Since Seattle in the 90s, there’s been a battle going on with line breaks: my voice, David Wagoner’s voice saying, “Don’t forget to sing,” and the page. I even stopped writing poetry because I began to feel that the line break was a gimmick and that the left margin could be so stiff. Then I read Lydia Davis’s translation of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. That’s when I truly discovered in prose the power of the comma. All this is to say that this week, I decided to take last week’s poem, “Fawning is so not punk,” and rework it: forget about line breaks, rely on the comma, and wildly enjamb the poem into a “...so not punk take 2.” May comparing take 1 with take 2 be of use to you and your poetry, your playing.
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