[albert geiser]

Recently critiques of a poem I posted on non-met, Patchouli, insisted that line breaks must not cause prepositions and articles to fall at the end of lines. I started my case for the line breaks there.

I've found some examples from Marilyn Hacker in which she did it.

Here is the best example:

The Life of a Female Artist Is Full of Vicissitudes

Goes mad,
frescoes in shit on the walls;
cuddled and spoon-fed for
3 weeks out of the month, a
teeming resurrection in
oils thick as a sapling,
rough as a sycamore bole,
orange, blue, red, seventeen
shades of green, the crucified
woman burgeons to power.
Lucky if she doesn't
die of cancer at fifty-two, a
virgin, a lover of women they just once let touch one,
and her Muse,
bearded and placid, gets his wife pregnant again.

And at the end of a poem called La Vie de Chateau

"What are you looking at?" Nothing. White lace. The
servant's
apron." "I know where we'll go." Grappling the girl
like children in the dark. He'd send a postcard.

[Elle Bruno]

Albert, other poets are welcome to view your poem on non-met and decide for themselves whether your line break techniques are effective. For this reader, they are not. They undermine the poem.
As I mentioned in response to your PM, I never claimed that people do not use odd linebreaks. I'm not sure how you jumped to that conclusion since several people cited instances where it can be effective.
In your cited poem, I see two areas where the poet diverts from traditional breaks (lines 4,12). Perhaps she is using the technique to jar the reader every once in a while -after all, it is a poem about insanity -a few juxtaposed crazed line breaks would make sense.
(It's hard to judge the reason why she chose those breaks in the second poem; you only pull out one small section as an example)
The breaks on your poem, on the other hand, add nothing to the overall sense of the poem; in fact, they subtract from it.

Feel free to continue to use any line breaks you want. You obviously have a plan and a theory behind your work. I gave my honest opinion regarding the effectiveness of them in your work, as did several others.
Dee

[Alexander Grace]

Actually I'm not so keen on these line breaks e.g.

'Lucky if she doesn't
die of cancer at fifty-two, a'

It seems showy and hysterical, and given the title and subject matter, I'm not surprised. That said, she sounds like she's satirising, and I haven't read the rest of the poem so maybe there's a good reason. Either way you lose I'm afraid. I'm with Dee on this:

The gymnast cartwheeled
with the grace of the damned
and the humour of heaven

seems to work better than

The gymnast cartwheeled with all
the grace of the
damned and the
humour of heaven

Just because it reads easier. I think you need a really good reason to go against that kind of grain. By the way I just plucked that line out of my bottom, so don't complain if it's crap.

[albert geiser]

Alexander-

You would want a poem that benefits from that technique.

The grain you're talking about is from clauses. It just feels easy in free verse poetry to keep clauses whole line by line. I think it's very ironic that metrics give a reason for ending lines with prepositions, the falling meter, while free verse poets have developed an orthodoxy of whole clauses line by line. Hacker was mostly a metrics poet. She wrote sapphic stanzas that by the requirements of the meter lead to endings in prepositions.

Dee- line breaks when used for what they can do, are versatile, however I think free verse poets have developed orthodoxies which are making line endings in free verse poetry less flexible than in metrics, and I'm not interested in writing metrics.

[This message has been edited by albert geiser (edited June 14, 2005).]

[albert geiser]

Thanks Dee,

I think a line break strategy like that needs to be consistent through the whole poem or make a stanza stand out. If there are just a small number that don't appear to go with the rest of the line breaks, then they are probably less likely to work.

[nyctom]

Sometimes line breaks are the least of one's worries.

[Svein Olav Nyberg]

What Tom said.

I think it's very ironic that metrics give a reason for ending lines with prepositions, the falling meter, while free verse poets have developed an orthodoxy of whole clauses line by line.

I think you're overly generalizing here. Go to TDE, and read Alan Sullivan's comments on enjambments of the kind you describe above. Radical line breaks are not a part of metrical orthodoxy, and I for one have grown more conservative over the years as far as line breaks are concerned. Maybe because I've committed some jaw-breaking line breaks myself.

Anyway, poetry is for reading aloud - for vocalizing loud, at least - so line breaks need to be audible. For radical line breaks to make sense, the sound of such a stop needs to make sense as well.

I was driving a
car this morning

for instance, has a line break that makes no sense unless you have an intense wish to make your reader anticipate the word "car" for a half second, or you want to indicate a insane speaker or such.

------------------
Svein Olav (The poet formerly known as Solan )

[winter]

It’s a risky strategy to end lines on words like “the”, “a”, “I”, or on the adjective in an adjective/noun pairing, or in the middle of a continuous verb e.g. is / walking etc. A poem can quickly become choppy and annoying to read and the line-breaks draw so much attention to themselves that they can easily look like gimmicks.

But in the right hands, the technique can have the effect of creating intimacy in the conversation the poem enacts between writer (or narrator) and reader.
It creates a hesitancy in the speaker’s voice, a fragmentation of thought, a sense that what the speaker is communicating is honest and real rather than carefully considered and self-censored. The writer carefully considers everything of course in order to give that illusion of hesitant spontaneity and/or awkwardness.

Because of this, the technique works best in (the best of) confessional poetry, or in any poem in which the narrator appears to divulge deeply personal information, but it only works if the writer maintains control of the poem. It takes immense skill to pull it off, for reasons outlined in my first paragraph.

The Marilyn Hacker poem quoted by Svein above has something of this about it, I think. Another poem that does this is I go back to May 1937 by Sharon Olds. How successful these poems are in using the technique is, of course, personal taste.

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.


[This message has been edited by winter (edited June 23, 2005).]

[Ethan Anderson]

I don't know...

For me, these breaks fail:


under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent

A lovely second line, but I don't see the enhancement derived from (or even the need for) the article ending the first.


standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,

The breaks in L1 and L2 here seem like cheats--attempts to deny/hide the existence of necessary connectors. Only L3 works as a result, but even that is primarily at the expense of L2.

at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say

Again, an interesting L2, but the previous line is mangled just to reach it, despite the sounds.


And these LB's seem to work:

plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip

they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.

you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,

but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female

The lines work unto themselves, interesting associations are suggested by the breaks, and "hidden" sub-phrases are broken out and highlighted at the ends of lines.

I don't mind unusual breaks per se, but I do look for reasons why. If I can't find them, they tend to grate.

So, did I miss something among those I felt clunked above?

[VictoriaGaile]

winter wrote:

But in the right hands, the technique can have the effect of creating intimacy in the conversation the poem enacts between writer (or narrator) and reader.
It creates a hesitancy in the speaker’s voice, a fragmentation of thought, a sense that what the speaker is communicating is honest and real rather than carefully considered and self-censored.

Is *that* what it's for!

Fascinating. I hadn't thought about how it was working as an aural technique.

When I first started posting here, I noticed and absorbed the general very strong emphasis on the metrical side of the house towards "sensible line breaks", defined as ending lines on content words. The last word of a line gets emphasis because of its position, I learned; therefore it should be a word that deserves that emphasis.

There was also some emphasis on breath and phrase, on the nonmet side of the house; that is, that lines ought to break at sensible breathing places, and that line breaks conversely controlled how the reader was going to breathe.

The idea that "in real conversation, people pause at non-sensible places" is one that I don't recall hearing before.

It still strikes me as something that should be used exceedingly sparingly: a few times in a poem, not consistently.