So I guess I haven't done this in a while, huh. I'm forgetful. And lazy. Those two are a terrible mix. I've been writing longhand in a notebook lately, so this poor blog has been neglected. Maybe I'll put up some entries I wrote in there. Maybe not, though. Like I said, I am pretty lazy. And forgetful.
Let's talk about... let's talk about language. About how it looks and what it represents to me. I'm taking a rhetoric that's been making me think about this kind of stuff a lot lately.
One thing people always ask me about, particularly in my poetry, is capitalization and punctuation. Okay, I guess that's two things. But they're like tied for first place.
I'm certainly heavily inspired by E. E. Cummings and W. S Merwin, breaking convention and making frequent use of he ability. It's sort of a philosophical thing now, something that just sort of developed in my head. Let me try to explain.
I'm certainly extroverted, but I still have a quiet speaking voice and generally try to keep my feelings and opinions to myself. So when you read a work of mine, you're entering a quiet area -- capitalization, to me, is loud. TYPING LIKE THIS certainly seems loud. Thus, typing in exclusively lowercase expresses a quieter mood. And in all reality, I don't give a shit about rules when it comes to stuff just swimming around in my head. So when I do use capitalization, it adds an even stronger emphasis -- even a simple I instead of i portrays something different. Am I feeling bold enough to consider myself worthy of capitalization? Am I trying to hide away, blending the representation of myself in with the other lowercase letters around it? If I start out a poem with a capital I, what could happen in the course of composition that causes the careful retreat of my ego, my desire to be seen? And the opposite -- has the catharsis of writing given me strength to turn my i into an I by the end? There's even a sense of value you can get just from noting what things are capitalized. It's important to me.
There is, of course, a time and place for conventional capitalization (letters, reports, etc) and I observe those. The only thing that really suffers from this mix of Capitalization Is A Tool! versus I Am A Tool of Capitalization is my casual typing via instant messengers. Have I mentioned I'm forgetful and lazy?
Punctuation, I adore thee. I make ample use of semi-colons (screw you, Hugo) and parentheses (!), dashes (oh, Dickens). I like to play with these in different ways -- obviously moving around commas can change a sentence dramatically (let's eat, grandma! versus let's eat grandma!), but I typically use them as a visual aid. I like pretty words. One of my favorite effects is playing with the speed of a line and how it is read out loud: "(iwillRIPoutyourheart)" is drastically different, at least to me, than "I will rip out your heart." The former is faster, the emphasis is on the word "rip," making, (again) at least for me, the following R consonants echo stronger.
I tend to interrupt myself a lot. Sometimes professors mark me down on academic papers because I have a sentence that is "too long," when in all reality it's a perfectly fine sentence -- it isn't even considered a run-on sentence, since I take great care to make sure that each clause is separated by some sort of punctuation, though it is often not a period. My problem with breaking up sentences like these is---I realize I'm saying this entirely too often---that, to me, these are one unit. They're a single stream of thought, and to break them into different pieces seems, to me, not only awkward but wrong; these ideas belong together, for whatever reason.
All these things aren't hard and fast rules at all -- I certainly am capricious enough to suddenly think differently about something for one reason or another. But for now, they remain as they are in this little Chelly head of mine, and therefore frequently manifest themselves in my writing. A lot of people call this kind of stuff "experimental," and I can't really argue with that -- I always feel like I'm grabbing hold of some odd idea and testing it out with language til it works. Luckily for me, the contemporary reader typically responds well to this sort of thing, and I can cultivate this desire to express myself in the smallest of details.
I really do love poetry.
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