Punctuation Or Not

[heslopian]

I don't think that there should be any set, unchanging guidelines for poetry. If you prefer poems without hard attention to grammar, that's wonderful, and if you prefer the strict rules of sonnets and villanelles, that's wonderful too. I like both. I enjoy ee cummings and Lord Tennyson, Shakespeare and Bukowski, because the way they wrote poems emerged from their ideas about what they wanted to express and how they wanted to express it. I can't imagine Buk writing like the Bard, and vice versa, and that's a beautiful thing, in my opinion, because it shows that art is uniquely human, dependant upon passions and ideas that aren't set in stone but can be explored, tinkered with, changed and even improved by different artists.