I continue to ruminate on yesterday’s Marianne Moore poem.
Although it’s not hard for me to see why other 20th century poets valued and imitated her on many fronts, clearly I’m both charmed and uneasy about one particular aspect of her technique–the end-line (and particularly the end-of-stanza) hyphens. I hinted at the reason in my last post: I want poetry to be performed, read aloud, interpreted orally. If you can’t do that it may still be poetry of course bu tI’m allowed to dislike it.
So what to do with these hyphens of hers–not the brilliant ones or those that make syntactic or metrical sense, but the others?
May I introduce Miss Emily Dickinson, whose famous “hyphens” or “dashes” almost need a name of their own, since all her poetry existed in (cursive or longhand) manuscript? Some look like full-stops or commas, but collectively they have confounded editors from the beginning. I’ll call them dashes for convenience, as the n-dash is often used when the poems get typeset. Since she often copied out a poem or two to send to a friend, it might seem weird that she frequently changed the punctuation even when she did not substitute a new word (though she often did that too). It’s as if each written “performance” was to her an oral performance: she was re-composing in real time. Nothing was ever finished, which is actually quite convenient for a poet or writer of any kind.
Check the penultimate line.
Some Dickinson dashes were clearly rhetorical, elocutionary, or syntactic, some a visual way of organizing, and some remain unexplained and perhaps inexplicable.
Beyond the obvious typology, I see some of them as tics, her mind and pen pausing to reconsider–and if as readers we likewise gift her an instant it forms a bond; and as musical directions, though not literally. Miss Emily played the parlor piano, so it’s possible that she internalized composers’ instructions such as ritardando/a tempo, crescendo/decrescendo, legato/marcato. Whether she did or not, in my mind these markings often constitute instructions to the performer.
People have written whole books on this, I my abandoned dissertation would have delved into Dickinson’s prosody at length.
For most of you this is old news, I know, almost ancient and irrelevant. Thanks for reading.