Of Glory not a Beam is left
But her Eternal House –
The Asterisk is for the Dead,
The Living, for the Stars –

— Emily Dickinson

The four lines that comprise Emily Dickinson’s poem “Of Glory not a Beam is left (1685)” do not include any asterisks, but in it, she declares them “for the Dead, / The Living, for the Stars –.” While the uses and connotations of asterisks are many, I am particularly interested in their poetic deployments and contradictions: those of the cosmic and mundane, of living and dead. When does the asterisk’s distance—its pointing elsewhere—facilitate a closeness to language? When do writers specifically use the symbol to cite, emphasize, or correct? How does its presence transform a text’s visual and rhetorical impact?

I am a poet concerned with neither a romanticization* of the asterisk, nor a takedown of it. Indeed, I disagree with critics like novelist Brandon Taylor who in his 2018 Lithub post “I Reject Your Asterisks, and Your Dinkus, Too,” writes that “[t]here are as many reasons to use an asterisk as there are stars in the sky and more still” as if it is a bad thing. He follows the line with two asterisks spaced apart,** then huffs that they are “used as a cheat, elision as a kind of magician’s cape to conceal a total lack of scene architecture.” (Does everything have to be built of brick, Brandon?) The post concludes that “the double white space is better”—and while I understand the call for more sky, why fill it with less stars or with less magic?

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Though Sumerian pictographs from five thousand years ago include a symbol that looks like the asterisk, asterisks with their known uses may be traced back to records of Aristarchus of Samothrace, the librarian of Alexandra who offered the most substantial critical edition of Homer in antiquity a couple of centuries before CE. Other early texts utilizing asterisks include Christian scholar Origen’s Greek translation of the Jewish scriptures in the third century CE and medieval printings of the bible.

In mathematics and computer science, the asterisk can multiply or repeat; in economics, it can mark the optimal level of a variable. They can be shorthand for statistical significance, or mean a property at sonic speed. In sports, the symbol can denote a tainted record, as in anti-steroid campaigns like “Play Asterisk Free,” organized by the United States Olympic Committee and the Ad Council in 2011. (An earlier tagline for the campaign was, comically, “Don’t Be An Asterisk.”) We see it on telephone keypads, in lines of code and music, and on our many screens.

Asterisks often act as footnotes, a tool considered by writer and curator Legacy Russell in her 2021 AICA-USA Distinguished Critic Lecture at The New School, presented in partnership with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. Through a Black queer feminist lens, Russell centers the margins, counter-text, and counter-narrative, asking “What happens when the footnotes become the text?” In the context of deep cultural and political shifts, Russell ponders how we can use the footnote as “a protective locality to quite literally hide in plain sight” and create “encrypted portals for thought, language, community, being, becoming.” She considers the footnote’s potential as “an armor and shield, as a place to curl up and rest so we don’t curl up, exhaust ourselves, and die.” She names it “a love space;” a “weird space to do weird work collectively,” a “congregation”—asserting that “all of us as footnotes are a threat.”

How might Russell’s characterization of the footnote as portal, armor, and threat extend to the asterisk? How does the asterisk—from the Greek asteriskos, “little star”—mute and whistle towards the celestial and the earthly, towards correction and connection? I’m curious.

* Though, admittedly, I can’t help writing love poems.
** Three asterisks would make it a dinkus. (More on that after the dinkus.)

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The Wikipedia entry for “dinkus” begins with a kind of asterisk: that the term should not be confused for dingus (meaning “something one cannot or does not wish to name specifically”) or dingbat (meaning an “eccentric;” a glyph).

The dinkus likely dates back to the 1850s and is composed of three asterisks, often spaced and centered between paragraphs. A pause is created visually with the white space surrounding the symbol, as well as logically as it represents a break in the text often involving a jump in time or ideas—a kind of spiky ellipsis. As such, it challenges sequential structuring and can be an intentional act of queering the order or logic of a text.

