[Katy Evans-Bush]

Many of the technical aspects of how we make our line breaks - things to do with syntax, speed, weights of syllables, etc - apply equally to both metrical and non-metrical poetry.

However, as has been pointed out recently in non-met, the tools for discourse are not being used. So I thought I would start a thread where we can discuss the ways in which we make our LINES when we write.

Even in metrical poetry this is an issue; we change sentences in order to end a line on a certain word, or sound, or type of word; and in free verse a poet may want to think about what length of line he or she is after in a given place. In other words, there are restrictions and freedoms in both "forms". How do we make our decisions?

Who are the masters of line breaks/enjambment? What effect is produced by unenjambed lines as opposed to enjambed ones? Do we have any lines in poems which we particularly admire on the basis of this aspect?

Of course in thinking about line breaks we are thinking about the structure and shape of the whole line, so caesurae (which are of course also line breaks, only in the middle) must also be part of this conversation.

[oliver murray]

Katy,

There was a good discussion of "Lineation in Free Verse" on "The Discerning Eye" last year which I think you would find interesting. As you can imagine, this subject comes up from time to time, and, while conclusions are rarely agreed on, there are a range of opinions between "line breaks don't matter at all" and "line-breaks are the very heart of free verse." It is an aesthetic judgemnt, in the end, something one "feels" rather than decides analytically, I believe, though there are considerations like anticipation, extension, arrival; lines of free verse can be "weighted" forwards or backwards according to stresses, and, like so much else in verse, line-breaks cannot really be dealt with in isolation. It is not only a matter of "what word should I break on" but "is that word even in the line yet?" How many clever or exciting line-breaks can a poem take.? Anyway, have a look. I'm afraid I cannot nominate anyone as "Master of the line-break"

By all means, continue the discussion here, or on "The Discerning Eye" if you wish - you can resurrect the thread referred to if you have further queries or suggestions, by posting to it.
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...ML/000181.html

Regards,

Oliver

[Clive Watkins]

Dear Katy

There was also this thread, which dates from my time as Lariat: http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...ML/000271.html .

Kind regards…

Clive

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Clive and Oliver, thanks - yes, those were both interesting discussions.

My own view is that the two ideas - free and metrical verse - cannot be separated from one another in terms of how the practitioner needs to approach the task. Free verse poets no less than any others need to be able to utilise the tools of the trade and to talk about what they have done, are thinking about doing, and so on.

The line break - which in fact, as I said above, implies the whole line, which implies its relationship to conjoining lines, and how they all work together - seems pretty vital.

I write a lot of metrical poetry and also a lot of free verse. Aside from a regular metrical scheme, I tend to use the same devices in both kinds of writing: things like assonance, dissonance, alliteration, metaphor, unity of diction to create tone; I structure the poem visually, aurally, and in terms of image, content, progression of action etc; and in both cases I need to decide on the content, emphasis, stress, rhythm and enjambment or not of every line.

It could even be said that writing metrical poetry is easier - there are signposts, you can at least get a structure in place at the start.

However, most people will think free verse is easier. I maintain it is MUCH harder to write GOOD free verse, that you have to know just as muxch prosody if not even MORE, to make sure you aren't just writing mushed-up prose (whatever that might be).

I was hoping - vainly? - to get a chat going between the two species, the denizens of TDE & Non-Met! Can we do it?


KEB

[Elle Bruno]

Yes, it's a topic that's been covered before but probably deserves to be tackled again!

For me, who writes only in free verse, I generally use an organic approach to looking at line breaks. That is,I pay attention to whether the breaks help the poem realize its overall goals, whether they add to the general feel of a poem, if they place tension in areas that call for it. Conversely, I also try to see if the breaks are undermining the poem in some way.

Although the following poem does not have remarkable line breaks, it does have ones that seem, for this reader, to successfully uphold the meaning and mood of the piece.

