Bare Poetry
What You Can and Can’t Do with Punctuation
Jasmine V. Bailey | September 2022
Jasmine V. Bailey
Poems without punctuation, if only making occasional appearances in literary journals, are nevertheless perennial staples of creative writing workshops, and are also often the bane of those workshops. Who has worked with the poem and not felt the temptation to cast off the diacritical shackles? When the stakes are low, it can be a productive exercise, and most poets find ourselves experimenting with cutting punctuation, even if we don’t wind up keeping or publishing the poems that result because we find that they so often fail the tests of pleasure and comprehension, or because the magic we had thought them likely to generate failed to materialize. Still, it is reasonable to embark upon and return to poetry without punctuation, particularly given that some masters have shown us how successful a tool the rejection of some tools can be. Why reject punctuation when it is a tool for creating meaning? Certainly punctuation can insist on relationships among words. If we discarded those gestures, we might reason, that might enable syntactical play: exciting ambiguities or kinetic juxtapositions that would not otherwise be there. In fact, we will see that when masters have used this tool they rarely generate significant syntactical play, and are often at pains to create syntactical clarity, using other tools to achieve it. We have to look more closely to see what poetry bare of punctuation can achieve, and how poets can best manipulate the lack of punctuation for their poems’ ends.
What You Can Do Without Punctuation
One of the first prominent instances of poetry without punctuation happened in a context that could hardly have been accompanied by more literary attention. In “What the Thunder Said,” the fifth and final section of The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot uses no punctuation between lines 322 and 359, and uses it very sparingly through the rest of the poem, with significant passages containing no punctuation at all. The authority of punctuation as it is commonly used is already unstable in The Waste Land by the final section. In “The Fire Sermon,” Eliot has the lines:
The river sweats
Oil and tar
The barges drift
With the turning tide
Red sails
Wide
To leeward, swing on the heavy spar.1
The language here is paratactic: it follows the regular pattern of subject, verb, direct object three times (plus the adjectival phrase “Wide / To leeward,” with its telling comma, in the third clause), but omits the semicolons or periods that would separate the three clauses in standard prose (between “tar” and “The”; “tide” and “Red.”)
In the opening lines of “What the Thunder Said,” anaphora acts in place of parataxis as a pattern that makes the syntax clear.
After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying2
The regularity of these phrases instructs us to consider them grammatically equal: this list of three phrases serves to open the sentence whose subject is “shouting and crying” in a compound prepositional phrase. The repetition of “after” makes it particularly clear that we are not to understand any nouns in the first three lines as the sentence’s subject, which would have been an ambiguity introduced by the omission of the commas separating the three components of the list if the preposition had not been repeated. Again, Eliot is avoiding syntactical ambiguity, and he is even willing to add extra words in order to be able to omit punctuation without leaving it unclear how his phrases function grammatically in his sentences. Eliot is, by all appearances, after something other than syntactical play in his choice not to use punctuation.
Another pattern Eliot creates seemingly in lieu of punctuation in the next stanza is repetition of images/words between the end of one line and the beginning of another.
Here is no water but only rock
Rock and no water and the sandy road
The road winding above among the mountains
Which are mountains of rock without water
If there were water we should stop and drink3
This gesture has a number of effects. It gives a sense of sedimentary accumulation from line to line and also of backstitching as a means of moving the whole idea he is trying to convey forward: two steps forward, one step back, etc. This gesture also serves, again, to make the syntax clear to the point of repetition. There is no other way to read “rock / Rock” or “road / The road” than to assume the kind of pause or rupture between them that would normally be indicated by punctuation, and “mountains / Which are mountains” can similarly only be read in one way, even if it could support different specific punctuations. If there’s anything Eliot’s showing through his syntax here, it’s that he can effect clarity among word relationships without using punctuation.
Another passage in this section suggests a positive effect that Eliot achieves by not using punctuation.
If there were the sound of water only
Not the cicada
And dry grass signing
But sound of water over a rock
Where the hermit-thrush sings in the pine trees
Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop
But there is no water4
As we’ve seen in the previous examples, and from any general impression of Eliot’s poetry or poetics, he is not eager to be misunderstood. In this passage, we can infer from the hyphen in “hermit-thrush” that Eliot will use a hyphen to avoid injecting new ambiguities into the language through the removal of punctuation: when it could make a difference in meaning, he uses punctuation to make his meaning clear. Whereas “hermit thrush” could be a metaphor, “hermit-thrush” is clearly the species, even though the hermit thrush is not usually hyphenated. Eliot keeps the unnecessary hyphen to make a fairly minute detail clear.
Once again, we see the poet taking advantage of the absence of punctuation to engage in poetic language governed by an imagistic and musical logic rather than grammatical logic.
Beginner poets who hope to use the lack of punctuation to generate play in their poems often wind up writing poems that are confusing where they mean to be illuminating, or jarring and opaque where they mean to be edgy and exciting. This kind of play in poetry is often better supported by the skillful use of punctuation, which provides the certainty to ground syntactical acrobatics and enables other possibilities in the poem, among which speech, dialogue, and the development of multiple characters or personae are only some possibilities. We can be aware of what these strategies are variously suited to and use punctuation, or not, successfully by assessing the kind of poem we are writing and the kinds of effects we’re trying to achieve.
Jasmine V. Bailey is the author of two collections of poetry: Alexandria, winner of the Central New York Book Award, and Disappeared. She is the winner of the 2009 Longleaf Press Chapbook Prize, the Michigan Quarterly Review’s Lawrence Goldstein Prize, and Ruminate Magazine’s VanderMey Nonfiction Prize. Bailey has translated Silvina López Medin’s That Salt on the Tongue to Say Mangrove.
Notes
1. T.S. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991), p. 63.
2. Eliot, Collected Poems: 1909-1962, p. 66.
3. Ibid, p. 66.
4. Ibid, p. 67.
5. W. S. Merwin, The Moving Target: Poems (New York: Atheneum, 1986), p. 62.
6. Ibid., p. 62.
7. W. S. Merwin, The Shadow of Sirius. (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2008), p. 49.
8. Ellen Bryant Voigt, Headwaters (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), p. 16.
9. Bryant Voigt, Headwaters, p. 14.
10. Ibid., p. 51.
11. Victoria Chang, The Boss (San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2013), p. 13.
12. Chang, The Boss, p. 12.
13. John Berryman, The Dream Songs (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969), p. 6.
