Funktuation

And some suggestions for punctuation marks at CollegeHumor. Check out the andorpersand, the sinceroid, the super ellipsis, and the Morgan Freemark. Punctuation has never been so fun.

And for more punctuation, check out my previous posts News in Poetry and Recognize these Puncs?.

News in Poetry

Do you get the weekly newsletter from The Review Review? (If not, you can sign up here.) I've been getting it for a month or so now, and every issue has linked me with articles and resources that are useful or interesting.

For instance, this week they report on The Grinder, a site aiming to take over the void left when Duotrope became a fee-oriented tracking service and database, keeping many cash-strapped writers from being able to use their once-free services any longer. Right now The Grinder is only up and running for fiction markets, but it plans to add poetry and non-fiction soon.

In other news, Ocean Vuong, a young poet I admire and whose name is the name as one of my sons and for just about the same reason, is intereviewed at The Well & Often Reader.

Poetry Kanto, Japan's longest-running bilingual journal (which counts among its impressive list of past contributors Jane Hirshfield, Alicia Ostriker, Ilya Kaminsky, and Judy Halebsky) has recently become an online journal, leaving behind its paper history. They have a call for submissions out now; submit 3-5 poems before June.

Harpur Palate, another journal I routinely enjoy, is calling for submissions for a "country living themed issue." If you've got something related, or could write something, give them a try.

Finally, not exactly breaking news but news to me nonetheless, Flavorwire has some crazy punctuation marks to consider. Do you know the ElRey mark, for example? When you want to express equivocal enthusiasm, use this:

And, unfortunately too late for Valentine's Day, we learn of the Love Point:

And who doesn't need a sarcasm mark?:

Flavorwire has seven other obscure punctuation marks, and you can find more such marks at my blogpost from 2011 called "Recognize these Puncs?"

Recognize These Puncs?

Here's a fun article called "Fourteen Punctuation Marks That You Never Knew Existed" over at Buzzfeed.com (and a shout out to my virtual friend Kira who posted about this on Facebook).

Have a look and see how many of them you knew about previously. I knew 8 of them before reading the article. A few I wasn't familiar with are:

 The exclamation comma, for when you are excited, but also not finished.

Also, the asterism, for indicating minor breaks in a text, or to mean "untitled," which is great since "untitled" is a title, but maybe an asterism isn't.

There's also the because sign, which is the flipside of the therefore sign, and I love that, just because!

And finally, the aptly named snark:

Enjoy all the punctuation you can, that's my motto!

More Defense of the Oxford Comma

As posted by poet Shaindel Beers on Facebook (with this link):

More Oxford Comma Uproar

Mary Elizabeth Williams at Salon chimes in on the Oxford comma uproar. Her article includes the following amusing lines:

'It's true that Oxford's new punctuation guide is only for its P.R. department, and it comes with the clause that "when a comma would assist in the meaning of the sentence or helps to resolve ambiguity, it can be used." The university press, Oxford further hastens to remind us, remains "a commercially and editorially autonomous organization." But the prospect of the beloved Oxford comma being dumped by its own kin seems cruelly ominous. It's like Hugh Hefner saying he's no longer interested in blondes.'

Voice Among Voices

I listen to a lot of podcasts, a lot of podcasts. I'm listening to one right now as I type (the Leonard Lopate show, if you are interested). Mostly I listen to poetry and science. Poetry interviews, poetry readings, and poetry craft talks (these are harder to come by), and science, anything about science I will listen to.

Why have I become addicted to podcasts (and yes, it is bordering on an addiction)? One reason is that living in Japan, I miss having a writing community and this helps a little. Another reason is that I miss hearing English, any English, even drivel, even nonsense. I can go whole days without hearing any English other than my elementary-aged kids' ramblings, and one of them has to be cajoled to speak in English. I just want to hear English. (I want to talk in English too, but haven't found such an easy solution to that problem.)

So I listen to a lot of poetry podcasts and have become somewhat sensitive to the voices of poets when they read their work. Intonation, pitch, speed, pronunciation, pauses, all of it. I'm paying attention to it. And yesterday I heard a poet read her own work in a voice that was mellifluous, absolutely perfectly phrased, pitched, modulated, and inflected. I even found myself just listening to the music of her voice and ignoring the words, a big mistake because her poems are tiny wonders even when read off the page by the voice in my head.

