In class the other night, one of my students asked about punctuation. He thought he'd like to write poems without commas because he wasn't confident of punctuating correctly. Rather than get it wrong, he figured it best to leave the little suckers out. Another student added that commas at the end of lines feels excessive. After all, she reckoned, the line break already tells the reader to pause.
Punctuation is a huge topic, and a drag for many people. Rather than turn a perfectly wonderful creative writing class into an exacting punctuation lecture, I offered my hard rule of consistency: Whatever you do, keep doing it throughout the poem.
Next post: Punctuating a Poem - Part 2
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