Week 14, Response 1

I found Melanie Jordan’s poem, “Parenthetical,” absolutely fascinating and daring. I have never encountered a poem quite similar to its style—a commentary piece about punctuation and its role within language, writing, and thereby, society. My fascination with the poem began with the title and structure of the poem as a text within parentheses. The poem begins and ends with the particular punctuation marks that namesake the poem, and the inside poem functions as I imagine text within parenthesis (when normally outside the context of a poem). The small affectations of the punctuation marks and not capitalizing the first word—as if the poem were a continuation of some larger work—provides some elaboration of a social construction, a scenario, where the action described is muted or whispered to the reader. The effect provides a more intimate reading of the text, and the content depicts a slight movement almost unnoticed or unrelayed to readers—an afterthought. When I created my improv with the em dash, I attempted to attribute the same perceived characteristics—by describing details that, to me, seemed to serve as appositives to some unknown material.