![]() ![]() Rhythm and meter are going to be your friend when taking this approach, because getting a reader into the flow of the sentences is going to help them the most when trying to read through lines.įor novice writers, beginning capitalization can be a really tempting thing to work with because it is so automatic, but because most novices do use this style, it can make the readers assume they haven't read much modern It's okay! A lot of people are taught very rigid rules about poetry that all poets Must Follow (such as rhyme, a comma for every line break, and capitalization) then you get to YWS and. You can use this to hide the beginnings of lines by making the readers guess whether the caps at the beginning is actually the beginning and then come up with some really cool effects. If the reader is well versed in ignoring beginning capitalization, they may be alright with reading the lines through on the first try, but it can be a tricky business. This can be a tricky thing if you're working with enjambment because they'd lose track of the sentence. When they see capitalized letters they immediately think it's the beginning of a sentence, so they stop reading through the lines to the punctuation or natural end of the lines. This is poetry! What it means to you means WAY more than what it ever meant to the poet.Most of the time, this hinders readers. See how those readings change the meaning of the poem, the expression and the cadence and the sound. They can make up the rules as they go, which means that punctuation can mean just about anything. With poetry, pretty much anything goes so long as the poet is working within a set of rules for that poem. Ampersands mean “and.” You get the picture. Asterisks usually mean there’s a footnote somewhere. What about parenthesis? Asterisks? Ampersands? Colons? Tildas and umlauts and accent marks? Really, those are used the same as they are in prose. Take a big breath, maybe two when you see ellipses in a poem. Really slow down like those are three periods. While their function in prose is to indicate a truncation, poets use them to ask for maximum space. ![]() Sometimes known as three dots, triple periods, or a one-legged duck hopping away from the end of a sentence, the ellipses is wildly overused in texts and perfectly at home in poetry. While the hyphen is used to connect or combine words, the en and especially em dash are asking for time and breath between words or lines. In poetry all of these things could be true, but like commas and period, they serve to create space. I had been walking - running, really - before I found him.Hyphens are used to connect compound words.Įn dashes are the width of the letter n and are used to connect a range of numbers, express conflict, or make a compound out of a multi-word adjective.Įm dashes are the width of the letter m and are used to separate clauses, to draw attention to them, and to signify interruptions. If you already know, then throw that information out the window. Fortunately, in poetry, you don’t actually need to know how they each function in prose. If you aren’t a punctuation nerd, I’m sorry to break it to you, but there are actually three different kinds of dashes: hyphen (-), en dash (–), and em dash (-). In fact, they may be as ill-used in poetry as they are in prose. A little more breath than a comma and a little less than a period. In poetry, it sits somewhere between a comma and a period. In prose, it is used to connect two complete and intricately linked clauses. SemicolonsĪh, that most ill-used of prose punctuation, the strange hybrid of colon and comma, the semicolon. ![]() When you see a period at the end of that line, give it even more breath and space. When a line breaks on an enjambment, you naturally give a little space between the end of one line and the beginning of the next. Take a full breath when you see a period. In poetry, a period is more like a stop sign, like a comma, but longer. In prose, a period marks the end of a declamatory sentence. Commas can also be used in more conventional ways to separate lists or clauses, but poets are free to use as many commas as they need to slow down a poem. Some poets even read commas as small catch-breaths. A comma represents a break, just a little space between words or lines. In poetry, however, this is actually pretty close to the truth. This is absolutely wrong and any professional editor will tell you this. There’s a common misconception in prose writing that you use a comma whenever you take a breath. ![]()
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