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

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by Jordan Antonucci

Scalapino’s The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom is remarkable in its physical and lyrical layers. It takes its readers to an imaginative space that lives at the bottom of the psyche and provides characters that continue to leave a space open for interpretation. She creates a deep dream state from which the reader surfaces occasionally in reality to encompass world issues and basic human interactions. Scalapino closes no doors in this work and it is her open and imaginative style that engages the reader.

There are many ways in which Scalapino brings the reader into the text. For example, the initial layout is easy to navigate (short one page chapters and jarring artwork). There is a humble editor’s note, in the beginning and again three-quarters through, disclaiming this work as an experiment, and also, there is a wide exposure of content ranging from mysteriously sexual, the “pink octopus [who] spreads onto her sucking her middle,” to political satire exposing Sara Palin as an “unctuous peppy hockey mom whose bug-eye syrphid fly’s emotionalism,” and to other topics like Greek Mythology, prostitution, world disaster and psychology. But above content, layout and humility, her most useful tool to invite the reader to enter the text is her use of punctuation (15, 96).

For Scalapino, these marks are active, necessary, and equally important to characters, events, and themes in the text.

Scalapino’s punctuation helps us navigate her vision of these events, and like Virgil from the The Divine Comedy, her punctuation does not bring us to instant safe understanding, but takes us deeper into the makeup of an elaborate story. As Jennifer DeVere Brody writes in her recent book Punctuation:, “Punctuation marks can serve as both sense and sensibility—as the most human element in certain sentences” (6). We can read into the punctuation of Scalapino as the determining factor that allows a deeper sense of the work to be realized by the reader. Realized in the sense that this is not a line or even a ray of thought but a dihedron, a figure formed by many intersecting planes, and in this case many intersecting characters. Through her unusual use of punctuation, she forces the reader to be more active within the work looking around every corner of her three dimensional, dihedral, pages (Brody 6).

This essay will explore how Scalapino uses specific punctuation to add visual and contextual layers to establish a trusting relationship with the reader.

One of the unusual punctuation marks that Scalapino uses in this book of poetic prose is the virgule suspensiva, also called the slash. From the late thirteenth to seventeenth centuries the slash was used as a break in breathe that would guide the reader when to breath in order to navigate a piece of writing comfortably. It was called the virgule suspensiva, which translates to pillars of suspense. When these pillars are used today they represent many things, nearly all lending to abbreviation. They take out the agony of typing a space then the letters “o” and “r” then another space (male/female, y/n, Sir/Madame), even more so when replacing “per” (three shillings/person, five drinks/day), and even more when replacing the beautiful phrase “without” with “w/o.” This process of reduction is fantastic, if time and experience demand such a reduction, but with Scalapino’s The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, this is not the case. Instead, she uses the virgule suspensiva to guide the reader to better understand characters and events in the text. To map the vision of this book, the mass of character intersections (and their emotions), the virgule suspensiva crashes into each chapter as a paring knife opening each corpse, each poem, to see what is further inside, “to open up the meaning conveyed” (16).

One of the ways Scalapino uses the Virgule is to compound nouns. She uses this virgule to clarify who or what is in motion. I say in motion because there are no entirely solid or stationary objects in this book. There are only “ctenophores,” jelly-like invertebrates, always in motion intersecting and fading in and out of chapters, as in dreams, present then replaced then replaced again and gone and the reader is left with a different character by each chapter’s end.

Because of this odd and continuous interaction it is necessary for clarification, which is where the virgule comes into play. DeVere-Brody argues in her introduction that, “Punctuation serves as a form of non-verbal communication… As such, punctuation’s performances are vital forms of interaction” (7). Scalapino’s virgule is “vital” to the reader’s interaction with her written characters—vital in the sense that if there is no clarification there is no understanding.