Poem For Maya
(Carolyn Forche)

Dipping our bread in oil tins
we talked of morning peeling
open our rooms to a moment
of almonds, olives and wind
when we did not yet know what we were.
The days in Mallorca were alike:
footprints down goat-paths
from the beds we had left,
at night the stars locked to darkness.
At that time we were learning
to dance, take our clothes
in our fingers and open
ourselves to their hands.
The veranera was with us.
For a month the almond trees bloomed,
their droppings the delicate silks
we removed when each time a touch
took us closer to the window where
we whispered yes, there on the intricate
balconies of breath, overlooking
the rest of our lives.

There is a satisfying hesitancy and breathlessness to the breaks (clearly felt in 'learning/to dance' and 'open/ourselves') that matches the idea of the poem -the momentary pause between youth and adulthood.
she also uses line breaks where some punctuation might be suggested:
Dipping our bread in oil tins
we talked of morning peeling
and,
their droppings the delicate silks
we removed when each time a touch
The slight pause gives the reader time to perceive the image, then follow through into the next connected thought.

The reader also has a moment to perceive the feel of the following:
of almonds, olives and wind
before being tossed into the open-ended
when we did not yet know what we were.

In the penultimate line, the word 'overlooking' also literally 'overlooks' the next line and the girls' lives.
All in all, it is an effective poem, made more effective by good use of linebreaks.

For me, line break advice is much like the advice given to doctors:
First, do no harm.

Looking forward to more of this discussion. Dee

[Michael Cantor]

I very much agree with what KEB said, and particularly the penultimate paragraph:

However, most people will think free verse is easier. I maintain it is MUCH harder to write GOOD free verse, that you have to know just as much prosody if not even MORE, to make sure you aren't just writing mushed-up prose (whatever that might be).

I also work in both genres, and post and submit very little free verse because it is so easy and tempting for me to slap out garbage, and so difficult to get past that and write well.

What I find is that line breaks and enjambment - the strength of the line, the pauses, the surprise or the continued flow around the bend - the flow and the breathing of the narrative - the internal rhythm of the poem - are critical to free verse, and when I go back and work with my drafts that is where the problems and the concentration lie. (Very much in line with Dee's post.) Any semi-competent writer can draw pretty pictures and make pretty sounds, but unless you assemble them properly it is like cooking with great ingredients and no concept of how to prepare them, or what you want in the final dish.

You can slide by some of this in formal verse. Rhyme and meter carry us through the rough spots. More tools are available. When I write free verse I sometimes feel naked and unarmed - the little tricks aren't there (except for my sense of humor - just as in life), and it's more demanding.


[This message has been edited by Michael Cantor (edited June 05, 2005).]

[Alan Wickes]

Hi,

I find what Michael says very interesting:

'When I write free verse I sometimes feel naked and unarmed - the little tricks aren't there '

I used to write mainly free(ish) verse; now I find myself more comfortable using recognisable forms. I have all kinds of good reasons for this - that writing to a form is more fun and so on, but in truth, the older I get the less confident I have become in my ability to make the kinds of decisions Kate is talking about. I find it easier to work outwards from a fixed shape.

So I say to myself I think I'll write a sonnet and somehow the form draws-in the imagery like a magnet.

What do free verse poets do? I think I'll write something thin and spindley - or does the act of writing define the shape?

What are non-met starting points?

Alan

[Henry Quince]

I want to highlight a paragraph from Clive’s essay linked earlier in this thread:

Given my contention that in non-metrical verse lines are determined on rhetorical grounds, the fundamental issue, then, is not how the lines are organized but how well written the poem is. The issues of sentence-construction, rhetorical patterning and the force and coherence of poetic argument and imagery are critical in a way that writing in lines is not. This is true as well for metrical verse. It is easy to deceive ourselves into thinking that the well-turned metre of our latest poem indicates its effectiveness. Inquiry must surely pass beyond metrical adroitness to these – and other - more fundamental qualities.

I think that’s absolutely right. Too often, it seems to me, poets rely on lineation to create the illusion of coherence in rhetoric, balance, or rhythm, when the piece actually lacks such coherence. The acid test, which I would think a valid one in most cases, is to remove the line breaks and see whether the resulting “prose” reads well or badly. Of course one would expect something to be lost, but does removing the line breaks reveal the language as unreadable or lacking in speakable rhythms? Good prose has rhythm too.

