The Point!

Missing everything but the point: visual poetry celebrating excitement! The exclamation point is much maligned. It’s bad style. It’s like laughing at your own joke. It screams, it yells, it’s hysterical, it’s maybe even embarrassingly obsequious. Nasser Hussain disagrees! What’s so bad about expressing enthusiasm? What if you really need to scream? The prescriptions of ‘style’ can feel like an artificial limit placed on our language, insisting we produce a bland monotone that trades on its appearance as rational, subdued, civilized discourse. Against this, The Point, where poetry bangs its head against this veneer of rationality. Poetry, it insists, is exciting! Is, maybe, excitement itself! The Point is composed using only exclamation marks, seeking to reclaim the dignity of the bang’s and explore its expressive possibilities. Against the well-known derision of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Elmore Leonard, and Gertrude Stein, Hussain uses the exclamation point to make a point: let’s celebrate the possibility of enthusiasm!