Mark My Words by Mitchell Lee Clark;

Author:Mitchell, Lee Clark;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

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Enjambment: Cummings, Williams, Giovanni

Surprising as it sounds, prose may well be more readily left unpunctuated than poetry, though poets have a longer modern history of experimenting with an absence of marks. And when they do, it is often because line breaks serve as a form of disguised punctuational guide or, in Charles O. Hartman’s words, “as a kind of master punctuation mark” (Hartman 153). Arguably as well, the less punctuation poetry exhibits, the less simply verbal it seems to become and the more its impact verges on the visual, which may explain the allure of shaped or pattern poems (sometimes known as visual or concrete poetry) that burst into prominence in the mid-twentieth century. Typographical marks convey meaning in poems as much ocular as rhetorical, whose effect is thereby largely lost when read aloud. Yet short of such experiments, poets often enjamb lines or drop capitalization and periods, evincing poetic statements with neither pauses nor caesuras.1

A trio of American poets has been drawn to this structural possibility out of a shared resistance to conventional modes, though for reasons that curiously happen to be diametrically opposed. E. E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Nikki Giovanni each embraced the freedom of abandoning punctuation, with its assorted implications, and in the process offer a sharp contrast not only to other figures in this study but distinctively to each other. Cummings turned from conventional punctuation as a means of exploring what otherwise seemed hidden, the visual realms of poetry; Williams did so out of a radical reconception of the relation between image and referent; Giovanni did so out of a desire to perfect an exhortatory, distinctively oral mode. Yet each of these three anticipated the wonderfully fruitful ambiguities generated by a lack of punctuation in poems, especially with regard to agency and perspective. Indeed, Cummings resisted marks so assiduously that he published under the sobriquet e e cummings, while Giovanni reframed stanzaic conventions in an effort to proclaim a distinctive black consciousness. Along with Williams, their poems establish borders where punctuation might forcefully seem to detract from rather than add to a poetic resonance. And from this perspective, it is as if Cummings and Williams, who each admired the other immensely, helped prepare the way for Giovanni’s success in an entirely different formal venture.

Cummings is usually associated with the modernist turn toward free-form poetry, following rhythms of natural speech to delight in whimsical possibilities of verbal and visual play. Indeed, the visual at times seemed to overtake the verbal, as Marianne Moore exuberantly proclaimed: “The physique of the poems recalls the corkscrew twists, the infinitude of dots, the sumptuous perpendicular appearance of Kufic script . . .” (Moore 47).2 Over time, he would even abandon the conventional syntax and capitalization of his early stanzaic poems, often in celebrating a spirit of carpe diem.

In his celebrated poem “since feeling is first,” from his second collection, Is5 (1926), Cummings expresses a belief in the primacy of emotion over reason, part of a perfectly recognizable romantic tenet:

since

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