I seem to remember a poem by Pascale Petit called ‘Lunettes’ that uses this strategy really effectively, and I developed my own version in workshop with Joanna Klink. What does it mean if a colon occurs again and again in a sentence? What if we believe the final clause is coming but it never does, but goes on and on adding more and more to the original thought? This strategy seeks to reproduce the intrusive thoughts or chains of association that happen after a traumatic experience. Normally, a colon introduces a list, or it precedes a final clause of a sentence. In quite a few poems, I use a repeated colon, which has a particular significance for me. Ultimately, forward slashes should, as Diaz says, make the reader a little uncomfortable. Again, I wanted to question how we read and absorb cases of violence, and the backslashes ask the reader to take in the lines more carefully than the careless way we sometimes receive media stories. ‘Beatitudes for the Women’ tells stories of violence against women in Britain, America and India cis and trans women some from cases that were high profile in the news. I use forward slashes sparingly – just in two poems, ‘Poem on the Edge,’ and ‘Beatitudes for the Women.’ The first is a deeply personal poem about trauma, and the forward slashes worked for me to ask the reader to think about how we access personal stories about trauma, and to make the story itself less readily available the poem is really about someone trying to talk about a traumatic event, and not being listened to. What is really effective about Diaz’s forward slashes is how they make meaning less readily available: do you read the chunks texts in isolation, or as a whole, or both? It is challenging to the reader, and that can be particularly effective when writing a poem about trauma and pain, as Diaz does in the collection mentioned. Natalie Diaz, ‘In Their Own Words’ series, Poetry Society of Americaįorward slashes became quite “trendy” after Diaz, with many imitating her style, but perhaps not as successfully. It’s downhill from there-ultimately, the asker ends up revealing that their great-great-great-something is an Indian princess. I’ve had people ask me, “Well, how am I supposed to read the slashes?” I usually just answer, “Yes,” which I realize is no answer. The text within the slashes can be removed but is responsible for the fractured experience. I hope they make the readers’ eyes uncomfortable, that they physically and musically express the disjointed, jagged experience explored in the poem. (Shout out to my workshop group with Kathy Fagan where we discussed this book quite a bit.) You can see an example in Diaz’s poem ‘Hand-me-down Halloween’ and here’s what Diaz says about her use of forward slashes:īut in reference to the forward slashes, they aren’t meant to be exciting. One strategy was using the forward slash, inspired of course by Natalie Diaz and her book When My Brother Was an Aztec. One of the reasons that this book took such a long time to write was because I wrote and rewrote the poems many times until I found the right form. be enacted not only in the content but in the fabric of the poems. It is important to me that trauma experiences like breaks, avoidance, intrusive thoughts, visualising, OCD behaviors etc. One major issue in writing Hand & Skull was thinking about trauma, and how the form and punctuation of the poems might express the experience of reliving trauma on a personal and cultural level. I’ve also had conversations with my editor Neil Astley about the use of em-dashes which was fruitful too, and I talked a bit with Hannah Lowe about using repeated colons. He was particularly interested in the use of forward slashes and repeated colons. I have been wanting to write something here for a while for the poet Tony Curtis, who, after a reading last month, approached me and asked me about my use of punctuation in my recent poetry collection, Hand & Skull. Edward Burne Jones: Proof of an illustration designed by Burne-Jones for the Kelmscott “Chaucer”: p.441, ‘The Legend of Goode Wimmen’ Philomene, with a woman (Philomela) standing by her loom holding a shuttle in an interior, with a half-woven tapestry with the story of Pholomene and Tereus, looking out of the window.

Dashes in poems