One is occasionally asked by students if there are ‘good rules’ for how to punctuate a poem. The answer has to be simply that there’s no particular reason for poems to be punctuated any differently from prose beyond the freedom to experiment we sometimes allow poetry as ‘radically original speech’. There is little to say about punctuation, other than it tends to receives the same excessive attention from the poet as does the individual word: a well- or badly placed comma will often make or ruin a line. Punctuation in poetry does a great deal more than making grammatical structure explicit. In compelling precisely timed rises, falls, breaths and pauses at the ends of phrases, punctuation marks not only foreground significant material and prepare the reader for the syntactical form of the next phrase, they also direct the cadences of human emotion.

Generally speaking, as long as the rule is consistent (i.e. the poet has not told the reader it’s a football game, only to start playing cricket halfway through) the reader will accept any local convention, however non-standard. Otherwise a comma is still a comma, whether it appears in a sonnet or a match report. Nonetheless one occasionally hears a poet maintain that the poem should have special exemption, and insist that poems have no need of colons, or dashes,1 or indeed any punctuation all; some others simply adopt this approach without defending it. Unless the poet can offer some explanation for this strategy (and there are some noble ways to defend it), we needn’t be detained by this nonsense; apart from anything else, written English is already impoverished enough in this regard. (If it were left to me, I’d introduce degrees of italics.2)

However consistent underpunctuation, in either its light or extreme forms, can be hugely effective. Especially (perhaps almost solely) in short-lined or odd-stress-count poems where the hiatus is longer, the space after the line can be used as a neutrally inflected punctuationzone, and can easily serve as a multi-purpose punctuation mark. The neutrality of these blank pauses is their novelty: as I’ve said, we are used to being directed by the punctuation at the end of the phrase – and to remove it is to remove all the intonational ups and downs of final cadence we would otherwise encounter, as well as most of our emotional cues. The omission of all punctuation marks is the explicit repudiation of such cadences, and is always a ‘statement’ of some kind. (A general absence of caesurae, though, often indicates a repetitive and overly paratactic syntax.)

Usually unpunctuated poems ‘unhumanise’ their tone. By removing the intonational rises and falls of expressive cadence, the poet can enforce an even, flat, monotonous delivery. This delivery can be perfectly appropriate to – and indeed enhance the expression of – absolute emotional states: great ecstasy, all-consuming depression, pitiless judgement, blank disillusion, or unspeakable tragedy and horror:

The omission of the final full stop can be a powerful device, implying (for once) genuine non-closure. While it may read merely as a pretentious affectation in weak poems, it can also reinforce a sense of continuation or ‘timeless suspension’:

and went on running with that bindweed will of his

went on running along the hedge and into the earth again

trembling

as if in a broken jug for one backwards moment

                  water might keep its shape

(ALICE OSWALD, ‘Body’)4

1 Douglas Dunn once told me that ‘brackets have no place in a poem: if you’re going to say it – say it’. I disagree, but I know what he meant. If poetry is a distinct mode of speech, perhaps it just doesn’t have brackets, in the same way that reported speech doesn’t have semi-colons – or at least looks absurd when it does. We don’t use bracket parentheses when we sing songs either.

2 The banning of italics for contrastive emphasis in the house styles of certain academic presses on the grounds that all emphases in a well-written article should be easily derived from context is an almost illiterate practice.

3 Karen Gershon (ed.), We Came as Children: A Collective Autobiography (London: Papermac, 1989)

4 Alice Oswald, Falling Awake (London: Jonathan Cape, 2016).