Point-Blank Sonnets: Jessica Piazza’s Interrobang
Why did the interrobang fall out of fashion‽ The title of Jessica Piazza’s debut poetry collection is also the punctuation mark, “designed for use especially at the end of an exclamatory rhetorical question,” according to the Merriam-Webster citation that serves as one of the book’s epigraphs. Every good book raises some questions, but Interrobang is itself a question, as well as an event: the chronicle of a speaker whose emotional awareness is matched only by a nearly incredible attention to language.
Piazza deconstructs and reassembles her words as she moves—through a relationship, through the world, and through the structure of the sonnet, her vehicle of choice. This is a form that has persisted through the ages: a challenge, a teacher, and a unit of meaning that even modern curricula are obliged to include. Piazza helps us understand this sustained appeal by taking the sonnet beyond an exercise, homage, or twist on tradition; her work reminds us how condensed this form is, how direct. Most of all, Interrobang celebrates—albeit rather darkly—the ability of the sonnet to turn, not only on itself, but on its subjects, its readers, and often, on its respective writer.
The ambivalent relationship between writer and text pervades the poems of Interrobang, their allusions to ill-advised affairs and the romantic tight rope they walk. The sonnet is a form modern writers dare themselves to enter, let alone complete and link together, as Piazza does, in an entire book-length sequence. With the exception of two small sets of three, all of the sonnets are named after (or with) phobias and philias, and the poems are just as emotional as their fear- and love-obsessed titles declare. The series of confrontation and confession can’t help but affect readers, probing into why and how we relate to another person—even if that person blurs in the process.
The process of what? That is another question raised by these poems. How strange, that we are capable of building complex language patterns with artistry and precision, yet we struggle to understand the scaffolding of our relationships. Is there a certain point at which language will always flounder, and is that point actually the inevitable uncertainty of another person? What are we really doing when we interact with others—especially beloved others—and if we don’t know, how do we continue doing it? The speaker, the lover, and readers of these poems are able to marvel at these ideas, even without answers to any of these concerns. They’re likely rhetorical questions, anyway—and really, what isn’t‽
The sonnet’s formal containment of the speaker’s experience, or at least the expression of that experience, mirrors their containment in various emotional states, the relationship in question, and the language that may or may not be able to express it. That question—of the express-ability of everything going on, the knowing all along, the not wanting to know—may be the overarching interrobang at the heart of this book. And it is as much of an interrogation, and as violent, as interr- and bang- imply.
Pulling apart the words is particularly appropriate for the poems in this collection. Piazza’s surprising, extraordinary verbal attention highlights exactly what each word is doing, which in turn—often on the volta itself—highlights what we, the reader, do with each word, both in the context of the poem and the spotlight thrown on the word itself—its roots, its false friends, and its myriad associations, in general and in our own internal landscape. It’s fitting that this verbal focus burns brightest on the verbs themselves, hinging as they often do on what is implied in specific activities.
In “Erotophobia, Fear of sexual love” we read:
“…I reach for you,
intrude, appease. Each time, my need beats night
to knees and me awake and heavy-tongued
and thick…”
To reach requires distance. Intrude, a space and the desire for it not to be entered, with an optional knowing about that not-wanting, and the possible conscious violation of that desire. Appease suggests a subject, (maybe two subjects, depending on how much Hegel you have in your bed), and a want—a lack of satisfaction and awareness there-of, at least on the part of the giver.
This is all saying nothing of the sounds themselves, which of course, go without mention—quite far, in fact. We make it only four syllables after “reach,” to rhyme on “appease,” and only three more after before “need” and “beats” and “knees” and “me.” Beats of all kinds assail us: the action of the heart, the poet’s building blocks, and the admission of defeat, all pounding the reader into feeling that we’re there, with the speaker, sounding our organs and heavy-tongued with the effort of going out on a limb—reaching across the bed.
The incessant shift and dissection of fears and loves blurs the line between the two—a distinction already fine, pulled finer by Piazza.
From “Kakorrhaphiophobia—Fear of failure”:
“…your vantage point is not the stairs
you’ll scale, but stars you can’t…
…Unfailed,
you delve. Another devil is de-veiled.
A doppelgänger born with every task:
the evil twin of its unfinishing.
The harbor, never there, is menacing.
Its ebb, unanswered questions asked and asked.”
Dismantled, not only part and parcel, but syllable by syllable. Apparent similarities are posited and broken, high-lighted and hyphenated, until the world feels fractured as it actually may be, beneath the meanings we gather into sentences. No matter how we string the words together, the string itself is tenuous, a very human muscle fiber. The speaker in Piazza’s poems is aware of this, wrestling with the meaning of what she’s trying to say, and what she’s looking for.
From the series “What I Hold”:
“I cannot love the space between the words,
can find no pleasure in the silence there.
And if the point is trusting what’s unheard—
how every stop, in time, will yield a sound—
the shape I seek is not one I create.”
The search is frustrating—it seems to echo the ‘can’t live with you, can’t live without you’ of the lovers, and yet that sequence soon realizes that without space across which to string our webs, (pale communications though they may be), we would have no crossing object, no bridge, no assertion of sound or sense. We land, perhaps in backwards gratitude, on a truth not only about love and language, but poetry and action:
“Without the skips, the beat would not exist.
My hand grasps nothing and still forms a fist.”
We need space across which to string ourselves—here, and often, that space is silence and the empty page.
Much of the word play (‘play’ a strange word, considering the heartache so present here) seems spurred by the speaker’s stream of consciousness, leaping from association to reminder to memory, then back into the narrative or meditation at hand. At times it feels that we are so caught up in linguistic loops that the emotional clout gets diluted. Or the requirements of line and meter become too constricting, tightening the evocative drip by forcing the poet to range around for a technically satisfying, but maybe less powerful, phrase.
Emotional heft aside, the journey for the satisfying word its own dark pleasure, especially for those as into etymology and overlap as Piazza seems to be (of whom there are many, among readers of poetry). Yet I can’t help wondering what would happen if these poems spun out of their constraints. Would they kick the stomach harder, without the relief of linguistic flourish? Or do those different tacks heighten the effect, putting more and stranger winds in our sails?
Perhaps the interrobang faded because every rhetorical question is somewhat exclamatory. As Piazza demonstrates, it’s rather hard to say, at least directly. Better to sift and ricochet—not until we arrive at an answer, but until we’ve clarified the question—which is where Piazza leaves us. Regardless, we’d be wise to keep an ear, or three, to the ground for what she askclaims next.
K.T. Billey moved from rural Alberta, Canada, to study poetry at Columbia University, where she is now a Teaching Fellow. Poems have appeared in CutBank, The New Orleans Review, Phantom Limb, Ghost Proposal, Prick of the Spindle, the sensation feelings journal, and H.O.W. Journal. Translations have appeared in Palabras Errantes. She is proud to be a Girls Write Now mentor.
