When to Use Punctuation in Poems and When to Leave It Out

Leaving Punctuation Out

One of the most innovative sides of modern literature is that many poets have swept all punctuation out of their work. But the question of whether poets should use punctuation is not just about semicolons and dashes. It’s about when punctuation works best in poetry, and when it gets in the way of expressing something very different from prose.

Some of the poets of the U.S.A. best known for unpunctuated verse are e.e. cummings (who also did away with capital letters in some of his writing), William Carlos Williams (but only in some of his poems), and W.S. Merwin.  

In modern poetry, not punctuating verse first became a common practice in France in the early twentieth century. Guillaume Apollinaire threw down the gauntlet to traditional poetry and culture in his groundbreaking poem “Zone” from his collection Alcohols, published in 1913.

Guillaume Apollinaire

Apollinaire started “Zone” with these memorable lines: In the end you are weary of this ancient world This morning the bridges are bleating Eiffel Tower oh herd Weary of living in Roman antiquity and Greek (translation by Samuel Beckett) By eliminating punctuation, Apollinaire also allowed words to group themselves in ways that did not conform to grammatical sentences. Even if you wanted to add punctuation to the line “This morning the bridges are bleating Eiffel Tower oh herd,” how would you do it? In his poem “Zone,” not only did Apollinaire throw out the convention of writing with punctuation, he tossed out the conventions of time and space, zooming from the ancient world to the modern, and leap frogging from one country to another: Here you are in Marseilles among the water-melons Here you are in Coblentz at the Giant’s Hostelry Here you are in Rome under a Japanese medlar-tree Unpunctuated poetry can provide a high-speed train for moving among ideas and settings, reflecting both fast-paced technology in the external world, and the fast-paced internal world of stream of consciousness that psychoanalysis opened up in Apollinaire’s time. That is one of the strengths of unpunctuated poetry: it can be really fast. It can grab those moments that happen so spontaneously or rapidly they’re difficult to catch. Here’s part of an unpunctuated poem by the French surrealist André Breton that begins “I dream I see you endlessly superimposed upon yourself.” The writer recreates the quick movements of the unconscious by describing a lover simultaneously at various times in her life: Little girl Caught in a bellows of sparkles You jump rope Long enough so that the one green butterfly that haunts the peaks of Asia Can appear at the top of the invisible stairway I caress everything that was you In everything that’s yet to be you     (translated by Bill Zavatsky and Zack Rogow) Without the obstacles of periods, commas, and exclamation marks, Breton’s poetry flows right from the writer’s subconscious onto the paper. It’s as if he’s dreaming onto the page. The result: a hallucinatory cascade of ecstatic images. Interestingly, unpunctuated verse not only allows for a more fluid pouring of words onto the page—it also can create the opposite effect. Unpunctuated verse can involve a more discrete use of language where each phrase vibrates on its own. In unpunctuated poetry, the words can be suspended in a borderless space that makes certain phrases resonate like a final chord played on a piano. Here’s the opening of a poem called “October Thoughts” by the French writer Jean Follain: How one loves this great wine that one drinks all alone when the evening illumines its coppered hills (translated by W.S. Merwin) These words radiate pathos because they are not contained within the sealed lead boxes of punctuation. W.S. Merwin famously wrote, “Punctuation nails the poem down on the page. When you don’t use it the poem becomes more a thing in itself, at once more transparent and more actual.” Imagine if Jean Follain had punctuated those lines: How one loves this great wine, that one drinks all alone, when the evening illumines its coppered hills! How banal and overstated these lines seem with punctuation; without punctuation, how mysterious and filled with awe. One curious side note: we think of unpunctuated verse as an invention of modern poetry, In fact, all poetry was unpunctuated in classical times. All writing was originally unpunctuated in ancient Greek, Latin, Old Persian, Hebrew, Chinese, and other languages that produced some of the earliest bodies of written poetic texts. Including Punctuation When e.e. cummings first started not to capitalize letters, it was revolutionary: next to of course god america i love you By not capitalizing words that readers were used to seeing in majuscule letters, such as “God,” “America,” and “I” (not to mention his own name!), cummings prompted a reexamination of those sacrosanct ideas, even the idea of the self. Cummings produced stinging satire, just with his use of punctuation and capitalization.