You may be wondering who this poet was. It was Keetje Kuipers, reading for KQED's The Writer's Block series. Click on the link to hear Kuipers's lush tones.

Do you have a poet who you particularly enjoy listening to? If so, please share, and include links to audio if you know of any.

And now, in totally unrelated news, did you hear that the University of Oxford has done away with the Oxford comma (the comma after the penultimate item in a series or list)? It makes me feel slightly ill just to think of it. I am rather passionate about punctuation. (I have even used the Oxford comma in this post.) Thank goodness they have left the semi-colon and the em-dash alone......

Punk Punk-tuation

The summer I was nine, I sat one day in my mother's van in the parking lot of the local Wawa (those of you who know what a Wawa Market is now know where I grew up), wilting in the humidity, waiting with my sisters and brother for my mother to emerge with the green checkered ice cream carton that was going to save us from the heat, when I suddenly realized that the word "as" was going out of fashion. From my dazed and sweaty position, I jolted upright in my sticky naugahyde seat. I hadn't heard anyone use the word "as" in...as long as I could remember. Right then and there I decided single-handedly to rescue the word "as" from its recent obsolenscence. So it became my summer of similes: the backyard as hot as a desert, the pool as fun as a carnival, and on and on. It must have been tedious for everyone in the vicinity, but I will say this: the word "as" is alive and kicking today, and you all have my nine-year-old self to thank for it.

Now I propose to do the same for my favorite punctuation mark: the colon. The first problem in re-popularizing the colon is, well, its name. Sounds rather gastrointestinal, if you know what I mean. So first, I'd like to propose a contest to rename the colon. If you have any good ideas, anything better than mine (the dual vertical period, the rotated nostril mark) please write in immediately. My campaign depends on it.

Now, let's do a colon-oscopy, an in-depth examination of the colon, but not the icky kind. Let's look at the uses of the colon, as copied and pasted here from The Guide to Writing and Grammar:

(From here on down, I am cutting and pasting from said website, until further notice.)

***************

Use a colon [ : ] before a list or an explanation that is preceded by a clause that can stand by itself. Think of the colon as a gate, inviting one to go on:

There is only one thing left to do now: confess while you still have time.

The charter review committee now includes the following people:

the mayor

the chief of police

the fire chief

the chair of the town council

You nearly always have a sense of what is going to follow or be on the other side of the colon.

We will often use a colon to separate an independent clause from a quotation (often of a rather formal nature) that the clause introduces:

The acting director often used her favorite quotation from Shakespeare's Tempest: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

We also use a colon after a salutation in a business letter . . .

***************

Okay, here is where I stop copying and pasting from the website, though I do want to mention, for those of you who are huge colon fans (like myself), that if you scroll to the bottom of that website, you will find The Poor Man's Animated Exercise on Uses of the Colon, with fabulous and (literally) colorful examples of when to use and when not to use the beloved colon.

Okay, so here's what I like so much about colons: You nearly always have a sense of what is going to follow or be on the other side of a colon. And that's why I adore using colons in poems. I like to follow a colon with something that I hope the reader won't expect to follow or be on the other side, combined with the structural implication that I did in fact expect the reader to expect it, or know it, or to perhaps bop herself on the side of the head thinking "Why didn't I see that coming?" I love the tension, all embodied in that one tiny punctation mark: the colon. In fact, I probably use colons too often: so sue me.

And I love the inventive use of other punctuation marks in other people's poems too. For example, Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon in her book Open Interval uses the em-dash and the colon in combinations that my poor brain cannot understand. Reading those poems gave me a headache. I actually threw the book at one point, my head hurt so badly. And I loved every minute of it. Van Clief-Stefanon almost tore a hole in my brain with all that wild punctuation, and how often do you get to say that?

So here's what I want from you, readers, if any of you actually made it this far:
1) suggestions for re-christening the colon
2) examples of other poems and poets using punctuation creatively and to great effect
3) tributes to your own favorite punctuation marks.

The end. (And none too soon.)