Under "General Talk" inside the thread that nominally considered the matter of changing the name of the "non-met" forum to "free verse", a discussion got going, significantly between Clive Watkins and Curtis Gale Weeks, on the topic of lineation in free verse. To me this is a subject of considerable interest.
The dialog began with the obvious: verse is written in lines. A line, however, is something special. You do not take a paragraph of prose, chop it arbitrarily into segments, and rename it poetry. Instead, the boundaries of a line convey meaning -- and, if done right, a great deal of meaning.
Both Clive and Curtis delved into what I took to be the question of: how may a bona fide line be distinguished from a segment of prose of equal length? Without the formal aids of rhyme and meter, how may a free verse writer keep from lapsing into lineated prose? What are these additional meanings which the boundedness -- or to use Curtis' term "isolation" -- of a line facilitate?
As one who writes almost entirely in free verse, and who has from time to time sunk into the morass of lineated prose, I would like to have on hand as large a "lineation toolkit" as I may reasonably assemble.
To that end, I invite you into this discussion.
Fred
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