But once unpunctuated verse became almost the norm in modern avant-garde poetry, there was an inevitable reaction against it. Here’s why: art hates norms. When a practice in literature becomes expected, its impact is immediately blunted. As soon as a great many poets were doing the same thing as cummings, leaving out punctuation became an affectation, in some cases. It could easily turn into a cutesy, self-conscious move that was just the opposite of cummings’ unpredictable use of language. There was also something coy about not writing with punctuation and capitalization, as if poets were not willing to declare themselves emphatically enough to end a phrase with a definitive period or exclamation mark. Not to mention that taking out punctuation and capitalization could conceal laziness on the part of a poet who did not want to make choices.

In the 1950s and 60s in North America, poetry split into two different practices with regard to punctuation. There were poets who greatly admired the French- and Spanish-language avant-garde and generally preferred to scrap the formality of punctuation. These poets included Lawrence Ferlinghetti and W.S. Merwin, and quite a number of African American poets, such as Ntozake Shange, and (at times) June Jordan and Ishmael Reed—just to name a few. On the other hand, in the work of the more traditional poets of that period, punctuating poems and using full sentences in poetry made something of a comeback. Those poets included the New Englanders Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath. For those writers, there was a sense that returning to the sentence could add clarity, crispness, and sophistication to poetry. Apparently Lowell was so concerned about the punctuation in his poems that he paid for poet Frank Bidart to fly across the Atlantic to fix the punctuation in one of his book manuscripts. Using traditional punctuation well in a poem can be an art in itself. I’m thinking of Elizabeth Bishop’s villanelle, “One Art.” Here are the first and last stanzas:     The art of losing isn’t hard to master;     so many things seem filled with the intent     to be lost that their loss is no disaster.     …     —Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture     I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident     the art of losing’s not too hard to master     though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster. Bishop pulls out all the stops of punctuation here: semicolon in the first stanza; dash, parentheses, comma, and exclamation mark in the last stanza. She uses short, punchy phrases, intensified by punctuation marks. Bishop made punctuation lively, fun, elegant, and unexpected. Many of the poets of the 1950s and 60s in North America wrote confessional poetry, which by its nature, is somewhat like memoir, a narrative prose form. No surprise then that their verse used punctuation. Under the influence of that generation, unpunctuated poetry has experienced a partial eclipse in North America in the decades since then. If I had to say where we are on that continuum now, between using and not using punctuation in poetry, I’d say the pendulum has swung way to the side of preferring punctuation. At least many editors favor it. My own feeling is that some poems want the sharp edges of punctuation to define their shape. Other poems crave the looseness of unpunctuated text to allow their phrases to float on the page like islands in the sea. The difficulty is that most editors expect consistency from a poet. If you don’t have a set style, which includes the use of punctuation, many editors think your manuscript lacks coherence and a literary brand. But looked at another way, if you’re too set in your style, are you really channeling the emotion that impelled you to write the poem in the first place? If different poems in a series or a book can have different forms, different stanza lengths, why can’t you use punctuation differently, if the poems call for that?

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Zack’s most recent book of poems, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging

Zack’s most recent book of translations, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Writing Great Titles for Your Poems, Part 1: Interview with Robert Hershon

For many poets, a title is a necessary evil, a part of the work that the writer would rather not bother with. After all, the substance of the poem is in the body of the poem, right? What’s to be gained by adding some frilly header that repeats what’s already in the poem, or that only relates obliquely to the rest of the text?

 

But titles can play an important role in bringing the reader into the poem. I enjoy the titles that the poet Robert (“Bob”) Hershon gives his poems, so I interviewed Bob recently about his ideas on titles.

Q. Do you like to title your poems?

 

Bob Hershon: I do. One thing I like about a title is that it can do the work of several lines in the poem that you can then omit. A good title eliminates the need for that “Meanwhile, back at the ranch” type of filler.

