WRI(GH)TE [ING] PUNCTUATION: READING LESLIE SCALAPINO

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This next example shows how Scalapino uses the comma to control the breath in the poem Limen:

Amor Asteroid transfixing her gaze not auger-eyed anyway the soft
eyes on either side muzzle panning the horizon having to turn for
her powder monkey boy jockey, having been taken from him,
who’d been removed from the track, she’d begin cribbing wind-
sucking in deliration, they figured, so another jockey aulophyte
takes her into the deliquescing hills become dawn before them
before other hills and rearing on one of the hills she trots
transformed— (120)

In this section the reader is given five commas used to quickly and rhythmically describe the monkey boy jockey. They follow what is a jammed three lines of simultaneous occurring actions and they act to let the reader rest and gain his bearings before being sent off again into the next three lines including complex images and abstract words that may require a dictionary. These five short clauses act to let the reader surface before sending them back into what is layered and complex content.

Throughout The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom the comma functions (at times) to construct complex and dependent sentences, and to include qualifiers, etc. In doing so, these marks blend quietly within the rest of the text. Although such has its function, Scalapino’s more creative choices (including omission) allow the marks to have a much more active life and importance.

The last mark this essay will discuss is the question mark. It is perhaps the most active of Scalapino’s punctuation because it is almost never used formally: “as a mark indicating a question” (Dictionary.com). To begin this section, Gertrude Stein describes the question mark best in her essay On Punctuation:

Therefore I ask you therefore wherefore should one use the
question mark. Beside it does not in its form go with ordinary
printing and so it pleases neither the eye nor the ear and it is
therefore like a noun, just an unnecessary name of something. A
question is a question, anybody can know that a question is a
question and so why add to it the question mark when it is already
there when the question is already there in the writing. (214)

In the poem “the like”, Scalapino uses the question mark from beginning to end:

Therefore the present doesn’t exist…the girls abandoned as infants
by parents who in poverty or chance mischance hadn’t rigged the
births to be male otherwise aborted or killed…the population soon
weighted with pampered boys…boys are forced to become child-
soldiers once committed bound to their own murderous acts
outside ‘society’/the jewel civilization they’re lost forever. ?? We
don’t know that.

—supposedly, which hadn’t a present ever? So there isn’t death
either? or being in it. But they’re outside it, the parents etc.

Why isn’t it heard elsewhere the grazing herd? (148-49)

This dramatic poem found near the end ties in secondary characters, “the boys” and “the girls,” that are continuously linked to war throughout the book. This poem questions the civilization that has brought them into a world that has no memory, present, or future. In the first two examples Scalapino uses the question mark to demand the reader’s attention probing questions such as Is this real? Is she talking about my country my children? What is our reality like without a present? By initiating the reader’s curiosity, Scalapino does two things: She demands their involvement, and makes them critically look for an answer (supposing there was one).

In the last example, the last sentence of the poem, Scalapino uses a question mark formally as though to say, I’m serious, pay attention. In this way the question mark functions as a lasting impression to be taken further to the end of the book and beyond as well as to suggest that this poem, and the issue of how children are brought into and through the world, is not a disappearing action. It is an infinite ongoing action. Her question mark in this poem, and many others, draws necessary attention to an important event with layers to uncover.

Here are two other examples when Scalapino asks the reader to perform the same attention and curiosity.

The stationary gelechild who is actually moving rapidly away
zoom(s?) in reverse…Since they cannot zoom to what would be
forward for them? (58)

The mark in this first section is necessary and consistent to the poem, as well as to Scalapino’s entire work because it creates a disorienting sense of movement asking the reader what exactly is forward, or movement, in a space where there is no orientation—only a fluid area where potential events are always happening.

The second:

[The] Distaffer apart at sea having time disappears the ocean bit-
stream indigo horizon pure whole unbroken sight anyone seeing it
happy is disorder? (Scalapino 38)

With this early introduction to the Distaffer, the question mark helps begin to define her, along with her name, as a representation of a sexual body always in search of happiness. It does so by asking the reader how this location and this character could be, or is, happy.

In conclusion , each of these punctuation marks are essential tools Scalapino uses to interact with the reader. They pose us to ask questions, to fill in the blanks, to breathe, slow down, re-read, and to have any number of other instant, though often fleeting, interpretations. If Scalapino had chosen to let them disappear within the work as obligatory or formal marks, the potential of the text to interact with the reader in an individually creative way would be non-existent. Characters and events would be required to follow a logical narrative. This would be fine for a work necessitating such parameters, but this is not one of those works. This is a text made from clay that goes back to clay, shape shifting and solid and transparent, opening every imaginative door. The punctuation in The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom begs the non-complacent reader to come to their own conclusions—to find within the text something deeper, and more lasting than empty lines on empty paper.

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