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Who Called "@" "The Strudel"?
Received an eccentric little book of poems from Tim Leach, Corncurls for the Medulla Oblongata (Word Tech Editions, 2016), mostly poems of three or four lines, called aphorisms, and what charmed me is his short poems about punctuation marks. Although it’s only part of our job, editors have intense relationships with punctuation marks, and people think editing is a very dry business and that editors are dried-out and irritable nitpickers precisely because we used all our juices tending to proper punctuation. It was refreshing to find in the middle of the book this untitled poem about commas:
Commas are tadpoles that surface for breath when read. and then a poem titled “&”: Asking for more, the ampersand is a squatting monk who holds up a begging bowl. He sits in for “and,” who always wants more too. Leach looked closely at the punctuation marks’ appearance and function and gave them life. Corncurls includes more punctuation poems, including the @ (“at”) which came out of utter obscurity—it wasn’t even on typewriter keyboards!—to rule the digital age. I used to work with an Israeli engineer who called @ the “strudel.”
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Writer, with 30+ years' writing and publishing experience, 20+ years' teaching experience. Last book read: Mrs. Lincoln by Catherine Clinton.
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