Dashes and Such

Punctuation is at the heart of my poetry; it seeks to represent a psychological, physical, or emotional upset. A thwarting of sorts. Thwarting in poetry serves to impede or shift the poem from one line of thought into another—it can complicate the image, scene, or emotional tone of the poem. The dash doesn’t always thwart—sometimes it adds to the previous statement, or provides emphasis (which is grammatically sound).

For me, a dash, whether internally or at the end of line offers the flexibility to make a poetic jump that requires space, or halting. I don’t have a problem finding a place to insert a dash and it is something that I consider my strong point. My work is held up through the functions of a dash. My “problem” with the dash is writing the line or words that follow it. I am constantly asking myself how to proceed from there…what I should write next. Should I begin a new line of thinking? Should I complicate the previous image? It isn’t about the position of the dash, rather what is to follow the dash. To understand the function of dashes and the subsequent lines and words, I am looking at a variety of poets that have mastered the use of a dash. The poets that I have looked at are:

·         Emily Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson
·         William Carlos Williams, Spring and All
·         EE Cummings, a selection of poems
·         Kimberly Burnick, Good Night Brother

Annotations for William Carlos Williams’ Spring and All
“Or rather, the whole world is between: Yesterday, tomorrow, Europe, Asia, Africa, – all things removed and impossible, the tower of the church at Seville, the Parthenon.”

Williams uses the dash to add motion to the prose. Moreover, it would seem that the dash serves to impede his series because it is a never-ending series. The list highlights how the eye cannot see any of these things in full—it his first mention of the use of the imagination versus reality. He cannot go on forever so he dashes off; he uses the punctuation instead of saying, etc… Another interesting facet of this section is Williams’ use of a comma in conjunction with the dash, almost as though he is preparing his readers for a quiet upset. When I reach the comma, I take a breath because I can feel his choice to create a distance between what I have just read and what is about to come…which relates to the phrase, “the whole world is between.” Furthermore, his dash does something that I myself want to do. He follows the dash with a statement that complicates the statement prior to the dash. Before the dash and the statement, the list was just a list, but the insertion of the statement completely changes the way the reader “reads” the list. It redefines what contemporaries of his time “see” the imagination.

This is different from my poetry because I use dashes to thwart an image or idea. I tend to dash off when I see the poem coming to a point that has nowhere to go or needs me to frustrate it into a new image or complicated idea, but I have a hard time creating a line after the dash that further complicates the previous lines and/or images. I lack the confidence to complicate the situation. After reading this bit of prose, I wanted to try it for myself with a previously written poem. I took a set of lines from “Lineage" that contains a dash and complicated it in the same way that WCW did:

Original Version:
“The concrete crushes the street heavy
after the sun sets    little chirps turn off everywhere,
the world black
           and the sky very gray
vultures circle in sync with the cyclone air—”
Adapted Version:
“The concrete crushes the street heavy
after the sun sets    little chirps turn off everywhere,
the world black
           and the sky very gray--
vultures circle readying to pluck out my eyes.”

The image in the first set of lines ended with a dash and nothing followed it. The image hung there and didn’t leave the reader with anything. I don’t want that to become a habit in my work. To just end it. I rearranged the position of the dash to come before the last line in an effort to complicate the entire image and result in a blinding of the reader after so much seeing was presented in the previous sections.

“…we alone live there is but a single force— the imagination.”
This is different from his other uses of the dash. He treats it with the same meaning as an equal sign. He gives the line equal weight on both sides of the dash and makes both clauses invaluable to the meaning of the poem.

Poem V, Page 23.
“enter black hearts. Barred from
seclusion in lilys they strike
to destroy—“
                       “Beastly humanity…”

The dash definitely thwarts the cultivated image and introduces a new idea and image. The image following the dash does resonate back to the other image…he maintains fluidity from one side of the dash to the other.

Poem VII, Page32:
“the Milky Way
without contact – lifting
from it – neither hanging
nor pushing—"

The series of dashes complicates and elaborates on a single idea.

Annotation Notes on Good Night Brother by Kimberly Burwick

From “Weakening the Spring Currents” 
The poem starts out with a “How” question, ending in a dash:
                       "How could I have known that you
                       would sever the strict shimmering of all
                       green birds on snow--
                       each facing south-southwest"

Here is a classic example of a dash elaborating on the previous line, but in this case, the dash is vital to the entire poem. I think that without it, this poem would fail. As the reader, we are left wondering on the actual snow? On a snowplow? On a snow drift? Burwick leaves me wondering where we are other than the cold. Where is the speaker? Is this her imagination, a memory, or physical? Merely a metaphor? The line following the dash does it again…placing the to the south-southwest…looking? All facing one direction? To migration? To summer? She leaves me with so many questions, yet not misunderstood question since they all leave me in the same direction as the poem. Direction, metaphorically, literally, and spatially, it is directive. I took to her idea, and wrote something with a similar idea:

Each drake works her and when the offense is over--
they fly far, far away.
I wanted to give the lines that ambiguity that Burwick uses to create an open-ended tone and image.

Annotations on EE Cummings, a selection of poems
Pg 42, the wind is a lady
“moves) at sunset
And who—touches—the
hills without any reason”

While this seems like the perfect interruptive notion of a dash, Cummings alters it slightly by treating the word that completes the statement like a secret. The word touches becomes sensual. Since many of my poems hit a sensual thread, I really liked the way he repositions the words within the punctuation to create a mood. By segregating the word touches, he sets up the entire poem for tactile exploration. The other reason that I am attracted to this set of lines is because I do not tend to use two dashes this close together to segregate a word, phrase, or idea, and that is something that I am learning to include in my work to enhance the reading of my poetry. Like before, I went ahead and attempted the Cummings-style dash:

“Her mouth lies to me,
—lips moistened--
smirking her crooked lips stained blue”

Cummings does something else with the dash that I haven’t seen very often and that is to put it at the beginning of a stanza. The “front” dash adds an interiority to his poetry that deepens the meaning. For example, in “here is ocean, this is the moonlight” on page 94, Cummings writes about the ocean and the moon, of course talking about love, but sticks hard to the metaphor until he reaches the dash.

See here:
“forgets the entire and perpetual sea
—but if yourself consider wonderful
That your (how luminous) life toward twilight will…”
He stops for a moment and in the stanza that starts with the dash, he inserts himself into the poem. He connects the lovers.
​
Annotated Notes on Emily Dickinson
I read a dozen of Emily Dickinson’s poems searching for answers about the dash. I found her work difficult to discuss because she uses it formally with a comma that precedes the dash. Moreover, I found that Dickinson used the dash as a substitution for most other punctuation, i.e. periods, colons, semicolons, etc. Her poems relied on the dash, but not in a way that complicated her lyrics. Since I don’t share the same style, I didn’t find her work useful for the thread that I am working on with respect to dashes. I did note that it was interesting that Dickinson’s poems survived through dashes and I intend to try my hand at writing a poem that only uses dashes as punctuation. For that, I am glad that I reevaluated her work with dashes in my head.