"In the use of punctuation, certain writers have been very inspiring to me. Wordsworth, again, was really a profoundly original poet in the use of punctuation. You have these pile-ups, car-crashes of combinations of punctuation throughout the
Prelude and other poems by Wordsworth—say, a comma, immediately followed by a colon, immediately followed by a long dash. These are uncertainly iconic of certain kinds of mental states. They both represent and in another sense
are moments of ambivalence or confusion or uncertainty, which in that poem could not be altogether expressed in words alone because no idiom could be found to represent these states. That’s true about the inadequacy of idiom in all great poetry, and it is why poetry is not prose, but in Wordsworth’s poetry, the best of it at least, we get virtually a commentary on the exhaustibility of idiom and the necessity of iconic representations of otherwise unspeakable states of feeling. Wordsworth’s very passionate and interrogative use of unusual combinations of punctuation bound up in clusters was profoundly influential to me, as also were his vastly overextended sentences, which are quite thoroughly different from Milton’s overextended sentences. Another master of punctuation is Samuel Beckett. His use of punctuation is deeply inspiring to me throughout his prose writings, particularly in the so-called trilogy of novels and in the novel
Watt. I don’t know if you remember the moment in
Watt where he describes the semi-colon as ‘hideous’. It’s a beautiful thought. The idea that Beckett was in agony over the appearance in his work of a semi-colon—I’m sure he really was"
Kyle Booten Daragh Breen Mark Byers Sarah-Clare Conlon & Robert Sheppard Hannah Copley Michael Farrell Adam Flint Charlotte Geater Paul A. Green Oli Hazzard Nicki Heinen Doug Jones Joshua Jones
www.manifold.group.shef.ac.uk