translation of the first sentence of “The Seafarer,” a translation that doesn’t replicate the poem’s pattern of stress and alliteration but that does attempt, in its use of modern spelling and punctuation, to stay true to the shape of the syntax.

I can tell a true story about myself,
speak of  my travels, how in days of toil
often I have endured long hardship,
abided bitter heartbreak,
known on shipboard the embrace of sorrow,
the terrible tossing of waves.

The first sentence of “The Seafarer” says I can x about y. The first half of the sentence (I can x) consists of three parallel versions of the same independent clause: I can tell a true story, I can speak of my travels, I can speak of how in days of toil. These three clauses are linked paratactically, in a list, asking for two commas to separate them. The third clause then opens the door to another list of three dependent clauses (about how I have endured long hardship, about how I have abided bitter heartbreak, about how I have known the embrace of sorrow), the parallel listing again asking for two commas. The verb of the final dependent clause (known) has two parallel objects (the embrace of sorrow, the tossing of waves), their separation asking for the sentence’s fifth and final comma. These punctuation marks are not condiments sprinkled over the poem at my pleasure; an editor couldn’t use periods or colons. By adding our now conventional punctuation to my translation of the Old English, I’ve made the organization of the syntax explicit, just as printing the poem in lines makes visually explicit its prosody.

English punctuation, like English spelling, didn’t become grammatically regularized until the rise of a ubiquitous print culture in the seventeenth century. Even when Shakespeare was writing in the early years of that century, punctuation was deployed erratically; John Donne called “points” but “accessories.” With a handful of small exceptions, no manuscript of a subsequently published Shakespearian or Donnian text exists in its author’s hand, but we do possess versions of their near contemporary Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poems written in several hands, including Wyatt’s own.

It may be good like it who list
but I do dowbt who can me blame
for oft assured yet have I myst
and now again I fere the same

It’s easy enough to hear that Wyatt’s unpunctuated quatrain is written in four-beat, mostly iambic lines (“But I do dowbt who can me blame”), even when the lines run together two independent clauses. But Wyatt’s rhythmic momentum is due to line working against syntax, not to the lack of punctuation as such. Were the syntax lineated this way, with or without editorially imposed punctuation—

It may be good,
like it who list.
But I do dowbt:
who can me blame?

—the poem’s animating rhythmic life would disappear: the duration of the lines and the duration of the clauses and phrases are in every case identical, and the resulting rhythm is clunkily regular. We need to feel the temporal unfolding of a poem’s language in tension with itself, punctuation guiding us through the syntax in one way and line guiding us through it in another.

Wyatt had few rules to break; a poet writing after him gives up punctuation knowing the rules. Writing in the later nineteenth century, Emily Dickinson deployed punctuation with charismatic idiosyncrasy, and writing several decades before her, the English romantic poet John Clare eschewed conventional spelling and punctuation, at least until his early publishers collaborated in making his texts. These metrically impeccable lines (a dimeter line followed by a trimeter, a pentameter, and another trimeter) largely organize the syntax as punctuation would, marking the inauguration of new phrases or clauses with conjunctions (nor, or), adverbs (where), or prepositions (in, of  ).

The trembling grass
Quakes from the human foot
Nor bears the weight of man to let him pass
Where thou alone and mute

Sittest at rest
In safety ’neath the clump
Of  huge flag forrest that thy haunts invest
Or some old sallow stump

Yet some of the lines of “To the Snipe” divide the syntax more disruptively, as punctuation cannot, cleaving subject from predicate (“The trembling grass/Quakes”—“Where thou alone and mute//Sittest”). These line endings are not marking the division of clauses and phrases but chopping them into pieces and thereby asking us to hear those pieces in a particular way. One feels the drama of the poem’s syntax heightening at these moments, especially because the enjambments are reinforced by the flipping of initial iambs into trochees: “Quakes from”—“Sittest.”

