ANNA'S APOSTREPHIC AIKIDO

written for my friend Anna, for fun, after a brief conversation about rebelling against grammar... and as she has declared herself, and is, practitioner of verbal aikido....

ANNA'S APOSTREPHIC AIKIDO

the author of its all one sentence to me was sad and very concerned
to realise at school she'd apparently not well understood nor learned
the correct rules for how to use grammar ( ie and etcetera, for example.)
this distressing realisation was received when she'd sent a small sample
of her sci-fi short stories, and a novel, fantasy fiction, first draft.
But unkindly, the publisher's rejection note said "Oh, How we laughed!
When we saw how your strange punctuation is absent or scattered ad hoc,
without any consistency at all!" Well, this came as a quite nasty shock.
"It does seem I've lost a few of those silly required symbols, I suppose.
I'll hunt for them!, Maybe they're hiding, to escape the duties of prose

I've never been very sure of grammatical rules, and am not so very fond
of commas, which look rather like little tadpoles that squirm in a pond.
And behave like them, too, as they tend to be damned slippery critters,
and so hard to grasp: like exclamation marks, they give me the jitters.
Oh, dear, what perplexity and trouble, each strange line, squiggle and dot:
I just don't care for it all, such a fuss, but maybe I must study and swat?
And if more troubling rules about words like reflex verbs make me squirm,
I'll just have to get tough. To stop misplaced prepositions, I'll be firm;
with double negatives, tell them clearly to not never uninvited, intrude,
when I'm just in a wonderful story line. Their interruption is so very rude.
I warn now: awkward syllables or faulty quotation marks will come a cropper,
if they mess with my metaphors, disrupt dialogue, written so nice and proper.
I'd much rather just get ideas on paper: bother these punctuational glitches.
And capitals, lower case or those horrid colons? I think they're all bitches."

( eva's reply .....

I too find the freeform versatile or minimal punctuation literary style
hugely pleasing though getting used to it for some can take quite a while
when i first read ee cummings andhiswords ran together that made me smile

and i much so prefer my name to be written eva with all
lower case letters
though of course ive been reprimanded for this by my teachers and betters
but we do it on purpose, us rebels of written rules, throw off the limiting fetters

another thing ive often Noticed is I enjoy using dashes like this - and how I do tend
to put i before c, after e, or somesuch similar confusion,or sentences often will end
with dot dot dot a favourite though sometimes i use several full stops and i will defend

your right and mine to enjoy these eccentric adaptations,
for sometimes its so much more fun
to scramble the proper Nouns, verbs and adjectives or
start a sentence before you've begun.
and breaking up paragraphs, perhaps let your word play
express some kind of whimsical pun


to explain what i mean i could tell you just now the past and its participle are tensely fighting
and i deliberately swapped around certain letters (like the g and the h in
I am hgost writing)
if i also included some mathematical symbols like + square root of = minus; that would be exciting!.....



etcetera. (eva day)