A claim often repeated is that the sentence is the fundamental unit of prose but the line is the fundamental unit of poetry. It’s relevant to ask in what sense, or at what stage, the line is the unit of poetry. At the time of reading, maybe. At the time of writing, other factors will often be more fundamental, as Clive has said. Certainly from what most FV writers say I have the impression that they don’t compose in lines but rather impose line breaks on the content subsequently.

As an occasional FV writer I note that I usually make my line breaks as I go along, and change few of them subsequently. This has to do with the fact that my natural inclination is to follow the lineation principle outlined by Clive elsewhere in the same essay:

[If] in a piece of writing one device – as here, the radical line-break – becomes too frequent, it can undermine its own effectiveness. Another common trick is to try to make the word which ends each line a “telling word”. This can come to seem mechanical. Foregrounds need backgrounds. For non-metrical verse written in sentences or sentence-fragments, the background in the matter of line-breaks – the default state – is the break which coincides with a natural syntactical boundary.

My feeling on this is much the same as Clive’s — whether we’re talking metrical or free verse. Radical line breaks, those which cut across the natural grouping of words in speech, need to be used sparingly against a background of “natural” breaks on syntactical or rhetorical boundaries.

Here is an excerpt from a poem by John Kinsella, to me an example of too many radical (and some plain silly) line breaks:

A waterbird landed but didn’t make
much of an impression — a damp squib
by comparison — though a couple
of old timers couldn’t take their

eyes off it. Bloody voyeurs
somebody muttered, and the bird,
as if taking offence on their behalf,
lifted and vanished into the confident

glow of the poem, the crowd
encrypting itself into the scene’s
diffident colouration, troughed
and crested like the hum of the current.


(If anyone wants to read the whole piece, it’s here . I omitted only the title and the first stanza.)

I note that many FV writers choose to present their work like this in stanzas with lines of roughly equal visual length. It seems to me that this practice virtually guarantees a high proportion of bad line breaks unless the syntax, rhetoric and cadencing have been structured in a way compatible with the “form”. In metrical writing this fault tends to produce jerky effects such as enjambments separating (without payoff) an adjective from its immediately following noun. In FV it seems like a perverse adoption of the most superficial attributes of metrical form: you tend to get the weakness without the strength. Emerson wrote “not metres, but a metre-making argument” and I think something similar applies to FV: “not a line-and-stanza pattern but a line-and-stanza-making argument”.





[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited June 10, 2005).]

[Mark Allinson]

A waterbird landed but didn’t make
much of an impression — a damp squib
by comparison — though a couple
of old timers couldn’t take their

eyes off it. Bloody voyeurs
somebody muttered, and the bird,
as if taking offence on their behalf,
lifted and vanished into the confident

glow of the poem, the crowd
encrypting itself into the scene’s
diffident colouration, troughed
and crested like the hum of the current.

Henry!

Silly line-breaks?

What are you saying?

This is John Kinsella, the wunderkind of Australian poetry. This is where it is at, man. This stuff is what makes the po-mo poetry world tick.

It also happens to be a good reason why contemporary poetry is read by contemporary poets -


and absolutely no one else!

------------------
Mark Allinson

[Henry Quince]

Well, Mark, I didn’t want to be too scathing — rather my usual restrained and diffident self — but yes, breaks of this sort do rather put me in mind of Private Eye’s “E. J. Thribb” (who has been 17½ for about the last 30 years):


Lines on the Death of Chairman Mao
by E.J. Thribb

So.
Farewell then
Chairman Mao.

You are the
Last of the
Great revolutionary

Figures. You
And I
Had little in
Common

Except that
Like me
You were a poet.

Though how you
Found time
To write poems

In addition to
Running a
Country of
800 million people

Is baffling
Frankly.


It cracks me up that sites like this
http://poetry.nanvaent.org/vl/author.asp?id=178

include him among their Vers Libre poets: Thribb, E. J. (he comes right after Thoreau, Henry David in their listing). You have to wonder if maybe they haven’t seen the joke.

Henry



[This message has been edited by Henry Quince (edited June 08, 2005).]