Amen to K's "Those little idiosyncrasies of each poet are one of things that make this place interesting for me. It gives each poet a unique "accent". "

thank you all for resuscitating this

I tend to write very structured pieces where line breaks are used to support the rhyming structure but are not in themselves punctuation as I always end the line with a full stop or comma.

I have read enough poetry here to see that line breaks can and often do act as punctuation.

I’m often reading poetry on my small screened phone instead of a larger computer screen so I often see line breaks where none were intended. It is usually obvious when a long line has been truncated by my small screen, but not always, so I prefer standard punctuation. That being said I still voted yes because line breaks as punctuation is definitely a useful tool in a poet’s repertoire.

Coming at this from a spoken word perspective the line break is where I would draw a natural breath, and serves as a tool to dictate natural inflections in the voice.

I’m a huge fan of the line break over punctuation. If a person chooses not to use any punctuation, ask yourself always the reason for this. What does this express as part of the piece as a whole.

I had a poetry professor who we dubbed ... "The Punctuation Police" ... who was adamant that there shouldn't be punctuation in poetry ... that spacing and line breaks should be used to fill that purpose ... later she would concede that it did have its place ... but for further emphasis ... not the mere function it fulfills in prose ...

Space is an invisible symbol open to much interpretation.

It can also be deceiving, especially on the Internet. For example, I will now insult everyone in the guise of white text that you can't read on this white webpage unless you highlight it while trying to copy.



























The above can be misinterpreted as a line break and subsequently punctuation.

I like this example ... great job ... ... made me realize I need to be more specific  ... the spacing I was referring to was within the line ... causing a pause in the read ... aloud or silent ...  like a comma ... but again I love your clever example ... I enjoy the use of space in some poetry

jb ya tinker 😅

anna_grin said:thank you all for resuscitating this
All?? What do you mean all? twas just me..

okay cf thank you for the cpr 😆

anna_grin said:okay cf thank you for the cpr 😆
alright. you're off the kill list now.

Jesus, we don't want to hear any moar about how you think wine breaks have anything to do with poetry.

i can’t hear you through my champagne sorry 🥂

To be honest a few weeks ago my writing changed in the most dramatic way.  I wrote rhyming poems with no structure as far as visual or style.  Then I saw how someone wrote something and they were happy because it was a challenging style.  I set out to write a style myself and BOOM, my writing world CHANGED!

Well, let’s get to the point (no pun intended) but noted.  I have had to look up how to use a semi colon and comma quite often, still I second guess the punctuation on every piece I write.  I care so I try but attempt to not bend myself out of shape over it, haha, and I still do get twisted up, AND still punctuate wrong I am sure of it.  I have gone back and changed some, however, pretty positive as it went from wrong to right the opposite also happened.

I do line breaks in my work sometimes because the sentence just look too long.  Having one 10 word sentence and the rest are 5 to 6 words visually bothers me.  I also don't like too long of a line.  Another thing I like is to make the line break where the internal rhyme would land, so I’m just trying to make structure.  Recently I started writing poems where I want the syllable per line to matter so that's another line break to consider so I would not want that to be read as a punctuation.  Being conscious of syllables now in my recent writing I believe I can reduce those odd breaks.  As a matter of fact, I need to go back and fix a piece I posted on here.  I removed it and will be reposting it once I restructure it.

I started doing line spacing a few weeks ago as well.  Prior to that all my work was one giant block of words.  I went back and line spaced a few random pieces from years ago and I feel that itself gave it a better quality.  I like to line breaks when I write comments or text... took me long enough to get around to do it in my poetry.

I don't know.  I just wanted to comment on how punctuation kicks my butt.

☝️ I think you’ve raised a very valid point here, LJDynamic. Do what feels right for you.

Anyone else is just background noise. 🙂