Before I saw kyle's solution, my first thought was to inject whitespace around each punctuation mark, then use split on just whitespace:

use strict;
use warnings;
use Data::Dumper;

my $str = 'earth, wind & fire';
$str =~ s/([,&])/ $1 /g;
my @arr = split /\s+/, $str;

print Dumper(\@arr);

__END__

$VAR1 = [
          'earth',
          ',',
          'wind',
          '&',
          'fire'
        ];
[download]

I definitely think kyle's is simpler (and better), but sometimes it's worth seeing a different approach.