 

Q. What’s your advice for writing a good poem title?

 

BH: Something that speaks to the poem without summing it up. I’m partial to “No poetry but in things,” to paraphrase William Carlos Williams. Your title should stand out, it shouldn’t sound like everybody else’s titles.

 

Q. What do you think about poems that don’t have titles?

 

BH: When I see a poem that’s just called “Untitled,” it seems like an opportunity lost. Many poets, including writers I’ve published and whose work I like, don’t use any title at all. In that case, it’s hard to identify the poem. For all practical purposes, the first line then becomes the title.

 

Q. What do you think of simple titles or one-word titles?

 

BH: I think a title should be fun. I know that many poets I admire and like personally take a different approach and use simple, generic-sounding titles. They’re entitled to their titles.

 

Q. Are there kinds of titles you just plain don’t like?

 

BH: There’s something terribly ostentatious to me about calling a poem just “Poem.” I also don’t particularly like a title with a “This and That” structure, such as “Truisms and Inconsistencies.” That particular construction annoys me, for some reason.

 

Q. What’s a recent title you’ve written for one of your poems, and how did you arrive at it?

 

BH: Recently I wrote a poem about the brain’s inability to forget old song lyrics. Initially I had a kind of flat title for it. This morning I woke up with a different title for it in my head, “An Old Cowboy Went Riding Out One Dark and Windy Day.” Some people might recognize that as a line from the old pop song “Ghost Riders in the Sky.” But even if you don’t recognize it, the title works on its own in a different way. Adding that title allowed me to cut a line or two from the middle and tighten the poem up.

Robert Hershon’s most recent book of poems is End of the Business Day. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He was executive director of The Print Center for 35 years and has been coeditor of Hanging Loose Press since its founding in 1966. Among his awards are two creative writing fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts.

Writing Great Titles for Your Poems, Part 2

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry: Part 3—Less Is More and the Poetry of Jean Follain

Western artists and writers have pulled from the tradition of East Asia for another reason: brevity, conciseness, and simplicity.

Mies van der Rohe architecture: “Less is more.”

From the sketches of Pablo Picasso, to the four-word stanzas of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow,” to the “Less is more” steel and glass geometry of Mies van der Rohe’s architecture, this aspect of the aesthetic of East Asia has opened up new possibilities in the art of the West. Traditionally, ornateness and opulence were more or less synonymous with artistry in Europe.

Medieval ivory carving, Louvre Museum

Think of the highly populated worlds of medieval ivory carvings, and the intricacies of such forms as the sestina, not to mention Tolstoy’s novels, requiring an index of the myriad of characters.

Enter the purity of East Asian art, influenced by the sensibility of Buddhism, particularly Zen.

Moon jar, South Korea

In poetry, this aesthetic is most pronounced in such forms as the tanka or waka, which creates the fulcrum of a story in only thirty-one syllables. And of course there’s haiku, which gives the readers a moment of heightened awareness in only seventeen syllables.

Even though the initial translations of East Asian poetry into European languages were in French, the aesthetic of East Asian poetry was slower to influence Paris modernism. In France, the new writing of the early twentieth century was closely linked to the subconscious, and the subconscious requires free association. Free association often takes the form of long lines or prose poems that allow for an outpouring of imagery, as in the writing of Guillaume Apollinaire or André Breton. The extended lines of Walt Whitman were more of an influence for the French modernists than the poets of East Asia.

To my mind, the French modernist who shows the greatest influence of East Asian writing is the poet Jean Follain, who lived from 1903 to 1971.

Jean Follain, French poet (1903–1971)

Follain, unlike many of his contemporaries, was not a follower of “isms.” In fact, in contrast to many of the revolutionary French writers of his time, he worked as a lawyer and then as a district judge. Many of the artists of his era flocked to the artistic center of Paris, where the cafes were continually churning out new literary movements. The great urban centers can sometimes be surprisingly provincial in their insistence on embracing the latest avant-garde. But Follain lived much of his life in the provinces, in the little town of Canisy in Normandy, in the north of France.

