tags: On Punctuation, Elizabeth Austen, poetry, National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month, and I plan to post one poem per day, every day, this month (If you have a favorite poem that you'd like me to share, feel free to email it to me). Today's poem was suggested by a reader and bird pal, Diane, who wrote; "I like the flow -- the freedom -- the not-so-subtle irreverent urging to think outside the box -- the joyful, (very) suggestive sauciness..." . This poet, Elizabeth Austen, is based in my original home, Seattle, and this poem appears here with her kind permission (the author will be checking comments, so please do ask her questions or respond to the poem, too).
On Punctuation
not for me the dogma of the period
preaching order and a sure conclusion
and no not for me the prissy
formality or tight-lipped fence
of the colon and as for the semi-
colon call it what it is
a period slumming
with the commas
a poseur at the bar
feigning liberation with one hand
tightening the leash with the other
oh give me the headlong run-on
fragment dangling its feet
over the edge give me the sly
comma with its come-hither
wave teasing all the characters
on either side give me ellipses
not just a gang of periods
a trail of possibilities
or give me the sweet interrupting dash
the running leaping joining dash all the voices
gleeing out over one another
oh if I must
punctuate
give me the YIPPEE
of the exclamation point
give me give me the curling
cupping curve mounting the period
with voluptuous uncertainty
-- Elizabeth Austen first published in the Seattle Review, Vol. XXVI, No. 1.
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I hope that the following meets with your approval. My mother was an active Feminist in the early 1950s, when that was far from the American mainstream, who introduced me to the previous generation, including elderly Suffragettes. My mom organized what were later called "consiousness raising" groups in the neighborhood, and got many local women to again pursue their dreams, go back to school, become professors and lawyers and writers, and (frequently) had to divorce the husbands who diapproved.
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NO GIRL NEXT DOOR
by
Jonathan Vos Post
The girl next door. What girl? What door?
No true next door in an apartment house
in Brooklyn Heights in the Korean War.
The girl upstairs, in a flowered blouse,
twisted by Polio, playing "Night and Day"
on a lonely piano. The girl Dad called "Mouse"
or "Mousie," two floors down, after her sister went away,
her brother went through Synanon, her parents' divorce,
was a prostitute in a negligee.
All single mothers proud without remorse,
women who cast their lives into careers,
widows, students drugged through another course,
were lost in a rented maze, dazed by the years
when "Night and Day" drowned out the Music of the Spheres.
1148-1231
17 Apr 85
Copyright 1996, 1997 by Emerald City Publishing.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced without permission.
May be posted electronically provided that
it is transmitted unaltered, in its
entirety, and without charge.
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