Mental Meanderings

Grammar in Poetry

Dear Readers,

Today I came across a conundrum. I wrote "Invalid Item"  right from the heart just to get something out of the way but as all my writing I work to make it the best it can be. As I reviewed it initially I felt a confusion on how to best punctuate the peice. Grammatically the question marks in the first two stanza's seemed to fall at the end of the four lines and yet when I first wrote the peice I'd placed them after the first lines.

With poetry it's always a hard call. Technically you don't 'have' to remain true to grammatic rules. You can tear apart words and rearrange things. There is nothing hard and fast about poetry and rules are made to be bent or broken. But in this case I'm left undecided.

Where does a comma, period, questionmark or any punctuation for that matter, find it's place in poetry and why? I've always believed it's important to punctuate poetry correctly however sometimes correct punctuation doesn't always make itself clear. Clever phrasing and concise organisation of words doesn't always lead to clear sentance structure.

And so, where do these question marks belong?

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