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.

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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