Poetry Thursday - Walking, Blues by Jane Mead

(via)

Walking, Blues

Rain so dark I

can’t get through—

train going by 

in a hurry. The voice

said walk or die, I

walked,—the train

and the voice all 

blurry. I walked with 

my bones and my heart

of chalk, not even

a splintered notion:

days of thought, nights

of worry,—lonesome 

train in a hurry.

(via)

In addition to managing her family's farm in northern California, growing wine grapes, Jane Mead has published five books of poetry. Her most recent book, World of Made and Unmade, was nominated for the National Book Award. Published interviews (on her website) give insight into her work - including her use of double punctuation, which is meant so serve for precise pacing, giving information on the pace of thinking.

Apostrophe

The greengrocer's apostrophe has made its way to Japan - as shown in this selection of Japanese signs. Delight in further punctuation schadenfreude here.

Aspects of the sonnet

The sixth of the ten sonnets I'm writing/rewriting/memorising is Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen - in the book I'm using for the source of the sonnets, Poems on the Underground, there's a facsimile of the manuscript of the sonnet -

My method of memorising is to start with the last line and add one line after another, which means that the final line moves down the page, and is the only legible line. As a result the (better-remembered) ends of the poems are the bits that are slushing round in my brain, the rhythm of the lines giving them a sort of music.

One of the things that's hard to remember is the punctuation - the breathing in the poem - so I cut some punctuation marks out of erasers and used them to replicate that aspects of several of the sonnets -

The lines of the poem seem very short, written this way - how to make them more like the poem itself? This led to thinking about the rhythm of the poem - da dum, da dum etc (iambic pentameter) and how the words might have contributed to that - but when you look at the words, most are just one syllable, very plain!, rather than what you might expect of a "poetic" word... As the punctuation falls in the spaces between the words, I decided to indicate the words and spaces to show the role of punctuation in the lines.

After some hours of embroidery onto squared paper, here is "Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part"  - beside it is the scanned version of the stitched page, which is intended to have printed on the reverse not the "wrong side" of the stitching, but the words of the poem -

Here is the reverse of the stitching - after a bit of practice, four-sided stitch settles into a regular rhythm of its own -

However I don't like the look of the punctuation marks on the stitched page, and will think about what to do next....

Book du jour - a punctuated journey

In the sleepless reaches of the night I had an idea about taking the words out of sentences, paragraphs, pages, books... and leaving only the punctuation. These examples are from "Owl" by Desmond Morris.

Towards the end I was thinking about how to space out the punctuation - or rather, include the word spaces as part of the punctuation. And then I started thinking about how different authors - or different genres, or different literary eras - might have different "punctuation journeys". And that sent me to sleep...

The idea seemed worth a try, so I took a book almost at random, which happened to be A Stranger at Green Knowe by Lucy Boston, and opened it almost at random and started reading/writing, using 6B graphite -

Unfortunately, rather than starting on a nice clean sheet of paper I was trying to combine two experiments, the other being whether the coloured ink would show up under black ink at all. The idea was to cover the sheet with ink and rub it to bring the graphite through.

Too faint!

To cut a long story short, it didn't work - the graphite lines were too thin, and the writing was lost. But the reading was most enjoyable!