The reader can see this when Scalapino writes about “the girls” in the poem Peen from The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom. Although an initial reading of this virgule may be that of a line break, my interaction with this mark, and studying such throughout the entire work, is more specific and dramatic, albeit more confusing:

—a ‘phenomenal’ event/in the past-instant act seen on the street
[outside], those who flew/the girls lift off fly across the street
disperse are pink flash their coreutics felicity whole or as the
flowing leticule pink frocks flock… (40)

With the title Peen it would easily be assumed that this is a pivotal point in the book and the protagonist or main character of the poem is very important. This poem begins by discussing a newspaper and a missing article which makes the next event, and those involved, more key. Every character in this book flies at some point or other, and without the specification of “the girls,” “those who flew” would not be a sufficient clarification and by page forty the reader could read this as a mass movement of potentially anyone. The virgule here serves to clarify who the main character is to who whom we need to pay attention and gather information.

In the earlier poems in the book, “the girls” are orphans and are made to represent a mass movement of any number of things ranging from a sexual revolution to a fight for societal representation: a powerful group. At the end of this piece we see the aftermath of their passing, “Again crowd or stone has been hammered by a peen that’s spherical smoothing either crowd or stone [is smoothed]…So a stone or crowd from this hammering emerges soft there” (40).
No other character in this book represents such power and particular ability. Without the virgule clarification attributing this destructive scene to “the girls” another character would be given the same destructive abilities.

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In another poem, Soft Green, we see Scalapino using the virgule again for character clarification, but this time as a way to layer the character as an image or phenomena:

—and the woman as it—the butterfly blood-reef (Chrysanthemum
dyslogia), wrath deity/Chrysanthemum does not see that she is
separate from the butterfly blood-reef—ever, at any time. (12)

This poem speaks about a disturbing dream Chrysanthemum (the flower of the plant) has in the colour green reflecting an image of what she is, or will, become: a wrath deity. The virgule here comes near the end of the poem and is a dreadful mark that immediately asserts that Chrysanthemum is the wrath deity. If we look closer to the earlier lines of Soft Green, we can see Scalapino’s build up to this powerful mark:

…are in blackness as crowd and not evening or light while she
there undulant fever all the cattle passing as by line-of-sight
looking at each other but not contagium other than their being alive
there pass contagious abortion between them and begin to
spontaneously abort the slick forms… a woman reading as
luminous green words appear—so the reader has to consider to be
a woman fetuses of the cattle floating before their eyes part of
them…permanently as disseminating in the wind in blades of grass
the fetuses snagged beside them. The reader who’d had the dream
in green…had not run retreated from combat or been in it yet is
now permanently bound to the cabbagy fetuses of cattle as kites oar
machine drones in a sort of dielectric at once a dielectric loss similar
to—and the woman as it—the butterfly blood-reef
(Chrysanthemum dyslogia), wrath deity/Chrysanthemum does not
see that she is separate from the butterfly blood-reef—ever, at any
time. (12)

In my reading of this poem, there is a chaotic scene of abortion and blame and responsibility. The character here, Chrysanthemum, is caught in a fever of anxiety and terror, a fever she can’t escape. By using the virgule at the end of this deep dream space, Scalapino makes this uncontrollable dyslogia the root makeup of Chrysanthemum adding to the already aggressive content and final clause. This virgule clarifies the main character by giving the reader a new and solid metaphor for comparison. Chrysanthemum is (is like) the “wrath deity.”

Another way Scalapino uses the virgule is compounding action. With compound verbs, via virgule, Scalapino maximizes the density of her content. By allowing two actions to occur simultaneously she can open the image further, for interpretation. A woman “walking/running” —vs.—is running and is walking, allows the reader three simultaneous actions to exist: running, walking, and both at the same time. Along with this immediate representation, the virgule here causes tension first within the physical image on the page and next with the idea of two things happening (and almost always more) at the same time. The reader cannot escape this type of new verb visually or contextually. They will automatically have to interact with how, as DeVere Brody writes, “punctuation simultaneously comprises, composes, and compromises thought through its gestures” (6).