A dinkus can also communicate omitted information, an abbreviation, or that something is untitled. Like the footnote, the asterisk oscillates between narrowing and expanding—teetering between uses that mark multiplicity and those that represent emptiness. It obscures while demanding attention, like a strikethrough might.* It represents both ramble and repose, a tangle of contradictions I am fascinated by.

Crucial to notice within this redirecting of attention and space is the direction itself—what is the asterisk leading us toward or winking at? Does the redirection validate sources of power or work to destabilize them? Who is amending or adding to the original text and how (where? why?) are they situated in relation to it?

* I think of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat saying, “I cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.”

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An earlier form of the dinkus was the asterism, which is composed of three triangulated asterisks. Its name derives from astronomy, where it means an observed grouping of stars. Asterisms are outside the eighty-eight “official” constellations and include the Big and Little Dippers. Power to the unofficially observed!

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Poet Moncho Ollin Alvarado’s Greyhound Americans (2022) also conjures the cosmic, the musical, and the asterisk. In the poem “Amá Teaches Me How to Whistle,” the speaker is told it is “facil” to “look up, kiss everything, / hold the sun between your mouth,” instructed to “blow like this * * * * * **** / **** * * * * * *** ****.” While in other contexts they might be used to silence vulgarities, here the string of puckered asterisks (akin to the ones that make up the lips of the kiss emoticon) act as music notes.

When performing, Alvarado whistles the line melodically, showing the audience the lessons worked. It ends with another string of asterisks and the speaker addressing Amá with the line, “I finally learned how to whistle like you.” In this poem, asterisks become both allusion to the shape of whistling lips and to music notes whose pitch is visually equalized on the same horizontal line. When asked about the poem, Alvarado credits a prompt from poet Aracelis Girmay and speaks about the questions and image the symbol conjured for her. In the asterisk, she saw the top of fruits, though primarily she thought about the shape of whistling lips. She asked herself: “How can I use the asterisk for myself? How can I mouth it, embody it?” Much of the poem praises embodiment, celebrating Moncho “going by she & my real name” and thanking Amá for believing in the “ordinary phenomenon” of her gender.

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Decades before Alvarado, New York School poet Ted Berrigan proclaims in 1971’s “Train Poem”:

What I like is

ASTERISKS

*   *   *   *   *   *

They’re so

Bold, confident, like you
have a plan, you’re in
control, you’ll be back

in a minute.

*

In this specific passage, Berrigan is ecstatic about the symbol, praising it in all capital letters and deploying it one, two, three, four, five, six times in the same row. The asterisks are capital-B Bold and their sense of control leaks into the language surrounding it. Berrigan names and then demonstrates the symbol’s continuative superpower, one that both pauses the poem and promises return. Like much of the poem, which is dedicated to Berrigan’s friend Joe Brainard, these lines are not only a set of observations of transit and language, but an address to Brainard, who “lives at the other end of the train.” Indeed, the break after the “you” makes the line the most intimate praise.

In some parts of the book-length poem, Berrigan uses just one asterisk to mark section breaks. In others, a horizontal line plays this same role. These breaks underscore the poem’s pacing as it is shaped by the stops on the train.

* * *

Considering the multiplicity of the asterisk conjures other tactics of citation and breaks. One text that stands out is Thresholes, in which Lara Mimosa Montes interweaves many references and cites them within parentheses. Montes writes, “Parentheses allow me to retreat from myself, as well as to say something else.” As the book undulates between narrative and theory, empty circles cascade centered down the pages—sometimes one between lines or stanzas, sometimes in groups of three.

Montes questions:

In search of a dead bolt, a grammar, a thought, a door—

○

What if all that’s left of me are the holes?

