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Q&A Punctuation and capitalisation in poetry [closed]

I'm writing a poem entirely without commas, periods, colons, dashes, emdashes, etc. However, near the end of the poem I name a city and I want to capitalise it. On one hand, I think it would be j...

1 answer  ·  posted 12y ago by JAM‭  ·  last activity 5y ago by System‭

Question poetry punctuation
#3: Attribution notice added by user avatar System‭ · 2019-12-08T02:44:49Z (almost 5 years ago)
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/7327
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision by user avatar JAM‭ · 2019-12-08T02:44:49Z (almost 5 years ago)
I'm writing a poem entirely without commas, periods, colons, dashes, emdashes, etc.

However, near the end of the poem I name a city and I want to capitalise it.

On one hand, I think it would be jarring to read the name of a city without capitalisation. On the other, though, it might jar to see an appropriately capitalised proper name in a poem entirely without punctuation.

The question, then, is: if one eschews punctuation altogether, then should one also eschew capitalisation, in order to be consistent? Or is capitalisation a separate beast from punctuation marks?

(As it happens, my poem is a response to [this poem](http://www.narrativemagazine.com/issues/poems-week-2011%E2%80%932012/%E2%80%9Csomeone%E2%80%9D), also written without any punctuation. In this poem, there is a street mentioned that is not capitalised. This does not jar (to my reading, at least), but the lack of capitalisation does actually let the street name fade from view somewhat, which I think is a part of the author's intent. In my case, I don't wish the city to fade from view (nor do I want it to shout).)

#1: Imported from external source by user avatar System‭ · 2013-02-21T04:12:33Z (almost 12 years ago)
Original score: 1