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  #1  
Unread 03-03-2006, 08:35 AM
Tim Love's Avatar
Tim Love Tim Love is offline
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I'm often puzzled by the precise box-shapes created by free-versers on Erato and elsewhere. I thought one of the ideas of free-verse is that it freed line-breaks from their duties so that they could be expressive. As shape-poetry goes, boxes are boring. They're not even minimalist.

I've not seen a defence of this style, so <A HREF=http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/review/pr95-4/kinsella.htm>Line Breaks and Back-Draft: Not a Defence of a Poem</A> (John Kinsella in the latest Poetry Review) is welcome. I don't understand it all, but it's worth seeing how someone who straddles the main-stream/avant-garde divide tackles accusations that he creates "seemingly arbitrary line breaks which add nothing to meaning/sound etc".
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  #2  
Unread 03-03-2006, 10:43 PM
Jerry Glenn Hartwig Jerry Glenn Hartwig is offline
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Tim

One, a poem is audial, not visual. It's meant to spoken aloud, not admired for its shape on the paper.

I break a non-met line (pardon my extreme loathing for the term 'free verse'), generally, by caesura. I say the lines aloud and format them on paper as I say them. If a stanza comes out box shaped, then so be it. It is an effect of my rhythm and pacing, it is not an intentional design.

If you like shaped poetry, go to http://www.the-buckeye.org/carousel.html and read Jan Hodge's wonderful creation.

It was still 'designed' to be read aloud. It is poetry, in spite of its shape. Not because of it. Do not demean it by calling it "Free Verse", however. I hear she has a terrible temper.

(Only teasing, Jan).



[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited March 03, 2006).]
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  #3  
Unread 03-05-2006, 09:50 PM
VictoriaGaile VictoriaGaile is offline
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We had quite a good discussion about this some time ago in Erato. I still have some summarizing posts from the discussion:

Three kinds of sections/section breaks:
- irregular sections
- regular sections, aka stanzas
- single line sections

Five kinds of function for section breaks:
- typographic visual effect
- shift in rhetoric
- information packeting
- pacing, aural effect, rhythm
- emphasis

Sectioning is, firstly, lineation writ large. Everything that we discussed in our lineation thread (except, possibly, the internal rhythm of a line?) can be applied to sections and section breaks, but on a larger scale.

Sections frame content by grouping sets of images or ideas together, and setting them off from each other.
This is true in lineation, too, but is more obvious with sectioning, because a section is bigger than a line, and has more scope to it. The effects of such a frame may be to highlight, to add emphasis, to suggest juxtapositions that are not rhetorically explicit.

Sections provide an expectation of the rhetorical flow (from the association with paragraphs) that the poet may work either with or against.
This, incidentally, may partially answer my question about why one would choose a more or less apparent set of frames: this choice generates a strong or a weak expectation for the poet to play off of. (off of which the poet may then play?)

"...the shift away from rhetorical shifting has a tendency to "blur" the contents into a singular experience ... The images and ideas are shown to be interwoven rather than separable items--at least, this is the implication--so one must read onward without a significant break if one wants to experience all of the interrelationships."
I'm clearly struggling with this one, because I couldn't rephrase it myself. Logically, I don't understand why this effect would not be achieved equally well by simply presenting the poem in a single block. Or, perhaps it could, but this is not the only effect of (and thus reason for) the sectioning
On the other hand, there does seem to be something about presenting a pattern of sections that signals to the reader, "Even though I have broken this into pieces, the pieces really do fit together as a puzzle". A single long block implies only linear development, perhaps, whereas a pattern of sections implies a more complex set of relationships.

Victoria Gaile
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Unread 03-06-2006, 02:14 AM
Tim Love's Avatar
Tim Love Tim Love is offline
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We had quite a good discussion about this some time ago in Erato - thanks. I don't recall it. Sectioning is, firstly, lineation writ large - this is how Kinsella does it, and he says "Readers are encouraged to read against expectation". But if the expectation is that there'll be a line-break per 12cms and a stanza break per 4 lines come what may, expectations are always satisfied. Interesting line-breaks are no more frequent than chance would predict. It is a "poem-shaped" poem - a statement in itself I suppose, like a contemporary artist using rectangular canvas and oils.
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Unread 03-07-2006, 12:42 AM
Henry Quince Henry Quince is offline
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Quote:
Sectioning is, firstly, lineation writ large - this is how Kinsella does it, and he says "Readers are encouraged to read against expectation". But if the expectation is that there'll be a line-break per 12cms and a stanza break per 4 lines come what may, expectations are always satisfied. Interesting line-breaks are no more frequent than chance would predict. It is a "poem-shaped" poem - a statement in itself I suppose, like a contemporary artist using rectangular canvas and oils.
Quite so. And I don’t know if you have realised this or not, but Kinsella in that linked essay is referring to our discussion HERE where I cited his poem as an example of bad line breaks. His “Internet chat site” is the ’Sphere, and I was “the commentator” who remarked on his defiance of “syntactical or rhetorical boundaries”.

Interestingly, Kinsella admits in his essay that an early draft would have been lineated more on the syntactical or rhythmic boundaries of the words, but says he afterwards revised the breaks deliberately to make them more disruptive. In this piece he begins by exhibiting a “revision” which is something like his original draft, and later goes on to justify (to himself, anyway) the strange lineation he used in the published version — which appears at the end. This revision of line breaks he describes as a process of drafting de-lineation, often in fact relying on the physical measurement of a line in a particular font. In this case, that seems to mean trying to end up with lines of roughly equal visual length.

