"Round / Shiny Fixed / Alternatives": Tracing the Colon in Pound and Oppen.

POUND, Ezra, 1885-1972; OPPEN, George, 1908-1984

The article explores how modernist poets Ezra Pound and George Oppen draw attention to punctuation to demonstrate the ways in which literary expression is always vexed by the materiality of language. It focuses on how Pound and Oppen used the colon punctuation to explore the tensions between language and literary expression. This exploration of the use of colon is exemplified in Pound's modernist poem "In a Station of the Metro" and Oppen's "Dicrete Series" and "Route."