Unlike academic writing, the ways in which elements of language are used in poetry tend to be entirely a matter of style and thus are much more flexible. As such, editing poetry is less about making technical corrections than it is about making edits and suggestions to enhance the flow, tone, and overall impact of a poem. This guide focuses on punctuation and the poetic line, provides some general tips for editing poetry, and includes a list of additional resources.
It is helpful to think of punctuation as a tool used to control the pace and tone of a poem, similar to how musical notation guides a musician to play a piece. For example, a poem lacking punctuation will tend to flow at a quicker pace, like in this excerpt from William Carlos Williams’ poem “Blueflags”:
I stopped the car to let the children down where the streets end in the sun at the marsh edge and the reeds begin and there are small houses facing the reeds and the blue mist in the distance with grapevine trellises with grape clusters small as strawberries on the vines and ditches running springwater that continue the gutters with willows over them. (143–144)
Conversely, poems that use punctuation more conventionally tend to feel slower and more contemplative, like in this excerpt from Zachary Schomburg’s poem “The Wild Meaninglessness”:
The people here have all fallen in love with their own meaninglessness, but I’m not sure what that means. I mean, what else can we do but mean? Just the other day, for example, we threw strawberries from the roof at the birds. We can’t help it.
Reading the poem aloud can help you determine the natural pauses in the poem and where the poem would read better sped up vs. slowed down. This, in turn, can help you edit and make suggestions regarding punctuation.
Punctuation should never distract the reader from the content of the poem itself. If you encounter a poem in which the punctuation is disruptive or seems contrived, be sure to leave a comment.
Enjambment (a fancy word for line breaks) works with punctuation to control a poem’s flow and inflection. Lines can be enjambed in two ways:
1) In the middle of a phrase, like in the following lines from Tommy Pico:
[…]There is surely something stalking and knowing where it comes from will help the running away. (64)
2) After a phrase that is more or less syntactically complete and more in line with natural speech. Re-written in this way, the above passage would look like this:
There is surely something stalking and knowing where it comes from will help the running away.
Notice how the first example has a different cadence compared to the second, a beat that’s a bit off and gives the poem more momentum. The second example feels a bit more settled, a little slower. The length of the lines also plays a role in creating these effects.
Enjambment can also contribute to what Mary Kinzie calls half-meaning: “An enjambed line always creates a half-meaning in addition to the ‘whole’ meaning of the sentence” (59). The beginning of Ada Limón’s poem “Flood Coming” is a good example:
The pulled-apart world scatters its bad news like a brush fire
Wherein “The pulled-apart world scatters” is the half-meaning created by the line break—giving the impression that it’s the world itself that scatters—before the next line provides the whole meaning of the sentence, revealing that, in fact, it’s bad news that scatters. Another example, again by William Carlos Williams, is “The Red Wheelbarrow”:
so much depends upona red wheel barrowglazed with rain waterbeside the white chickens
so much depends upon
a red wheel barrow
glazed with rain water
beside the white chickens
A red wheel becomes a red wheelbarrow, rain becomes rainwater (okay, not that far of a stretch), and a tension is created after “white” before the reader knows that it’s describing chickens.
The purpose of half-meaning is by no means to trick or confuse the reader; rather, it’s an artful way to build and layer images and meaning.
Since enjambment is entirely a matter of style and can significantly alter the feel of a poem, it is advisable to leave suggestions for alternate enjambments in the form of comments rather than make those changes yourself.
Finally, don’t forget to enjoy the editing process! In a sense, the subjectivity of poetry can make it trickier to edit; however, tapping into and working within the framework of another person’s creative viewpoint can be an exciting challenge. It also helps to remember that there is no single “correct” way to write any poem. Even if the writer decides not to implement some of the changes you’ve suggested, you’ve helped them by providing another perspective on their writing.
While some of these are geared towards writers of poetry, the information and explanations they contain can guide you during the editing process.
“How to Read a Poem,” Academy of American Poets: https://poets.org/text/how-read-poem-0
“Learning Image and Description,” by Rachel Richardson: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70212/learning-image-and-description
“Learning the Poetic Line,” by Rebecca Hazelton: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70144/learning-the-poetic-line
“Poetry for Left-Brainers,” by Judy Willis: https://archive.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2146
Why Poetry, by Matthew Zapruder, HarperCollins Publishers, 2017
The Poet’s Companion: A Guide to the Pleasures of Writing Poetry, by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, W. W. Norton & Company, 1997
The Poetry Handbook, by Mary Oliver, Mariner Books, 1994
Kinzie, Mary. A Poet’s Guide to Poetry. The University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Limón, Ada. “Flood Coming.” Sharks in the Rivers, Milkweed Editions, 2010, p. 9.
Pico, Tommy. IRL. Birds, LLC, 2016.
Schomburg, Zachary. “The Wild Meaninglessness.” Fjords vol.1, Black Ocean, 2014, p. 3.
Williams, William Carlos. “Blueflags.” Imagist Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Bob Blaisdell, Dover Publications, Inc., 1999, pp. 143–144.
Williams, William Carlos. “The Red Wheelbarrow.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45502/the-red-wheelbarrow. Accessed May 15, 2020.
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