A question for the poets: line breaks

[swan_tower]

I'm very hit or miss when it comes to liking poetry, and I most frequently miss with free verse, because part of what draws me to poetry is the rhythmic effect of meter. But I've taken to copying out poems I like in a small notebook, and a couple of the recent ones have been free verse -- and in writing them down (which forces me to pay finer-grained attention to the arrangement of the words), I found myself reflecting on one of the things I find most puzzling about the style:

How do the poets decide where to break their lines?

In a poem with meter, the answer to that question is set for you, and the challenge is to figure out how much of your idea you're going to put into a given line and how you'll make it fit. But with that element gone, you can end your line anywhere you choose. Sometimes I can see why the choice was made in a certain way; for example, two lines might be structured so that they echo one another, and the positioning of the break draws your attention to the similarity. But other times, it seems to be completely arbitrary.

And yet I'm sure there's an aesthetic principle, or more than one, guiding the decision. So my question for the poets among you is: what are those principles? If you were critiquing a poem, what would make you say "it would be better if you moved this word down to the next line/joined these two lines together/broke this one apart"? What are you looking at, or for, when you give someone feedback like that, or choose the placement of the breaks in your own work?

I feel like, if I understood this, I might enjoy free verse more. Because things that register on me as arbitrary are rarely impressive, so seeing through to the underlying reason might increase my appreciation.

Comments

[mindstalk]

I don't know.
But I grew up with
a book called The Poetry
of Richard Milhaus Nixon
which was his prose sentences
arranged
like free verse.
Just thought I'd share.

[swan_tower]

Yeah . . . there's a lot of free verse to me that's indistinguishable from prose chopped randomly into lines. And I always see things saying that poets in such cases are achieving some kind of aesthetic effect based on where they put the breaks, but nothing ever really tries to explain how, or what effect I ought to be getting from them.

[mindstalk]

My guess had been emphasis and artifical rhythm, so it's audiovisual: you'd read it out loud differently than continuous prose. Searching just now has sites saying it's about following the cadences of natural speech, which suggests it's only a visual form, at least in that aspect (free verse can use alliteration and rhyme and such, just isn't trying for a set pattern thereof.)

Some pages do talk about line breaks: https://kellyrfineman.livejournal.com/299689.html
http://mikesnider.org/formalblog/?p=654

[swan_tower]

It definitely isn't always about the cadences of natural speech, because I've seen poems that stick breaks right in the middle of what would be a single breath/arc/whatever you call it that is not where you would put in any kind of pause. Those are the ones that tend to feel the most arbitrary to me, too.

(Though, to be fair, if a poem sticks entirely to the natural cadences, I often wind up wondering why it isn't just a paragraph of pretty prose instead.)

Thanks for the links. I wish the second one had given some examples in discussing enjambment -- I'd like to know what he meant by "To take just one example, by emphasizing both the last phrase of the first of the paired lines and the first phrase of the second, it can cue the reader that the poet intends unusual emphasis on their juxtaposition — an effect difficult to achieve in metrical verse without some typographical cue such as an ellipsis or a dash or a sprinkling of ungrammatical commas."

[the_rck]

I've been trying to get myself to the point of appreciating free verse for a year or two now. I still don't always get it. Part of the problem for me is that 'free verse' includes a lot of subcategories that are all doing different things.

I'm not sure what all of those things are, but I've recently hit a couple of different authors who write the sort of run-on sentences that smash together ideas that wouldn't normally be connected. Any two or three adjacent words make a partial idea/image that overlaps with words before and after so that nothing completes. At that point, the line breaks actually blur the meaning further and seem to be deployed for that purpose.

Visually speaking, I find each line break almost like a speed bump. I have to slow down in order to stay on the road. Part of what I'm trying to figure out is how to get to the next line reliably because I keep reading line breaks as end points.

I suspect that poetry resembles music in that learning to appreciate an unfamiliar genre is hard because most people doing, say, opera have different assumptions and expectations from those doing gospel or rock and roll but don't have the words to explain the differences.

(I'm on my phone, so please excuse incomplete thoughts. I can only see 2.5 lines of text at a time when I'm commenting.)

[swan_tower]

I've recently hit a couple of different authors who write the sort of run-on sentences that smash together ideas that wouldn't normally be connected

Could you give examples? I do much better pondering this sort of thing if I have concrete instances to consider.

Visually speaking, I find each line break almost like a speed bump.

Very much so, yes. A lot of free verse with short lines sounds in my mind like somebody horribly out of breath trying to talk, gasping out three or four words before they have to haul in more air.

I suspect that poetry resembles music in that learning to appreciate an unfamiliar genre is hard because most people doing, say, opera have different assumptions and expectations from those doing gospel or rock and roll but don't have the words to explain the differences.