This first compound verb virgule example comes from the poem Destool:

the deb at the age of 4 seen by an outsider visitor who by chance
views the child being led/counteracted/reversed/bullied a
thousand acts ‘then’ done by her ma who talks at once as if
speaking for/before the child can speak so there is no one ‘then.’
(Scalapino 95)

In this section of the poem we are given the whole of the deb’s tension-filled childhood in only three and a half lines. By compounding four verbs in the past tense, Scalapino floods the reader with simultaneous abuse, and with the details of her age and mother, the reader is given and shown a missing link in the deb’s character: a neglected and impacting childhood—a.k.a the ground for most psychological study. It is with this brief section that the reader begins to gain a further understanding of the deb who up to this point had only represented a young woman (with control issues) making her debut into society. From this point further, the reader understands why it is so crucial for her to always make a good impression.

If Scalapino had chose to construct these verbs into sentences the impact on the reader would have been watered down. Long sentences would allow the reader to breathe through each abusive action like a soft warm shower: Ineffective. Instead, she goes for the ice-cold water bucket.

The next example does not play as significant a role as the previous, but does show the potential use of compound verbs. In the poem Cheliform, when we are first introduced to the girls, Scalapino writes “the girls who lifting off flew/disperse pink frocks in the hyperbaric weight” (6). Within this union of two actions, one past and one present, she gives the reader a completed view of the occurrence. By adding “disperse” (aside from its use to more logically complete the sentence), Scalapino gives the reader a layered image—the first being a take-off of girls (maybe on brooms maybe only three maybe without brooms) and the next image of a chaotic separation which bade the chance there are more than a few but several, and the scene is made complex by their separation. Finally, and most important, this compounding opens the space for more movements to be imagined—to complicate the event, not to confuse, but to provide a more logical order of things for the space she is writing into and from, a space that demands new angles of perception and new readings of such angles.

The next and easiest to notice virgule, is its use to compound time. In most situations Scalapino uses this tool to let the reader know this is not a first time, but at least a second. This does two things: first it saves a few useless lines discussing how an action has also happened before, and secondly, it furthers her argument “The transfection [in reality] is echopraxia as uncontrollable repeating of actions as people are speaking or silent seeing that action a space transforms” (122).

In her poem the Meadow of Dissociative Disorder Scalapino writes, “is then? red Chrysanthemum was/is smiling mouth with teeth barely visible in its red middle petals” (8). With this one mark Scalapino tells the reader this is happening in two time periods and has happened as such. What this also does is reveal a very small blip of a character’s history. For example, this one line informs the reader that Chrysanthemum, at this early stage in the book, represents youth and positivity. The reader knows this because of her name and, following this virgule, her history of a smiling mouth. This poem continues further to paint a picture of a tyrannical world at war around her. Whether this foreshadows danger to come or the strength of her positivity is left up to the reader.

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Another good example of this virgule can be found in the poem The Float when Scalapino writes:

—and the mother, being looked down upon by other family
members as child-like being infinitely optimistic thus immortal the
daughter/she’d been led to believe she herself was/is a pessimism
occurring her/to balance the other/the mother. (94)

In this very complicated section we see several layers. The first virgule initiates contact with the reader and draws focus to the daughter. The second (compound time) shows the reader this is not a first but a past to present ongoing misguidance. The third and fourth (compound noun) designate a more specific way of interpreting the mother: as what the daughter has grown up to become. Though there are many virgules here the most important is the phrase “was/is” which governs how the reader recognizes time and its role in The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom. In this case, time and its passing are to represent their effect on a daughter-mother relationship.
The last virgule use to discuss is the compound content virgule. Unlike its previous functions, this mark usage is far more abstract. Its primary function is to make the content more complex. Its secondary function is to further express Scalapino’s writing philosophy for this particular work:

The writing is not the idea of the whole frame work of occurrences
after without its existence ever being. In the accumulating stream of
events, hybrids repeating parts of an event in different
combinations, the parts rearranged by imagination begin to pierce
each other surpassing single outlines and boundaries, the sense of
infinite combinations are actions       bliss. (129)

The compound noun virgule comprises all of the above lines and includes several others as well. One of which was discussed at the end of the previous example. That particular virgule, “immortal the daughter/she’d been led to believe,” initiates the reader’s focus as if to say pay attention, this is important (94). And, it is. It exposes the juvenility of the daughter and reminds the reader that even the immortal have growing up to do.