Canisy, Normandy, France

He was somewhat isolated from other French writers. This may be one of the reasons that he was open to influences outside Europe, particularly East Asian writing.

For Follain, the short line and the poem of few words becomes a way of sketching the fates of living beings, much the same way that a haiku or tanka poem can.

Here, for example, is Follain’s poem “Dog with Schoolboys”:

Dog with Schoolboys

For fun the schoolboys crack the ice

along a path

next to the railroad

they are heavily clothed

in dark old woolens

belted with beat leather

The dog that follows them

no longer has a bowl to eat from

he is old

for he is their age.

(translation copyright © by Keith Waldrop)

This poem is almost a Zen koan. It presents the odd spectacle of schoolboys wandering by themselves, ostensibly having fun, but there is way too much silence and emptiness in this poem for their amusement to be anything but a way to heighten the pathos. Something about the schoolboys “dark old woolens” and “beat leather” suggests anything but a carefree childhood, and may even imply domestic violence.

Follain holds off on introducing the dog until the last four lines. Unlike the boys, the dog is homeless. The last two lines are understated but shot through with emotion: “he is old/for he is their age.” The paradox is that for a dog, the age of twelve or thirteen is past middle age, while the boys are the same age but still young. And yet…we sense that there is something old about these boys, repeating the ageless pranks that schoolboys have always played, in worn-out clothing, like the garb of old men. They are next to a railroad track, but ironically, they are not going anywhere. Their lives, like that of the homeless dog, are laid out before them, and those fates seem anything but promising. “Dog with Schoolboys” is a poem that shifts rapidly in perspective, and opens a sort of bottomless, emotional trapdoor at the end. It reminds me of the very famous Japanese haiku by Ransetsu:

Hattori Ransetsu, Japanese poet (1654–1707)

The childless woman,

How tender she is

To the dolls!

(translated by R.H. Blythe)

In Ransetsu’s haiku, he also sets the scene, and then suddenly pulls the rug out from under the reader, leaving only pathos. Ironically, the non-human world evokes human loneliness.

Follain’s “Dog with Schoolboys” also reminds me of those great tanka poems where there are two separate sections, connected only metaphorically. I’m thinking, for example, of this classic by the 10^th century poet Fujiwara no Toshiyuki:

Fujiwara no Toshiyuki, tenth century C.E. Japanese poet

In the Bay of Sumi

waves crowd the shore

Even at night

by the corridors of dreams

I come to you secretly

(adapted from the translation of Kenneth Rexroth)

The poet allows the reader to make the connection between the waves crowding the shore and the speaker, who is visiting his beloved in a dream. It is only on reflection that we realize that the waves could be a metaphor for the speaker in the dream. That wonderful phrase “crowd the shore” tells us that a love that penetrates even to dreams is a bit overbearing.

Follain draws on this sort of metaphorical tanka in his poetry, often presenting two or three or more elements in his poems that seem unrelated. It’s up to the reader to place these elements in a continuum along an axis, and to figure out what that axis is. Follain borrowed from East Asian poetry to create a poetics where the reader has to solve the puzzle.

The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 1, Introduction
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 2, The Akhmatova Bridge
The Influence of East Asian Literature on Western Poetry, Part 4: Jack Kerouac's Haiku; and Conclusion

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

Thoughts on Literary Fame

Fame. It’s as irrelevant to good writing as sunny weather. Or is it the gold ring we’re all reaching for?

I was moved to write about fame because I’ve been listening during my commute to a collection of poetry on CDs called The Spoken Arts Treasury. This compendium of the writings and voices of 100 leading poets in the United States was released only 45 years ago, but I was shocked by how many of the poets who were considered necessary writers in 1969 are unknown today. I don’t mean that I’ve only read a couple of their poems. I mean that I had never even heard the names of a good portion of the poets in that collection.