The time separating Wyatt, writing in the sixteenth century, and Clare, writing in the nineteenth, is the time not only of the rise of regular punctuation but the time when punctuation is, at least potentially, politicized as we sometimes know it today. When William Carlos Williams omitted punctuation from a free-verse poem at the beginning of the twentieth century, the omission was charged in the world outside the poem: does the omission remain charged? These unpunctuated lines by the later twentieth-century poet W.S. Merwin (born 1927) organize the syntax as punctuation would.

Again this procession of  the speechless
Bringing me their words
The future woke me with its silence
I join the procession
An open doorway
Speaks for me
Again

But these unpunctuated lines by Ellen Bryant Voigt (born 1943) generally do the opposite, interrupting rather than marking the integrity of grammatical units.

first frail green in the northeast the forest around us no longer
a postcard of Christmas snow clotting the spruce or worse
fall’s technicolor beeches sumac sugar maple death
even the death of vegetation should never be
so beautiful it is unseemly I prefer the cusps
they focus the mind

And this poem by Jos Charles (born 1988) gives up conventional spelling and lineation as well as punctuation.

tonite i wuld luv to rite the mothe inn the guarden / 2 greev it / & as a mater off forme / did u kno not a monthe goes bye / a tran i kno doesnt dye / just shye off 27 / its such a plesure to be alive / inn this trembled soot / u lent / shock is a struktured responce / a whord lost inn the mouthe off keepers / & u thum at the mothe / a dozen bes / i tethered thees nites / i gathred so manie treees

Why have these poets made these choices? What have they gained, and, since every gain is purchased at a price, what have they lost?

Merwin’s “Daybreak” is the final poem in his 1963 volume The Moving Target, the volume in which he first embraced the unpunctuated lines on which he would continue to spin variations for over half a century: were one to punctuate his lines as the syntax suggests, the punctuation would appear exclusively at the end of the lines. The Moving Target begins with punctuated poems, such as “In the Gorge,” and in retrospect one can imagine why Merwin came to find his punctuation unnecessary: the lines already function as punctuation, parsing the syntax into clearly consumable pieces—subject (“Our jagged hands”), prepositional phrase (“Like the ends of a broken bridge”), predicate (“Grope for each other”). Lineating Shakespeare’s sonnet in this way, lines corresponding to uninterrupted grammatical bits—

Th’ expence of Spirit
in a waste of shame
is lust in action
and till action
lust is periured
murdrous
blouddy
full of blame

—dissipates the most fundamental energy of the poem: the tension between its syntax and its lines (“till action, lust/Is periured”).

Here is the way Ellen Bryant Voigt did not lineate her syntax in “Privet Hedge,” from her 2013 volume Headwaters.

when my friend said knowledge does nothing for him
I felt at once superior and chastised
I’d just deduced the five new birds in my yard
woodpecker size and stripes and red blaze
but feeding on the ground
five yellow-shafted flickers
can the soul be known by its song
who hears it
what keeps it aloft
what keeps it whole
what helps it survive

This imposed lineation preserves the integrity of Voigt’s parallel clauses (who hears, what keeps, what helps), the repetition producing a consistent rhythm. As a result, the poem sounds like a record of considered thought rather than a volatile act of thinking, which is how “Privet Hedge” really sounds.

This is how Voigt actually lineates her syntax: rather than emphasizing the grammatical shape of clauses or phrases, the lines use enjambment to shape our experience of the syntax.

                                                 when my friend said
knowledge does nothing for him I felt at once superior
and chastised I’d just deduced the five new birds in my yard
woodpecker size and stripes and red blaze but feeding on the ground
five yellow-shafted flickers can the soul be known by its song who hears it
what keeps it aloft what keeps it whole what helps it survive habitual
pride greed wrath sloth lust a list compiled by a parent always
needing something to forgive you for

Voigt’s lineation of “Privet Hedge” avoids any consistent alignment of syntax and line, either violating the grammatical integrity of the clauses or running them together, thereby creating variable rhythms within the lines. The poem’s list of questions sounds not earnest but bewildered, uttered by someone who has not thought about the deadly sins—“pride greed wrath sloth lust”—until the second she finds herself uttering them. Didn’t this poem begin by talking about the weather?

