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.

 

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