Punctuating poetry

There is

• text that uses full punctuation and no line-breaks - this is how prose is usually rendered. Some poems use this style too.
• text that uses full punctuation and line-breaks - this is how much poetry is rendered. Punctuation has various uses - "there was a movement away from rhythmical-oratorical punctuation to grammatical-logical usage between about 1580 and 1680 ... It was only in the decade of the 1840's that the grammatical-logical theories finally triumphed." (Mindele Triep). Line-breaks have several uses too. Poets often break lines at the end of clauses, which is where punctuation usually appears. This leads one to wonder if both line-breaks and punctuation are needed.
• text that uses line-breaks and no punctuation - some poetry is written like this. The amount of punctuation perhaps "reveals how writers view the balance between spoken and written language" (Baron). Or maybe the poets feels that the little black marks make the page more messy. In general, readers have little difficulty adapting to the style. All the same, I have a few objections to it
  • If the poetry does need to be parsed into phrases, the structures need to be simple, otherwise readers will need to backtrack in order to work out whether ";", ":" or "," is missing, or whether the sentence is a question. But why risk the reader needing to backtrack? Why simplify the sentence structure?
  • Line-breaks already have several uses. Burdening them with further duties risks overloading them, making the reading process harder
  • Line-breaks seem in some poems rather a blunt instrument, used in poetry like they are in tele-prompts and adverts as an alternative to underlining.
  If line-breaks and punctuation seem to be doing much the same job, why not jettison line-breaks rather than punctuation? Perhaps because the writer, like Tony Curtis, thinks that "writing in lines ... is all that distinguishes it from all other forms of writing".
• text that uses line-breaks and few punctuation marks - Some poets use varying amounts of indentation and between-word spacing, partly to compensate for the loss of punctuation. Commas can be replaced by between-word spaces. Full-stops can be replaced by line-breaks or paragraph breaks. Other punctuation marks (e.g. apostrophes) can be used. To me, the big white spaces can make the page look messy.

For more on punctuation see poetry punctuation

The Friday Poem and The North - poetic language

In "The Friday Poem" (31st January 2025) Stephen Payne articulates a feeling I've not been able to put into words - how the language of some poets is slightly, persistently, non-standard. Reviewing 'The Island in the Sound' by Niall Campbell he writes that "This is immediately interesting writing. The syntax is ... reduced or disrupted ... There are a few part-rhymes ... There's the playfulness ... the verb-choices are novel: I'm sure I've never seen 'comb' as an intransitive verb meaning "to become a honeycomb" or something similar."

It's not a style I can do. I wish I could. In my self-doubting moods I feel that poets who write like this are "thinking in poetry" rather than translating into poetry. The review points out that "All these aspects of the surface language – syntax, sound effects and phrase-making – ... combine to achieve a dense and intense lyricism. ". There are radical ways for poets to make readers distrust words/language. I think this gentler style stops language being transparent (the way it tends to be in prose) without making it opaque.

"The North" (issue 68, August 2022) is subtitled "the Caring issue". It's guest-edited by Andrew McMillan and Stephanie Sy-Quia. Many of the 150+ poems baffle me, not least because of the surface language. It's probably unhelpful to quote extracts of poems out of context but I'll do it anyway -

• "First I died to my feet. Then I died to my pride"
• "I'm neither dreaming nor/ running release me slow the/ attic skylight floods so much/ rain glass grey the day ahead/ blurred a chrysanthemum/ paperweight in the palm a/ flaming porcupine" (the poem justified like prose to form a rectangle)
• "So let's asphalt cognition behind, grandly dandled by on cloud rests we lay.// One bicycle wheel is left to signal to the intermitting friendship of a butterfly:"

Lucy Allsopp has 2 side-by-side poems each entitled "Collateral". The poems are the same except that one uses "/" instead of line-breaks.

I liked "Predation" by Caitlin Young (maybe because it's micro-fiction). I think there's only one poem that used a standard form - Sarah Tait's "Brack" rigourously uses iambic pentameter, the rhyme scheme being roughly xaxa xbxb ccccdd.