Sonia’s Poem of the Week

Poet Sonia Feldman featured “During the Middle Ages” on her series and interviewed me about writing that poem. I loved her ideas and questions about how humor works in poetic punctuation and syntax:

What I think I'm saying is that the absence of punctuation permits the poem to joyfully and wildly associate across ideas that would otherwise be bound within their own sentences. Plus, every thought running unimpeded into the next allows the poem to read as an ongoing moan. Did these types of considerations occur to you as you were writing the poem? How do you think about punctuation and syntax as components of humor?

CG: What a generous and insightful close reading: thank you! Yes, I meant for the lack of punctuation to enact the restless, emotional thoughts spinning out from each other—the way the mind thinks when upset and variously insulting or consoling oneself with ideas, digressions, fantasies. I am reluctant to punctuate in most of my new poems, especially with medial commas and end stops; it’s a way of representing the dramatic way I hear the poems. The interrupted syntax and mirroring (the so and so lines) are a way of resisting and creating structure: the kind of glue you need to stick in somewhere to make the poem cohere if you’re not writing in a form. Form and content should work together, so I wanted the onrushing lines to mimic the unhappy, reaching, amusing tone of the poem. A tension between comfort, misery, and humor.

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