Another good example of this virgule can be found in the poem Limen:

The eye of passerby records the little girl running beside the black-
white-spotted dog or the girl from a different point of view (hers
and one’s) seeing and/or speaking/running—but being beside the
dog is no mere record, being/action. So action isn’t only
fundamental to being. It’s outside individuals while at once them.
(Scalapino 122)

In this section the reader can see Scalapino using the virgule to represent alternate ways of recording a beautiful moment. These two inserted lines have the ability to destabilize the reader during even the most basic of occurrences—this, of course, impeccable to maintaining the fluid and aerial space where all events in the text take place.

Scalapino, after confusing and dislodging the reader (now with their attention), makes a simple but powerful connection: being is inseparable from action—without one the other would not exist. Through bonding these words with a virgule she solidifies this relationship, opening the space for further analysis—which she does in the next six lines. If Scalapino had not demanded a punctual interaction with the reader, any ‘words of wisdom’ she had to offer would surely fall through empty ears.

Whatever the instant in which a virgule is used, one undeniable affect they have on the reader is to break up the expectations of how language is supposed to function. This disruption mimicked within other creative punctuation marks allows a text to open possible alternate interpretations. In a work as vast and imaginative as The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, anything but fully open would fall short of its absolute potential.

Another mark Scalapino uses to engage the reader and add layers to the text is the parenthesis. When the dictionary is asked to define “parenthesis” it offers several definitions with different situational uses ranging from mathematics to politics, all of which funnel down to the same fundamental definition: A necessary interval. To better discuss the importance of this mark, I will quote Roi Tartakovsky from his essay “E.E Cummings’s Parenthesis: Punctuation as Poetic Device”:

The additions of parentheses in the poem act primarily to
physically realize the metaphor, as every part of what the speaker
says carries with it a parenthesized appendage. The poem is in fact
an on-going series of statements that are alternately outside and the
inside parenthesis. (221)

Although the writer in discussion is E.E Cummings, this same statement applies to Scalapino’s The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom. There are always physical sub layers in a text, “appendages,” that at different times require different attention and the parenthesis allows the writer to control what is immediate, secondary, or altogether omissible.

In The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom Scalapino takes advantage of the parenthesis to further open the space of experience in a single event. Each event, or “statement,” grows more layered and interconnected with other events occurring in previous poems, sometimes fifty or more pages prior. These intervening occurrences, or “appendages,” help Scalapino make connections throughout the text while also layering immediate images using the parenthesis similar to a comma, but not a comma because it inhabits an entire space of its own—where it is given the potential to write a new part of the story, or be omitted entirely—as if to say to the reader, you can skip this if you want, but if you do you will miss something important.

In The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, Scalapino doesn’t give the reader a chance to escape the parenthesis. Every poem has at least one (usually several more) of such marks, and the information is not omissible. Scalapino takes advantage of the parenthesis, not only to layer her story, but to provide the reader clarity through giving small particular relations, definitions, or physical specifics. The reader need only read within the parenthesis a few times at the beginning of the work to understand they are not to be skipped over. This next section will discuss four ways the parenthesis interacts with the text to provide a clearer, more decipherable, meaning for the reader.

One way Scalapino uses the parenthesis is to cause a physical disturbance on the page. This is a call to follow the author’s train of thought as DeVere Brody writes, “by reading the punctuation marks as part of the sentence, to open up the meaning conveyed” (16). Punctuation marks are not separate from words: a period has the same potential as the word mother to affect the text and the reader’s interpretation. In The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom, Scalapino uses the rarely tapped resource of creative punctuation to jar the reader from reading too complacently, to fracture the space letting water in. A fracture to slowdown the reader and beg their focus.

