Punctuation
Punctuation is defined as “any of various standardized marks or signs used in punctuation,” but we poets know punctuation as an act. You choose how you punctuate your poem. And there is a delicate balance to be navigated. The dictionary also lists 26 various punctuation marks (as many as there are English letters!). As someone who grew up in bilingual education, it has become my habit to make adding punctuation one of my final editing steps, as the rules change depending on what language I’m writing in.
To be honest I struggle quite a bit with punctuation. It is the element of craft I am perpetually worried about. I think that is why I love achieving what I call “naked poems,” or poems without any punctuation whatsoever. I wasn’t sure if this was a popular mode, but after reading bell hook’s When Angels Speak of Love, I can now see it is a very well established form. I’m not punctuation-biased, however, and I’m very attracted to poets who make bold choices in punctuation, such as Emily Dickinson’s claim on the delicious emdash, and e.e. cummings playfulness is his visual pieces.
Here are those 26 punctuation marks I mentioned:
Period .
Question mark ?
Exclamation point !
Comma ,
Colon :
Semicolon ;
Hyphen -
En dash –
Em dash —
Parentheses ( )
Square brackets [ ]
Curly brackets { }
Angle brackets < >
Quotation marks " "
Apostrophe '
Slash /
Ellipses ...
Asterisk *
Ampersand &
Bullet point
Pound symbol #
Tilde ~
Backslash \
At symbol @
Caret symbol ^
Pipe symbol |
Example
The way you use punctuation marks can set a tone for your poem. They can change the meanings and connections between words. Provide a pace, disrupt a rhythm, or amplify a word or phrase. To begin to explore playing with punctuation I want to offer you a radical alternative. This is a "naked poem" (or poem without punctuation) from When Angels Speak of Love by bell hooks:
4.
in him
my twin likeness
all flesh a mirror
pentimento
palimpsest
all traces
seeds pressed
in flower beds
a diary of enchantment
his hands hold mine
keep me standing firm
ground my heart
the angel eye of love
stands guard
protects our union
we are too much one
too much each other
Prompt
I am going to suggest a series of prompts to explore the topic of punctuation. Write a naked poem, such as the example by bell hooks. Or use this bell hooks poem to play with while trying out these prompts:
Rewrite the poem as a one-sentence poem.
Rewrite the poem with all the "traditional" punctuation you might find in a poem, following the general flow of clauses and sentences.
As punctuation and line breaks begin to work in tandem, rewrite it again but without line breaks so the punctuation has to do all the work of pacing the poem.
Now rewrite the poem again using as many punctuation marks as you can. Get a little wild: because...poetry [should be] fun!?
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