NOTES
Sources: My hands. The murals from the
Tepantitla complex at Teotihuacan (Central Mexico, first
centuries C.E.) showing open hands distributing bounty.
The structure of feathers and their relation to highly
stylized bird images in diverse Indigenous Arts of North
America. Bill Keith's exclamation points/zebra stripes.
Márton Koppány's punctuation
mark poems, one set each of question marks and exclamation
points, in which only the last of each includes the most
basic element of punctuation, the dot, on the last one of
each series. The space (large or small) between one sheet
of paper and another.
Question marks make open hands and flight
possible. Exclamation points create the body and create
a base for the extensions of wings and fingers. The dots
on the bottom panel are essential to the other two punctuation
marks which, like the period, conclude a sentence. In Spanish
usage, inverted ¿ opens
a question, just as ? closes it. The curve in question marks
need not be great. The dots may be periods or they may be
ellipses. All marks need negative space to function. The
moon's disk reflects the sun's light, as faces appear in
mirrors. Watch the moon and punctuation—the full moon
can turn into various different styles of commas, quotation
marks, and parentheses that function as internal divisions
rather than temporary points of closure indicated by the
exclamation point, the question mark, and the period. You
shouldn't look directly at the sun's disk, though I take
pictures of it through clouds and in conjunction with them.
The sun makes colors appear dramatically in the sky, and
tends to do so most enthusiastically at the end of a day.
Sunlight deflected through clouds can appear as lines and
can make spots on your windshield show up as tentative dots.
Despite the perennial dirtying of the Bible by Fundamentalist
Jihadists, and particularly in the U.S. in 2004, check out
I Corinthians 13:12. Feathers make good pens if you know
how to cut and temper them. They can also be used delightfully
in erotic play.
Karl Young 2005
LINKS
Karl Young homepage
Light
and Dust Anthology of Poetry
An ongoing, pluralistic anthology of contemporary poetry, which includes complete out of print books, sub-sites for authors, genres, issues, and interchanges with poets in other countries. |