In the first poem of the book, The Contester, we can see how Scalapino uses the parenthesis to slow the reader and prepare them for what is next:

The family ocker (redundant) doesn’t even remember—or doesn’t
remember at all (two entirely different events). But memory isn’t
the origin of events. Neither is. The eye is (not). Oar. The hand
thrust in. (1)

The first useful detail the reader is slowed down to notice is one of Scalapino’s mantras while writing this piece: “memory isn’t the origin of events.” As the reader begins to stumble and question what is within the parenthesis, Scalapino is given a window to say and offer something that needs to be understood. As the reader knows from her Author’s Note, the origins of the events in The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom are not from memory—they are discovered occurrences from leafing through the dictionary. Scalapino is aware that many readers use a few pages to warm up and enter a book. Instead of waiting for those few pages to pass, she initiates the relationship by demanding the reader to slow down. Once she has control of the reader’s full attention she can pick up the speed and flood the reader with any number of vivid details.

What follows this section is eight fast lines, loaded with imagery, describing the contester and his surroundings:

The red claw, the mitt reaching the poppies some red-centered, has
performed actions, though the action is the contester’s, already past
but appearing at once ‘allowing’ the single petal outside no
producing or attached in wind—outside isn’t either, the trees
fractionators future only, a forest 2 states a tree rushes 1000 trees
roiling divided are in that sense 2 frothing the appendages bats bat
the sky corners of the diamond [in which the base runner runs]
floats in the sky where a forest as single entity bats blows—the sky.
Yet petal exudes dawn there exactly. Not even gradually 4 there is
no memory. If there were not a contester the dark blue indigo-plum
black-purples-centered poppies are for nothing? (Scalapino 1)

Because Scalapino first slows down the reader, they will be much more apt to digest the mass of images that compose the contester, and by doing so she allows the reader to be hit more dramatically when told that without the contester all of these colours and images, and possibly her entire book, would be “for nothing.” If instead the complacent reader was given a straight forward syntactical text, there is a good chance they would move quickly unaffected onto the next poem, or even the next five.

Scalapino’s next, and possibly her most complex, usage of the parenthesis is the use to layer again and again, complicating images, events, philosophies and locations—to layer everything. With this particular usage, the reader is asked to consider why this is necessary to the text, and how this interval extension is important and connected to a fabric encompassing the entirety of occurrences composing this book.

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In the poem Bright, two thirds into the book, the reader is given a chance to absorb and analyze Scalapino’s layering in a smaller, easily digestible instance:

Bright green emerald’s horizon is present never exists as its it is
jumped between future and past the/its jumped gelechild is
hummingbird aggressive fighter but gelechild’s an other’s child
comes up (with itself, humming bird also diffeomorphism,
psychotogenic effects) is in the base runner’s heart’s lake that’s in
him always (is him) outside-gelechild is the gelechild enters it (his).
(114)

From previous poems, the reader knows the base-runner is initially caught in the green emerald horizon where his uncontrollable impulsive nature has no concept or care for time. In this poem we see the gelechild, a small moth, breaking into the emerald horizon with the unexpected reaction of becoming a humming bird, “an other’s child comes up.” Without the next parenthesis, the reader is liable to place little concern on the action, the morphing, taking place—that is not the case here. Within the parenthesis Scalapino shows the reader the interior reaction of the gelechild’s morphing—its succumbing to a schizophrenic delusion. This initial understanding is difficult to read into without special attention to the text. Scalapino uses the short poem length and parenthesis to procure such attention.