The Greek goddess Pheme, source of the word "fame"

Maybe even more surprising is the fact that a collection released in 1969 did not include many of the poets of the U.S.A. whom we now consider to be some of the leading voices of the mid-twentieth century, such as Gwendolyn Brooks, Allen Ginsberg (too radical for that time), June Jordan, Adrienne Rich (who had already published her first Selected Poems in 1967), Anne Sexton, or May Swenson. In just 45 years, we have dramatically changed our sense of who the important U.S. poets of that time were. Many writers included in The Spoken Arts Treasury do continue to find readers: Elizabeth Bishop, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Sylvia Plath, William Carlos Williams, etc. But it seems almost arbitrary which poets were included in this anthology.

The word “fame” comes from the name of the Roman goddess Fama, which in turn comes from a Greek word that just means “talk.” That in turn, is related to Old Church Slavonic bajati, but you already knew that. Hey, Zack, what is your point? The point is that fame is just talk, it’s not hard evidence of truth or quality.

Just because a writer is known today, or unknown today, does not mean that her or his reputation will remain that way. In fact, it’s almost a guarantee that tastes and readers will change, and that writers whose work speaks to a particular time and/or readership will vary in popularity, or maybe find new readers in a different time or place. We should not be intimidated by a writer’s reputation and feel we have to like that person’s work. On the other hand, we should appreciate writers who are not well known, but whose work we genuinely enjoy. In other words, trust your taste and your reaction to a work of literature, not the writer’s reputation.

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka
How to Be an American Writer

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone, Part 5: Taking Leaps

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This is Part 5 of a series of blogs on the ancient concept of the muse, and whether it has any uses for writers today.
For a writer, it’s useful to listen to those voices in your head—call them the muses if you want. Those voices sometimes tell us to do crazy things: “Joan, put on men’s armor and chase the English out of France for the glory of God.” Did Joan of Arc say, “Dude, that is so random! I’m just a teenager in a small city in France. You must be totally tripping.” No. She chased the English out of France. I think listening to those voices can be a much more exciting and daring way to work as a writer than to write from your everyday consciousness.

So when do you not listen to the voices, to the muse? When the voices tell you to do things that will not strengthen you or your writing. How do you know which ideas will weaken you and your writing, and which will not? There you do have to make the call yourself, using good judgment.

I’ve been talking about the power of the muse, but I've hardly even mentioned examples from poetry, the art that has always been the first to call on the muse.

There are the times that a poem just arrives as a gift from out of the blue, almost in a finished form. As I've mentioned, Rainer Maria Rilke is one classic example of this, writing the final sections of The Duino Elegies and his Sonnets to Orpheus in the space of a few weeks in Duino Castle in the winter of 1922. That sort of gift poem is the product of inspiration, one way the muse comes into our writing.

 But there's another way we as writers can really learn from the idea of the muse: in trusting those leaps of language, emotion, and subject that happen when you stretch logic and metaphor and feeling to its breaking point. In those moments you trust that the muse will allow you to stay in the realm of communication even though you may feel you’ve jumped off a diving board in the pitch dark with no sense of how far down the water is. I’m talking about poetic lines like these from Federico García Lorca’s “Gacela of Unforeseen Love,”

A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep

in the moonlit plaza of your forehead

while through four nights I embraced

your waist, enemy of the snow.

[translated by W.S. Merwin]

“A thousand Persian ponies fell asleep/in the moonlit plaza of your forehead”. The guy is nuts, right? And yet, when you fall in love with someone, you glimpse a peace as profound, crazy, and beautiful as a thousand Persian ponies dreaming in a midnight plaza, and Lorca has described that as literally as William Carlos Williams’s cold plums missing from the icebox in his poem “This Is Just to Say.”

And where is the muse in this metaphor of the poet jumping off the high diving board in total darkness? Is the muse splashing around in the pool, waiting to swim with you when you reach the water? Too distant. And anyway, then you might land on her when you hit the pool. Is the muse holding your hand as you dive? No, sorry, no one is holding your hand. As André Breton, the French Surrealist poet said, “Writing is the loneliest road that leads everywhere.” No, in the metaphor of the diving board, the muse is the one who pushes you off before you’re ready to jump, not knowing if what you’re going to say will make sense to a single other human being.

Other recent posts about writing topics:How Not to Become a Literary Dropout, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry? 

Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka

Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer

Adrienne Rich: A Few Scattered Memories

I first met Adrienne Rich in 1976, when she was helping to organize a group of poets to protest the editorial policies of the American Poetry Review, which was not yet publishing many poets of color, women, or younger poets. (The editorial policy has changed dramatically at APR since then.) Adrienne

hosted a meeting of the organizing group at her apartment on 93^rd Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I had never heard her read at that time, though I knew her amazing poems, so even to be in her presence was an exciting but frightening event for a twenty-four-year-old budding poet.

Adrienne welcomed me to her home with warmth and a flashing smile that I hadn’t expected. As we walked from the door, I noticed her limp, a result of the rheumatoid arthritis that eventually caused her death. She corrected my pronunciation of her name. She had her own way of saying ahd-dree-ENN.

During the course of that successful campaign to change the editorial policies of APR, more than one of the better-known poets who supported the effort, and actively participated that night at Adrienne’s, bowed out of any public role in the effort. We all agreed on an open letter to APR challenging their editorial policies. June Jordan, who had initiated the entire campaign, drafted an eloquent text. When the letter was published, some of the celebrated poets who had joined us at first decided not to be public signers of the letter. Adrienne stayed with the effort all the way, risking her own strong ties to APR. That was typical of her committed politics.

In fact I had an odd interaction with Adrienne over just this point. One of the most active members of our group, Jane Cooper, decided that she couldn’t sign the open letter, even though she had meticulously compiled the statistics that helped us make our case, going back over every issue of APR to count all the poets published. At the last minute, though, Jane told Adrienne confidentially she couldn’t sign the letter, since APR had been particularly supportive of her personally, even featuring her work on a recent cover. I volunteered to type up the final version of the letter for circulation. (There were no personal computers back then. I had an ancient Underwood manual typewriter made of heavy steel with a little medallion on it that read “Speeds the World’s Business.”)

I was living at the time in a Bohemian shared apartment in the East Village. One night my roommates introduced me to a controlled substance that had mind-altering effects. I was still recovering from those effects the next morning when one of my roommates came into my room and said, “I think Adrienne Rich is on the phone and wants to talk to you right now.”

That spelled terror for a twenty-four year old male poet. I jumped out of bed and went to the phone. Adrienne was irate that Jane Cooper’s name had appeared on the published version of the open letter. Somehow the message had never been passed to me to omit Jane’s name. The letter went out with Jane’s name among the signers, violating a relationship of trust that Jane had with APR. It took quite a bit of explaining before Adrienne was satisfied that it wasn’t my fault, it was just a miscommunication.

Later I got to hear Adrienne read her poems many times, the final time at the Lunch Poems Reading Series at UC Berkeley on February 6, 2003. Adrienne was by then much weakened physically by her illness. As coordinator of the series, I worked out elaborate preparations for how to get her up on the stage at International House on the Berkeley campus. We tested the backstage elevator to make sure it would get her to the height of the podium. In the end, despite evident pain, Adrienne just marched up the stairs in front of the whole audience. Once onstage, Robert Hass, who was introducing her that day, took her arm. Adrienne’s power as a poet, though, was never diminished by her illness.

One of my favorite poems by Adrienne Rich is “Heroines,” from her great book A Wild Patience Has Taken Me This Far. It’s an audacious poem from a formal standpoint, using the triadic line that Mayakovsky and William Carlos Williams had innovated. In the poem, Adrienne salutes the women social activists of the nineteenth century, while teasing out the nuances of their class privilege. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Your mind burns

                            not like the harbor beacon

                                                                       but like a fire

of fiercer origin

                         you begin speaking out

and a great gust of freedom

                                             rushes in with your words

Adrienne would not have liked to be compared to those heroines—she shunned any honors that focused on her and not on her beliefs—but those lines are so true of her own poetry. I always came away from a reading by Adrienne feeling changed. Her poetry summoned us to do our best and better. Her language was forged by the blaze of her convictions. She was one of those rare human beings whose very presence altered you. I love the great gusts of freedom that rush in with her words.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation: The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry