People ask why the poems look the way they do on the page. The short answer is that I am dyslexic and I write for the ear, and both of those things decided the shape before I had any opinion about it. The longer answer is below, with the counting done.
The second collection, and the one all of this was worked out on.
Across the whole book the average line runs to five words. Not four, not eight — five. More than a quarter of every line I have ever published is three words or fewer, and the longest line in two hundred and thirteen poems is twenty-one. I did not set out to do that. It is what happens when you write down the amount of language you can hold in your head at once and trust it to be enough.
A long line is a place to get lost. I lose my place in other people’s poems constantly — the eye comes back to the left margin and lands a line above or below where it left. So my lines are short enough that the return is never in doubt, and there is white space to the right of nearly every one of them. That space is not decoration. It is a handrail.
It has an effect I did not plan for, which is that the poems read fast and land hard. A short line has nowhere to hide a weak word. If a line is three words long and one of them is doing nothing, you can see it from across the room.
Look at where the capitals stop. Look at the comma in the fifth line and the nothing at the end of the second. Four of these eight lines carry no punctuation at all, and the sentence that begins in line four does not finish until line six — across two breaks, with no capital to help you.
It still reads. That is the whole argument.
There was no proper ending Just silence And an invested heart That’s how love dies not with goodbye, but with nothing at all. You left me on read. . . I’ve still got our play list.
Fifty-four per cent of my lines end with no punctuation mark of any kind. Forty-five per cent contain none anywhere. I am not being careless and I am not being modern. It is that the break is already a pause, and putting a comma there as well is telling the reader the same thing twice.
Forty-six per cent of my lines begin in lower case, because the sentence has not finished — it is still going, it just went round a corner. Five hundred and twenty-eight of them begin with the word And. My English teacher would have had something to say about that. But nobody speaks in full stops. When a man tells you the worst thing that ever happened to him, he does it in fragments, and he starts half of them with and, and he trails off. If I punctuated that properly I would be tidying up the only part that is true.
What is left is a grammar you supply yourself. You put the commas in as you read. That is why people tell me the poems sound like their own voice — some of it literally is.
Four hundred and seventy-eight times in one book I write three dots with spaces between them. . . . — not the tight one that printers use, and not the single character a word processor tries to give you. A hundred and two of them are closed up, and I would not swear that every one of those was somebody else’s doing.
A proper ellipsis means something has been left out. Mine means nothing has been left out — the speaker has simply stopped, because carrying on would cost him something. The spaces are the length of the stop. Three dots close together is a hesitation. Three dots apart is a man deciding not to say the rest of it.
Fifty-four poems end that way. It is the closest thing I have to a signature, and it is the one piece of my punctuation I will argue about.
Two hundred and thirteen poems, twenty thousand words, and only two thousand two hundred and seventy-five different ones. Of those, a hundred and twenty-one are longer than nine letters — five per cent. I use the same small handful of words over and over: love, gone, still, home, mother, hands, morning.
That started as avoidance. If I cannot spell a word with confidence I will not reach for it, and for years I thought of that as the ceiling on what I could write. What I found instead is that the small words are the ones that do the damage. Nobody has ever been undone by a long word. She is not coming back is five words that a seven-year-old can read, and it is the worst sentence in the language.
The other thing dyslexia gave me is that I compose out loud before anything is written down. I hear the whole poem, then I write it, then I read it back aloud — and if the sound is right I leave the spelling and the punctuation alone even when they look wrong on the page. Sound is the thing I can trust. Spelling is the thing I check afterwards. Doing it in that order is why the poems work read out at a graveside and why they can look strange in print.
People assume plain language means it was easy to write. It is the opposite. It is much harder to say something true in five words you already know than in fifty you had to look up.