Tuesday 22 September 2009

Punctuation Cut-Ups

; instead, years." ' 'cleanse


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leader,' 'loving 'Even the smallest thing


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a pet deer, 'patriotic education' he comes back."


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destiny, is impermanent. , maybe I won't be around so long.


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no moon, three choices: , passing through

1 comment:

Stephen Nelson said...

Recently I was struck by the beauty of a semi-colon in a sentence from a piece of non-fiction I was reading. I started to scan the shapes of certain sentences and phrases and the marks which punctuated them, and decided to pick out a few at random. This led to me choosing certain words and phrases using a selective cut-up technique to re-assemble as minimalist poems. I had two rules. Each word or phrase chosen had to be preceded or followed by a punctuation mark; and, each piece had to be composed from the facing pages of the text. The punctuation marks alter or add to any meaning which can be drawn from the pieces.

In the text, single quotation marks were used, except where quotes within quotes.