Dashes, dashes, dashes--it's all about the dashes. A lot of times I feel the most interesting thing about writing is the punctuation--making decisions about how to fit the words together with the non-word elements--I love commas and I love leaving commas out--and there's nothing I love so much as figuring out where verse lines should end, how to finesse a stanza break, how to make a paragraph break cover more distance than it really should--I don't know that there's much poetry I'd still read for content but I can still be amazed at some writers' construction of lines--although I still think the contemporary experimental and avant-garde tend to be actually less interesting in this respect than more conventional verse, when it's really good--I would love to try to explain why stringing observations together with dashes seems to me so interesting and running sentences together with semi-colons seems puerile--if that's the word . . .
and then there's ellipses . . .
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for the entire year of 9th grade, all we did in English was learn how to string phrases together with semi-colons--nothing else; fortunately, comma, I don't really remember that year. - JH
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