Hi guys,
Well, what I saw in Alicia's example was that the enjambment did exactly what Kevin said: it takes that word "they" for a running start and then gallops off into the next stanza completely.
But there is a lot of tired practice, where people just adopt this "sophisticated and exciting" (I agree) practice without knowing why, or how to use it well. You do get loads of these poems where people have written something and then, seemingly, chopped it into random sections resembling quatrains. It just ends up looking as if they don;t know what they're doing. Why adopt a form and then work against it? (I'm talking here not about Auden and Larkin and people like that; I'm talking workshop members of the world.)
(It's like, especially when peopl ewerite free verse, they write these line breaks, and then in a reading they read against them completely - this happens all the time - then when you do see their poetry written down, it looks completely different to how they spoke it! So WHY did they write it like that?)
Doesn't "stanza" mean "room"? Isn't it a concept originally from the Memory Palaces (or whatever they were called!) of the Renaissance, mnemonic devices in which the person arranged information round a sort of mental mansion? So one stanza, or room, is one lot that goes together.
That's how I understand it, anyway.
I think that's WHY it's exciting when someone jumps over the hurdle. Of the partition wall. Or something.
Brodsky of course was the King of Enjambment. He took it to new levels and if I get a chance tomorrow I'll look some out.
K
[This message has been edited by Katy Evans-Bush (edited March 12, 2005).]
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