The next action the reader sees taking place in this poem is the gelechild immediately finding shelter within the “base runner’s heart’s lake that’s in him always.” This alone would suffice as a conclusion of events, but Scalapino takes it a step further to discuss the base runner’s character. She tells the reader in a short, very simple, parenthesis, “(is him),” the base runner’s base composition is his heart. This is important for the text as a whole because this is the first time Scalapino introduces this character as more than an impulsive uncontrollable ball of energy (usually sexual). Scalapino then walks out of the poem simply and clearly describing the action of the gelechild’s entrance into a lone parenthesis, “(his)” to be sure the reader knows where the gelechild has gone. This poem is the mark of the gelechild’s coming of age walking into the abyss—the bright green emerald Horizon—into an unstable and intense world of mystery, intimacy and wild imagination.

Another way Scalapino takes advantage of the parenthesis is when she brings events and ideas back into the present again. She does this to show ongoing threads throughout the book to be sure the reader understands no matter how fractured this book may seem, everything is continuously interconnected.

The first example is from Now the butterfly blood-reef, where Scalapino uses the parenthesis to maintain her initial mantra from the first page, “memory is not the origin of events” (1):

Now the butterfly blood-reef the freezing passes sixteen or eighteen
thousand feet altitude passage memory of lime (not yet occurring,
one not going there yet) in the enclave Lo-Munthang… The memory
of this trip (that has not occurred yet) is the limen— (76)

In this poem we can see the parenthesis functioning in two ways. In the standing poem Scalapino uses the parenthesis to suspend time. As the character butterfly blood-reef is falling or moving toward the limen—a thick, muddy marsh—Scalapino takes this time to discuss the ever present loom of war that is attached, or rather seen in, the butterfly blood-reef who by this point in the book has come to represent tension. Her area of discussion is the city of Lo Munthang, a country that has fought for their independence since the 1300’s.

The next usage is to maintain her philosophy that memory and its influence on events is not nearly as important as it is made out to be. The parenthesis functions as a reminder to the reader that this space and its characters are composed of liquid matter, not concrete.

Another example of threading via the parenthesis can be found in the emerald dark:

The Distaffer…wakes in her bed in a dream the hump of octopus-avatar still attached on her entire front sucks on her center on the pudendum comes meeting him (she accepts as a normal dream hers rather than an invasion later she sees the base runner on the street goes out—though it has attached when she’d crashed the plane in the ocean) where wide closing her eyes briefly the base runner appeared. (87)

This section is a vital link between a focal relationship between the Distaffer and the base runner. The parenthesis here alludes back to the poem The where the Distaffer, who was flying among clouds near the emerald dark horizon, with her plane, was shot down and the base runner’s avatar, the octopus, “spreads onto her sucking her middle the pudendum” (15). The parenthesis, here, also foreshadows the occurrence, not yet happening, where the two meet outside the emerald horizon and where the base runner will soon die.

The outside meeting occurs four pages later in the poem Meet, when the reader is given another threading parenthesis. “They meet in a café having sighted each other as both are crossing the street. Their images hers ecstatic (while lying on the ocean entwined with the octopus) theirs…” (91). From then on the relationship of the Distaffer and the base runner continues to infiltrate the text, and in the mass of events and characters (and their avatars) Scalapino’s use of the parenthesis allows the reader to witness a continuous thread. The possible and excellent result of this is the ability it has to keep the reader active, no matter how absurd and vast the textual space, forming connections always invested in the following pages. This interest to move to the next poem is proof the author has gained the reader’s trust.

The three previous uses discussed engage the parenthesis creatively within a text while also accomplishing the basic syntactical result of giving the reader an important side thought. This next use of the parenthesis lends itself to more traditional analysis as “a qualifying, or appositive word, phrase, clause, or sentence that interrupts a syntactical construction without otherwise affecting it” (dictionary.com). There are many points within The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom that the text requires an extra few sentences to clarify the action or character, and instead of wasting precious words and space Scalapino uses the parenthesis to quickly and effectively make the clarification. (Dcitionary.com)

In the short poem Food the reader can see how Scalapino uses the parenthesis to tell the reader everything they need to know while maximizing the potential of the poem:

The base runner is starved having used up his reserves. They sit the
three (the Distaffer and deb also) together eat in a restaurant. (128)

With this simple clarification parenthesis, Scalapino is able to expose a very simple and concrete event with an efficiency of language. The reader has enough to digest from the first sentence. The base runner, now outside the emerald dark horizon, will die soon, is now human, with a long memory of events that never really happened. And because he is starved and slowing down, by the nature of events and their connections in this book, two other main characters whom are in love (or sexually interested in) the base runner will also begin to starve and slow down.

