Honestly, punctuation in poetry troubles me. Not to the extent I lose sleep over it. But I have gotten into bed wondering if I’d over or under punctuated a just completed draft. Worse my penchant for inconsistent punctuation, such as a completed sentence with commas and and a full stop, followed by a non-sentence with little or no punctuation. Of course, inconsistent punctuation can be intentional. More on that…
Historically, poets followed normal prose rules for sentence structure, and more often than not capitalized the beginning of each line. As early as 1827, however, William Blake started eliminating certain punctuation, and had his own strict rules for how a poem should appear — notoriously difficult for editors. Take Blake’s poem, “The Sick Rose.”
O Rose thou art sick.
The invisible worm,
That flies in the night
In the howling storm:
Has found out thy bed
Of crimson joy:
And his dark secret love
Does thy life destroy.
The first line, eliminates a standard comma for written English at the time. But, “O Rose, thou art sick,” with that pause one feels at the comma, has an entirely different effect. Blake is inconsistent with his use of commas in this poem, but intentionally so. Note here, also, his use of dual colons astonishingly drives the poem to its bitter end.
The end of a line essentially punctuates the line
Later, W.S. Merwin, William Carlos Williams, and, of course, e.e. cummings, among many others, followed suit with Blake, often including elimination of the capitalized line. Poets began to ask, “How can a poem say more?” Using punctuation as a tool for deeper expression rather than being held captive by it in order to obey the rules of grammar, was one way poets broke out of the box.
So, “punctuation” in poetry is not just determined by punctuation "marks." Poems have line breaks, one of the things that delineates poetry from prose. The end of a line essentially punctuates the line, and gives it a natural pause. The last word in a line holds “prime real estate” in a poem’s landscape (hence its importance in rhyming poetry). Capitalization at the beginning of a line also punctuates that first word.
With the continued popularity of “free verse,” many poets will consistently capitalize lines only if that repetition serves a purpose: it starts a new thought, starts a sentence that might not be preceded by a full stopped sentence before it, or perhaps an acrostic poem where every first letter spells out a word or phrase. Or, quite simply, in the interest of being “free” in our verse, we like the way it looks, as acceptable as any reason, should we need one.
Filipino-American poet, Jose Garcia Villa, wrote what he called “comma poems,” where he follows each word with a comma. “The commas,” he wrote in his Volume Two, “are an integral and essential part of the medium: regulating the poem’s verbal density and time movement: enabling each word to attain a fuller tonal value, and the line movement to become more measured.” How’s that for an intention?! From his “136” —
The, hands, on, the, piano, are, armless.
No, one, is, at, the, piano.
The, hands, begin, and, end, there.
Poetry has a way of freeing a writer from the constraints of “proper” grammar.
As an example of how we grow as poets, here’s a little anecdote. A dear poet friend of mine likes to leave out question marks in her poetry, essentially saying that most if not all questions posed in poetry are “rhetorical,” and therefore don’t need punctuation. If I were editing her work and kept seeing this, I would send her articles from the “grammar police” citing the necessity of question marks at the end of questions, rhetorical or not! I eventually lightened up on this point and came around.
How? Why!
The question mark, like its close relation, the exclamation mark, stops the reader and asks them to think at that point about what has been said. It’s an extreme sort of punctuation. I realized that may not always be the effect I want simply by asking a question in a poem. And… well… question marks are visually ugly (in my humble opinion).
The intentional removal of standard punctuation can be seen as a form of punctuation itself. The absence of punctuation, or the refusal to capitalize words that normally are (“I,” proper names, titles, e.g.) creates an empty space where mystery, and even satire (e.e. cummings, for instance) can unfold.
Every aspect of a poem should be intentional: every word, every line break, every added space between words and letters, and, yes, every use of punctuation. If you place a comma in a particular spot, why? Is the meaning the same without it? If it creates a potential dual-meaning with or without the comma, is that your intention? Maybe you intend to say, “Screw all the conventions of language!” Well, okay, then.
Poetry has a way of freeing a writer from the constraints of “proper” grammar. A writing teacher of mine once said, however, “Go ahead and break the rules, but first learn the rules well, and why they were created, before you do.” So, perhaps even more than a novel writer, a poet must know the rule, even if their destiny is to “screw the conventions” with alternative punctuation.