Poem: PARENTHITICAL
Strategy: Grammatical rule breaking
The strategy that stood out to me the most in Melanie Jordan’s piece, “Parenthetical” was how she seems to boldly ignore (or pay little attention too), rules set up for grammatical mechanics. In retrospect, the fact that she ignores these rules seems to make up the basis/foundation of the piece as a whole. For example, the poem starts with a lower-case “a”, and the entire piece is made up of 3 sentences. However, each is a run-on sentence which stands strongly enough on its own to defy the rule set against it. Finally, at the end of the piece, the period is set on the inside of the parenthesis instead of on the outside.
Everything set inside the parenthesis is isolated from the world and set in its own world/environment. In other words, inside the parenthesis there are no rules. The fact that there are no rules means that anything is acceptable, which is also true in terms of the content and construction of the piece. When we get to the line about the speaker and her friend pulling up outside the club in the middle of the piece, we can see the correlation to the inside of the club, their relationship, and their first night together in the attic room. The waves of curtains and dresses and the smoky atmosphere makes for a mystic environment in which nothing is grounded, just as nothing is really grounded within the parenthesis encompassing the poem.
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