this is what ezra pound learned from ernest fenollosa: some languages are so constructed—english among them—that we each only really speak one sentence in our lifetime. that sentence begins with your first words, toddling around the kitchen, and ends with your last words right before you step into the limousine, or in a nursing home, the night-duty attendant vaguely on hand. or, if you are blessed, they are heard by someone who knows you & loves you & will be sorry to hear the sentence end. when i told mr. angel about the lifelong sentence, he said: "that's a lot of semicolons!" he is absolutely right; the sentence would be unwieldy & awkward & resemble the novel of a savant, but the next time you use a semicolon (which, by the way, is the least-used mark of punctuation in all of poetry) you should stop & be thankful that there exists this little thing, invented by a human being—an italian as a matter of fact—that allows us to go on and keep on connnecting speech that for all apparent purposes is unrelated.
you might say a poem is a semicolon, a living semicolon, what connects the first line to the last, the act of keeping together that whose nature is to fly apart.
—from mary ruefle's book, "Madness, Rack, and Honey"
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