Jos Charles begins and ends feeld with a spelling invocative of Middle English, the language Geoffrey Chaucer employed roughly four centuries after “The Seafarer” was written in Old English. But the point of the poem is not archival: Charles deploys that diction within a prose that introduces a slash where the early Merwin would use a line ending—between short clauses and phrases, not in the midst of them: “& as a mater off forme/did u kno not a monthe goes bye/a tran i kno doesnt dye.”

What is “a mater off forme” here? Charles invokes a weirder diction, making us think about words we might otherwise take for granted, but the poem doesn’t try to replicate any of the prosodies of the fourteenth century. Instead, the poem’s slashes separate the nine independent and dependent clauses (“tonite i wuld luv,” “a tran i kno”) from their always brief attendant phrases, and at the same time the slashes blur any grammatical hierarchy: the result is that, with so much else in flux, the slash and its use become a stable point in the poem, however initially unfamiliar. This climactic fifty-seventh section of feeld, other sections of which are lineated, asks us baldly to think about what the words say, rather than taking the meaning also for granted.

There’s nothing intrinsically right or wrong with any of these kinds of lineation, just as there’s nothing right or wrong about deploying a particular punctuation or spelling or meter. Context is all. We might choose to use line as a substitution for punctuation, leaving each line syntactically complete.

now I say yes to the bridge

Or we might use line to break the syntax in a grammatically predicable way.

now I say yes to the bridge
the dead cross
no thicker than a fingernail
no wider than a knife

Or we might use line to introduce tension, the lines cutting against the grammar of the syntax.

no thicker than a fingernail
no wider than a knife eyes fixed
on the Gates of Paradise yes
to the visible hills the actual hills
olive trees with grey underleaf

Or we might decide, as Michael Palmer ultimately did, that we want the poem to exist perpetually in a state where we long for “commas between each breath brief.” Even there, however, our experience of Palmer’s syntax is modulated. Just as we feel the opening stanza of Voigt’s “Privet Hedge” coming to a moment of composure with the syntactically complete line “they focus the mind,” we similarly feel Palmer’s prose poem settling down as it ends into the syntactically simpler sentence “it was screams and screams all the way through,” especially given the longer, more complex run-on syntax that precedes it.

A run-on sentence can be exciting, you’re reading one now! If the English language is a poet’s medium, as oil paint may be a painter’s, then that medium demands that we attend to the qualities distinguishing it. Yet the challenge, as Charles reminds us, is that the medium is not static: we can afford to try, after understanding what oil paint can do (as it were), what’s not done. Why give up conventional punctuation? Why give up line, meter, or rhyme? Why take it up? Without rhyme, meter must do more work to hold our attention. Without meter, line must do more work. Without punctuation, line must also do more work, but what kind will depend on whether the line endings are made to substitute for punctuation of the syntax or to break it.

Lines since Homer’s have sounded these ways, but their effects have meant different things at different times and in different places. An admirer once complained that the American radical poet Adrienne Rich was not imprisoned; instead, she was ignored. In the USSR Mandelstam was murdered for writing a little poem comparing Stalin’s mustache to a cockroach. Could the inflation of a poet’s power be as problematic as the refusal to countenance it? Would Galileo have been imprisoned if he’d said in verse that the earth revolves around the sun?

The notion that poems affect the world outside poems is easily exaggerated, but understandably so; poets spend lots of time on a poem’s formal properties, and apparently little things like punctuation beg to be meaningful in ways that are hard to describe. It’s not accidental that Shelley proclaimed poets “unacknowledged legislators” after the idealism fueling the French Revolution went horribly wrong, and any reader might feel today a wish for poetry to be powerful. But the wish has not necessarily empowered poetry. Our few hundred years of print culture, with all its limitations, may in time be forgotten, along with the writers who perpetuated it. But in art, especially this art made of language, another word for limitation is freedom: we only know that art will change.