WITHOUT PUNCTUATION

There's a controversy going on about commas and other points of punctuation nowadays. The latest word, or not-so-latest word in newspaper style, is that commas take up too much space. Further, serial commas should be avoided with as much caution as serial killers. Even E.B. White, the essayist I most admire, had something sassy to say about commas in an interview in the Paris Review: "Commas in The New Yorker fall with the precision of knives in a circus act, outlining the victim."

I realize that too much use of anything is bad for the reader's eyesight and brain capacity, but I'm troubled by the trend to omit ideas, abbreviate words, create acronyms, and excise punctuation to the extent that even periods will soon die a swift death in the name of "saving space." I once won a First Place award at State Rally for being able to take shorthand at 140 words per minute—those squiggles and lines were a real space saver in lined tablets—but even so, when I transcribed the material, the words fit in as much space as that required for typed copy.

Can you imagine the dawn of the run-on sentence with all its abbreviations, acronyms, loss of punctuation, and other literary trimming? Would it read something like this:

During the bitter winter of 2015 when temps dipped below freezing in the am and even lower in the pm our electrical power was shut off and we could not use the computer which was penalty for having used too much electricity because we did not try to save space by omitting commas periods and certainly exclamation points when composing copy for periodicals like the NYT and WP and long books similar to War and Peace and had ignored those green lines that denoted too many words in a sentence and the basic rules of punctuation established by Strunk and White who believed in comma serialization and other outdated rules for style so we got out a yellow pad and a pencil and wrote a piece of flash fiction which is the latest form of abbreviated writing that has no plot and few characters and certainly reduces the amount of space that a story takes up on a page while writing in the manner of someone like Gertrude Stein who happened to call her run on unpunctuated style automatic writing or James Joyce who invented stream of consciousness technique both of them I am sure who created in the interests of saving space

Just looking back over that piece of unpunctuated nonsense makes me wonder about the future of literature. However, think of the money publishers could save by printing one-page books, or perhaps we're already at that point in human literacy. After all, we have the smart phone and text messages to save our brains and spare publishers the trouble of having to print something in black ink on paper that might be kept for future generations.

'Seems that if we don't become involved in this mass excision of punctuation and language, those who follow us will know we didn't do much toward saving a civilization dependent on trees. However, if we retain the comma, period, and long sentences that express large ideas, we just might expand human consciousness.

FLOATING HEART

Pinyon Publishing in Montrose, Colorado has done its part to promote National Poetry Month this April by producing several notable books of poetry by nationally-acclaimed poets.  Among the outstanding volumes published is a collection of poetry by Stuart Friebert, an audacious poet who will captivate poetry lovers with Floating Heart. This collection features poems of probity and liveliness that pay attention to the familiar and ordinary and will startle readers with their fierceness. The poems are rendered with the exactness of memory, dark humor, and a particular aptness when Friebert describes the changeability of "the floating heart."

Friebert pulls aside the curtain and reveals, with authoritative insight, the foibles of the human heart and the existential attitude that sometimes lies beneath the surface of ordinary people. In "But That the Wicked Turn From Evil Ways and Live," readers can identify with being "a long way from here, closer to Eden, wishes/will amount to nothing. But we don't know how/to get there...It would have been just/the same if there were no God whom we watch/for, expect to return on foot, indignant, to claim/his imperfect children.  But. And. But. And..."  And take a deep breath.

Yet, hope forces its way into the business of survival and shows the emotional power–and poignancy– of Friebert's writing in a short poem featuring the poet's father and mother speaking to the subject of "The Will" they haven't prepared and the mortality they haven't faced --their claim being "there was little wealth,/but enough gaiety; and we were/never done with our food.  Standing/in our socks, starting some old joke./Life being different from death; hoping/we might go on and on and on." 

Friebert is at his most masterfully wry in "Pink Of the Evening," poking fun at authors Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, leading off with the choice line of "Pink is as pink supposes..." with Hemingway coming over to visit Stein for "something to drink, work to show,/advice to get,/but we can't be sure..." And for those of us who know the story, from first to last lines the poem is pure irony because of Hemingway's friendship and eventual bitter parting with Stein. Noteworthy are two laugh aloud lines when Alice Toklas and Stein are discussing whether birds that appear while they're having drinks are ravens or waxwings: "'Who cares?' Gertrude would sigh, 'As/long as Mr. Hemingway won't shoot them'..."  Needless to add that Hemingway shot most creatures that appeared in his gun sights!

To me, the most anguishing poem in Floating Heart is entitled "Near Dachau," a poem that is simply declarative but charged with emotional power as the poet speaks of the Allies arriving "too late" at Dachau and find "the enormous/ditches still smoldering on the far/side of the rusting barbed wire." 

Robust and direct, these portraits of inner moods, authentic and imagined characters, cover the expansive range of a consummate poet's experience. They are alternately serious and hilarious and allow readers to develop a new perspective about death, family, society, and the intimacies of human lives and their "floating hearts."

Stuart Friebert taught at Mt. Holyoke College, Harvard, and Oberlin College where he founded and directed Oberlin's Creative Writing Program until retiring in 1997. He also taught at this college, co-founded Field Magazine, the Field Translation Series, and Oberlin College Press. He has published a dozen books of poems, ten volumes of translations, prose stories, memoir pieces, and critical essays. He has received an N.E.A. Fellowship in poetry and numerous awards for poems and translations, including the Four Way Book Award for Funeral Pie.

Floating Heart is available at Pinyon Publishing, 23847 V66 Trail, Montrose, Colorado 81403.