Line Breaks, Punctuation and Space
Poets often have trouble with the overall construction of their
poems. It's not easy knowing how to control a poem's speed, where to
break lines and how to end. Try thinking of a poem as a flow of
water downhill. Gravity is naturally pulling on it. Undisturbed,
neither channeled nor dammed, it will flow quickly down to a level
plane, its ultimate destination. So it is with poems.
We erect aqueducts to channel it and dams to stop it. We install
valves to limit the flow as needed. Poems, with words instead of
water, we have tools -- line-length, meter, space/indents,
punctuation, and line/stanza transition -- to accomplish a variety
of things with this otherwise natural flow.
When a line is short it will tend to move the reader to the next
line quickly. For example:
When a line
is short
it will tend
to move the reader to
the next
line quickly.
New poets tend to write in longer lines -- a holdover from writing
prose. Sometimes lines need to be long to capture a whole thought
that NEEDS to fall on the eye all at once, but this is not usually
the case. We use set forms like tetrameter, pentameter, and
hexameter when we write but that can be like putting the poetic
voice on a hanger -- the content being artificially held up by the
form. This is a test for the writer. Every line must be full of
meaning and music to keep the reader's attention, and when it's done
right, great poetry results. This was the discipline of poetry of
pre-1860, essentially, before the poetry of Walt Whitman. Whitman
wrote a lot of VERY long lines -- almost prose passages --
interspersed with short lines. His poetry definitely ebbs and flows.
After Whitman, formal verse was prevalent for about 50 years.
Eventually things did start to open up and poets used shorter lines
to speed the flow of their poems. When they did, the feel of
pentameter or other meter was not totally lost -- they were divided
into more than one line on the page. By the time we get to Eliot,
William Carlos WIlliams, ee cummings and the Beats, short line free
verse was common and often interspersed with longer lines. These
poems flow very quickly, unless of course, the poet WANTS to stop
the flow.
To stop things, a longer line (or lines) does the trick. Make sure
the line "feels" as if it can't be broken. The thought and
language must be strong, because the reader will focus on it.
Changing meter from a flowing one, for example iambic pentameter to
a hard, stopping one or to one with hesitation, will slow down the
reader. Sometimes it will make things interesting too! The use of
words and phrases that stop and start work in fixed forms as well as
in free verse.
A poem written in ALL iambic pentameter (duh DUH , duh DUH, duh DUH,
da DUH, da DUH) can be monotonous unless you're doing a lot of other
interesting things (as Pope and Shakespeare did). The rules of
language have changed since the time of Pope and Shakespeare and we
can take advantage of these changes in writing poetry. However,
sometimes we use the device of changing meter stress too much and
make things too choppy for the reader. New poets learn the art of
balance as they go along. Remember, poetry is SUPPOSED to flow,
unless YOU decide, at a particular point, that it shouldn't.
Line breaks. Five different people could break off a line in
five different ways. The key is to decide how fast you want the
reader's eye to fall to that next line. If you carry thoughts over
to the next line, called enjambing or enjambment,
(instead of ending your statement predictably at the end of one line
and going into a new thought beginning with the next line) you will
definitely speed your poem's flow. Enjambment is a GREAT way to
spice up and speed up FIXED FORMS as well. A few well-placed
enjambments can greatly improve a poem (I'll discuss more about
Enjambment in a separate article).
Where should we break the line in free verse? There are many
choices. First, keep track of the overall sculpt of the poem - look
a how it appears on the page. The narrower the sculpt, the faster
the flow. Try breaking individual lines at various points to see
what speeds them up or slows them down.
If you stop after a noun, the effect of the break may not be as fast
as when you break after a verb. It may be faster still if you break
after an adjective, adverb, preposition or conjunction because you
are distancing the break from subjects and objects, actions,
descriptive, directing or connecting words (in that order).
Essentially, you're moving further away from the way people put
thoughts together.
If you break after nouns, the reader can "rest" a minute
and gets an immediate image. If you break after a preposition, the
reader needs more information to form an image and his eye will dart
quickly to the next line. You can play nifty little semantic games
with line breaks too,.for instance:
"Lust
falls
down three flights of stairs."
The word "falls" literally fell. Verbs that connote
movement work very well in this context.
It's important to maintain the meaning of your lines when you break.
If the break clouds your meaning, do you want that break? Or do you
want it BECAUSE it clouds the meaning in a way that could open the
line to other interpretations? In any event, line breaks are VERY
subjective. Experiment, but remember that different line breaks will
support or inhibit speed.
Space is also a great tool. Poetry is at least half a visual
exercise. Space will stop the reader's eye whether you're using a
small indent or completely isolating a word or a line or skipping
lines to form new stanzas. The more space used, the more the stop.
In the next article, I'll discuss the role of punctuation in
controlling the flow (as well as the order) of your work.
Punctuation is A LOT to discuss.
Al Rocheleau has been a full-time staffer for the Poetry: Body
Shop in the Writer's Block area of The Amazing Instant Novelist
(AIN) since early 1996 (Keyword: NOVEL on AOL). He also is on the
Editorial Board (for Poetry) at AIN, and writes the regular
instructional column, "Poet's Place," for AIN's The Write
Stuff member newsletter.
Al has published more than sixty poems in magazines and journals in
the United States, Canada, and Europe. Publications include Nedge:
The Northeast Journal, Outerbridge, Pennsylvania English, Mobius,
Artisan: A Journal of Craft, and Haight Ashbury Literary Journal; in
these, his work has appeared alongside noted contemporary poets like
Lyn Lifshin and John Tagliabue. A 64-poem collection, A Granite
Symphony will be published by Alpha Beat Press this year. (Alpha
Beat Press has published work by Allen Ginsberg, Diane Wakoski, Gary
Snyder, and Charles Bukowski.) A second, new collection,
Munchkinland and Other Poems, was recently completed.
For the past two years Al has co-hosted a poetry chat/workshop at
Orca's Place (a former Atlantic Monthly site), and also, as his
"real" job and livelihood, edits and publishes a popular
managed care-related journal for providers of alternative health
care. He resides in Orlando, Florida with his wife Georgette, and
three children.
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