○
○
○

Another passage reads:

The circle sweats and expands

○

Allowing breath through resonant

○

And when it widens, it vibrates

○

The rounded partial enclosure of the parenthesis and the full enclosure (wholeness) of the circles (one of the titular holes) contrast visually with the pointy asterisk but can have related applications. The circles in this work seem to echo or perhaps mirror the asterisk’s poetic uses, both visually and rhetorically. The circles not only facilitate travel down the page but (like asterisks often do) become portals to elsewhere, vibrating and resonating with other forms of knowledge. Here again we see a structural mark not only serving poetic purposes, but intentionally characterized in terms of the bodily, in terms of sweat and breath. (Or, to borrow another line from Moncho: “how round this knowledge.”) It makes me think about the asterisk’s queering, decolonizing, radical potential, even when reified by another symbol like Montes’s circles.

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As I contemplate these texts and histories related to the symbol, I return to Dickinson and her declarations.

What of the stars? Of the visual overlap between the asterisk’s radiating stems and the glow of far-away plasma held by gravity? Do the outward gestures made by these little stars represent a distancing between symbol and significance, between language and meaning? Does its impact equal the scale of stars themselves, or is it as small as astral bodies seem looking up from the ground?

What of the asterisks we leave for the dead? Do their citations just conjure passed writers, or point at words so unalive they need a caveat? Do they live in the “subterranean,” the place where, as Russell remarks, tombstones and footnotes are held? Is the asterisk’s compliance in acts of censorship, silence, and erasure a kind of death, too?

What about asterisks for the living—be they tools to mend human mistakes from misplaced fingers making typos, or annotations to communicate stage direction or emphasis? What of the neural sparks that allow us to fill in a dirty word from a single letter? What is more alive than a confession of error or incompleteness? What signs of life persist within a pause, or a breath between psalms? To quote another Dickinson poem, “For what are Stars but Asterisks / To point a human Life?”

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The Star of Life is a symbol composed of a blue asterisk overlaid with the Rod of Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine who was adopted by the Romans in 293 BCE after a plague. The symbol, designed by Leo R. Schwartz and trademarked in 1977, was created by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. It is widely used to mark emergency medical services on roads, vehicles, and uniforms. The six bars of the asterisk represent parts of the emergency medical services, in this order: detection, reporting, response, on-scene care, care in transit, and transfer to definitive care.

I detect these gestures in the asterisk’s linguistic and poetic uses, too. As they respond—to the reader, to texts, to histories—the symbol reiterates care for the living. By denoting a literal and metaphorical expansiveness of ideas and language, when the asterisk widens, it vibrates, too.

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Born in Medellín, Colombia, danilo machado is a poet, curator, and critic living on occupied land, interested in language’s potential for revealing tenderness, erasure, and relationships to power. Their writing has been featured in Art in America, Hyperallergic, ART PAPERS, Poem-A-Day, The Recluse, GenderFail, No, Dear, ArtCritical, TAYO Literary Magazine, among others. A 2020–2021 Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow, machado has contributed writing to exhibitions including at CUE Art Foundation, Miriam Gallery, Denny Dimin, Abrons Art Center/Boston Center for the Arts, Second Street Gallery, and Real Art Ways. They are the author of the chaplet wavy in its heat (Ghost City Press, 2022) and the forthcoming collection This is your receipt and is not a ticket for travel (Faint Line Press, 2023).

machado is curator of the exhibitions Otherwise Obscured: Erasure in Body and Text (Franklin Street Works, 2019), support structures (Virtual/The 8th Floor, featuring the 2019–2020 cohort of Art Beyond Sight’s Art and Disability Residency), and We turn (EFA Project Space, 2021). machado is also the author of The Post Post Post newsletter on Substack, co-host of the exquisites Reading Series, and co-curator of the chapbook fundraiser Already Felt: poems in revolt & bounty. An honors graduate of the University of Connecticut and former Curatorial Assistant at Socrates Sculpture Park, machado is currently Producer of Public Programs at the Brooklyn Museum. They are working to show up with care with their communities.