Poem with Exclamation Points
M tells me someone at Hollins told her (quoting someone else?)
that every writer is allowed one exclamation point in all their writing career.
One! Can you imagine?
Someone forgot to tell Walt Whitman!
Also O’Hara, Koch. What about cummings? I’m checking. Does
!
by itself on a line count? In my (used) book
someone has drawn parenthesis around Death I think is no parenthesis. (How
many parenthesis are we allowed, I wonder?) What about Herrick?
Here’s: Alas for me! I don’t see another, but
I’m not really looking carefully anymore, I’m writing this poem,
the things I’ve exclaimed in poems already! Like, O, dead spider!
and stuff like that. I should ration exclamation points, then,
be careful, they’re dear, imported. But it’s spring!
I mean it’s fall! Suki’s sitting on my poems in the springfall breeze!
(We didn’t used to have a cat but now we do!)
D’s playing June Apple in the guitar room; later he’ll go get someone out of jail!
And me: blue ink, blue ink, all day (what luck)!
(How many parenthesis did we get again?) And what about
semicolons; what about colons? What about
the question mark?
1 comment:
I love it.
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