Why go against the natural pull of the syntax and speech cadences? I quote.

Of course, for me, "syntactical and rhetorical" boundaries are prisons. My poetry is a direct result of my politics and ethics, and form for me is a box to be pushed against; to be used pragmatically at times, but ultimately to be tested at every opportunity. I do not want my poems to give pleasure, I don't want them to be comfortable, and I don't want them to "tell". I want my poems to suggest and to bother - to irritate, and to instigate.

Whenever someone points to the obvious here — that many contemporary “names” in poetry have achieved a literary prestige out of all proportion to their general (as opposed to specialist or critical) readership — up pops one of the usual suspects to question that notion. Here is someone who makes it clear that he has nothing but contempt for general readers. He doesn’t want to “package” the poem in a way anybody might expect or appreciate, but as you’ve pointed out, Tim, he’s packaging it after all, just in another way — a way that seems far more forced and artificial.

But it’s quite common, this practice of laying out a free verse poem in a neat little set of couplets, triplets or quatrains with lines of roughly equal length, with these divisions bearing little or no relation to the poem’s structure. It is, apparently, the modern way of making a poem look like a poem. It’s a style favoured by competition judges, I’ve noticed. On other boards I’ve occasionally posted FV poems myself and critics have kindly relineated them for me on that principle. I’ve asked them to explain, but got no satisfactory answer.



[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited March 07, 2006).]
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  #6  
Unread 03-11-2006, 10:26 PM
Janet Kenny Janet Kenny is offline
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Quite so Henry.
I have become weary of tricksy cosmetics in poetry whether allegedly "avant garde" of traditional. Some poets try to have it all ways and very few commentators remark on it.

If the form of a poem does not strengthen the expressive qualities of the poem then, in my view, it is incomplete. I include capitalised lines in this general accusation.
Janet
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  #7  
Unread 03-12-2006, 12:01 AM
Clay Stockton Clay Stockton is offline
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Aside to Janet:

I compose my poems mostly in my head, often on the train while on my way to or from work. I carry around whatever I'm working on in my Palm Pilot, and record my changes there. The thing is, the Palm Pilot has a screen about two inches wide--so even with the tiny font I use, anything longer than trimeter ends up bleeding over onto a new "line." I therefore use initial caps, so that I can identify my own line breaks at a glance. I suppose that once I've finished a draft, I could go back and take the initial caps out--but that would be tricksy, yes?

I'm just telling my anecdote because I thought you'd be interested in a functional reason for carrying on what looks like a meaningless tradition.

--CS
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Unread 03-12-2006, 01:19 AM
Janet Kenny Janet Kenny is offline
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Quote:
Originally posted by Clay Stockton:
Aside to Janet:

I compose my poems mostly in my head, often on the train while on my way to or from work. I carry around whatever I'm working on in my Palm Pilot, and record my changes there. The thing is, the Palm Pilot has a screen about two inches wide--so even with the tiny font I use, anything longer than trimeter ends up bleeding over onto a new "line." I therefore use initial caps, so that I can identify my own line breaks at a glance. I suppose that once I've finished a draft, I could go back and take the initial caps out--but that would be tricksy, yes?

I'm just telling my anecdote because I thought you'd be interested in a functional reason for carrying on what looks like a meaningless tradition.
Not "tricksy" Clay. Meticulous and professional since your caps are not part of the poem but simply a visual aid during composition. Leaving them in is slovenly in my book
Janet

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Unread 03-12-2006, 05:07 AM
Henry Quince Henry Quince is offline
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Janet, thank you for the “Quite so”. We’re straying from Tim’s subject, but I think you have a bit of a bee in the bonnet about initial caps. I don’t know why you can’t just accept that there’s a lack of unanimity on this point, rather than insisting that anyone who disagrees with you and always or sometimes uses init. caps must necessarily be doing so in an unthinking or “slovenly” manner.

You like to remind us that the convention was originally a printers’ convenience, but to me that’s irrelevant. However it began, it’s a tradition several hundred years long, so why not consider it as an available effect in one’s palette? If it were a serious impediment to reading, we should all be having great trouble with Shakespeare, Keats, Hardy, and many recent and contemporary poets.

I believe you admire Hecht, as do I. Is he “slovenly” when he uses capitalised lines? What about Wilbur?

Henry


[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited March 12, 2006).]
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Unread 03-12-2006, 05:50 AM
Janet Kenny Janet Kenny is offline
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Henry,
Steady on--you misquoted me.
I said that when they were used as Clay said (because of a tiny screen) that wasn't a structural reason to include them in the finished poem if they added no structural benefit. I said it was "slovenly" not to remove them if that was why they were used during composition.

I'm just deliberately questioning an accepted mannerism which I think contradicts flow and syntax and interrupts a poem like a cracked record interrupts music. So we are used to it and can read around it--but why continue it? I do think that some people use them to "posh" up the poem. It's like dirty varnish on paintings. People get to llike it. Like Chinese women's bound feet.

I'm not knocking the poems in which they are used-- they may be absolutely splendid-- just the mannerism. Tim wrote of unrelated layout. That's what I am writing about.

Janet



[This message has been edited by Janet Kenny (edited March 12, 2006).]
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