If Scalapino were to go into further detail about the Distaffer and the deb it would be wasted space. Completely unnecessary. The reader already has 127 pages of their relationship history. Their name presence, made clear by the parenthesis, is the only needed text. Their names already carry, like that of the base runner, a long history of events that never really happened.

The reader can see this again several times in the poem The Distaffer’s memory:

an event in school in ‘study’ period (no content of class, no
instruction occurs in ‘study’ period) two boys…were openly
flying/throwing wadded crumpled paper (wads) at each
other…the hard paper wad…hit the teacher [and] the boy who was
innocent closes his mouth and an expression undefiant (the tall
man standing over him)…That’s all. (108)

Throughout this poem, Scalapino uses the parenthesis to further clarify the action or object by becoming more particular and giving the reader more information. The first parenthesis clarifies the event incase the reader does not know what a “study” period is. The second gives a much shorter alternate name for “wadded crumbled paper” and by doing so allows Scalapino to use this shorter word throughout the rest of the poem easily and with no confusion. The next use helps, like the first, to further describe the scene. By adding this specific action the reader can be more involved with the scene. If the reader can see where an action is taking place, there is no doubt they will actively be more involved. Also in this particular poem, Scalapino uses the parenthesis to interject what information is useful for the person who didn’t have the dream—what she believes the reader should know.

Throughout The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom Scalapino uses the parenthesis in several ways, all of which affect the reader’s interaction with the text. Her use to slow the text down and layer, thread and clarify it, are only four of many possible interpretations on how scattered ‘intervals’ can function within a text and open it to potential meaning, and in this particular work, are intricate to maintaining the chaos of endless, ongoing events that never really happened.

Although Scalapino’s virgule and parenthesis are used most often to add further depth to the text punctuationally, they are by no means her only tools. Her unusual use of punctuation is spread throughout the The Dihedrons Gazelle-Dihedrals Zoom with what appears only one concrete rule: Every mark must be placed with intention.

This next section will examine a few examples of how the comma is used by Scalapino to further activate her poems and how her use of punctuation agrees with DeVere Brody who writes, “These are the tenants of “close reading” and good editing in which each mark on the page matters and is the matter of and with writing” (13).

One very obvious mark Scalapino uses is the comma, the breath and backbone of formal writing. When used in a creative sense its formal uses are replaced by a free and active nature to instruct the reader to, among other things, pause, and to continue reading without a noticeable breath.

The first example comes from the poem The flouncing with Nautilus brain where the reader is left alone at the end of the poem to fend for themselves:

—from word to vision the flowers a thin layer black and silent
barely ruffle in the abducent wind that black in day silent
motionless blue, (Scalapino 26)

Instead of a period, or even no punctuation at all that might render a sense of completion, in this poem Scalapino ends with a comma. This opens the white space after the poem to potentially add meaning to the text. If this function is read formally, the reader is expected to continue and that which comes next will, albeit a short curious thought, add to the previous sentence. In this case, she begins with a “word” shape-shifting into an array of colours that blend together through sound, action, and word choice, all the way to the colour “blue.” We are given here an image that is quietly folding into itself and attempting to represent the poem’s overarching theme of abduction. As we know from the word “Nautilus” from the title, this is an infinite pattern. She reminds us of this as she suggests there is an important continuing image that will inevitably happen.

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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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Jordan Antonucci is a poet/artist/performer from NY preparing the jump to Melbourne and the Australian open mic scene. He received his MFA from the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics and is the poetry editor for Monkey Puzzle Press. Please visit www.jordanantonucci.com for further information and recent publications.

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