I think so, yes. But I know lots of interesting and erudite people who might be able to explain, or at least talk it through intelligently! :-) (Even if they're having to cope with only seeing 2.5 lines of text at a time.)

[ursula]

Line breaks emphasize the beginnings and ends of lines, especially their ends. You can combine that emphasis with the sorts of natural pauses we'd indicate with punctuation, or you can intentionally contrast those pauses.

You can also set up expectations using line length, even if you're not writing strictly metrical poetry. Lots of contemporary poets use a series of two-line "couplets", for example.

So, just to be specific, here's a chatty, colloquial, discursive poem I wrote (there's lots of intro junk, so skip to the last page of the PDF). Most of the line breaks match with punctuation or potential punctuation, and there are lots of long lines. But the ends of stanzas are very short in comparison, and that means they're very strongly marked.

For contrast, here's a poem by Madhur Anand that uses couplets:

Rare are irises that live for years all dolled up
in deserts. Amidst Negev sand, starry annuals [...]

This poem is short, so the end of every line and the shift in expectations between the end of each line and the beginning of the next is strongly highlighted ("dolled up" to "deserts"). But it's also setting up internal patterns (the last line is a little shorter, for example, and I think that's intentionally marking "fall apart").

[alexseanchai]

exactly this

[yhlee]

+1 This exactly; this is how I did it back when I wrote poetry.

[swan_tower]

Would you be willing to quote any of your own poems and dig into the thought process that went into writing them? Dissecting other people's work, we can usually only guess at what they were thinking, but poets talking about their own aesthetic decisions can be hugely enlightening.

[yhlee]

Uh, let me see if I can find any of the suckers--I don't have any of them on my laptop so I'll check when I get home. That is also assuming I remember the process--it has been some years. :]

[yhlee]

Aha, I found one online here from a few years back: "Foxfeast" [Mythic Delirium].

The first stanza ("There's nothing in it...") is just a statement of intent. I wanted the whole sentence on a single line by itself for impact.

The second stanza has the line breaks set up so that the alliterating m's ("Your merry"/ "your marrow" / "the machined") all hit at the second word/syllable.

For the third stanza, I broke the line after "blood" because I wanted to bookend "broth" and "blood," plus the pararhyme of "broth" and "breath" hitting at the beginnings of their respective lines.

Fourth stanza does bookending alliteration again in the first line ("Foxes" to "face"), ditto the fifth stanza ("Foxes" to "force"). The line breaks in the fourth and fifth stanzas are set up to make them sound rhythmically similar, plus putting alliterating words in roughly similar positions ("hundred hunched" vs. "hinges...heart" and "starwheel towers" vs. "stuttering tears").

Sixth stanza is pretty much a couplet with the pararhyme of "wires" and "wars."

Seventh stanza slant-rhymes "gnawed" and "knotted" in the first and second line endings, plus in the beginnings of the second and third lines I wanted the "your" to start the line for impact.

The first line of the eighth stanza ends at "feast" to form an across-two-stanzas pararhyme couplet with "fast" at the end of the seventh stanza, and I wanted "smiling"..."smiles" in a single line for deliberate repetition, and then it ends the final line with "first" to slant-rhyme with "feast" and "fast."

I don't know if this is helpful or enlightening? And also I actually sort of do prefer to write rhymed or at least metered verse, but there was no market for it so I tried my hand at free verse instead...? Happy to answer any questions.

[swan_tower]

Thanks! That is indeed enlightening -- not to the extent of making me go "aha, I understand it all now!," but knowing why one poet made the decisions he did makes that poem less opaque to me, and provides ideas I can then apply to other things I read.

(For what it's worth, your poetic structure would have registered on me as less arbitrary than some I've read even without your explanation.)

[swan_tower]

Thanks for the examples! They help a lot in me thinking this kind of through.

Starting with my off-the-cuff reaction: I like your poem better. :-)

I think part of that is because yours has more obvious repetition giving it structure, especially at the beginning ("some things are about as likely"), and part of it is because you have fairly long lines, so you avoid the "runner gasping for breath" pace I mentioned in a comment above. But it's also that I look at the Anand poem and think . . . okay, I suppose I can see a contrast between "dolled up" and "deserts," but why the line and stanza break between "starry annuals" and "shrubs"? I guess one suggests flowers and the other doesn't? Ish? But that's an example of where the break feels arbitrary to me: like Anand went "welp, I've filled this line, so it's time for a new one," without the pattern of a meter to dictate that the break has to go there. The line ending on "void" works better for me, because the stanza break is a void, but "a ring" to "of six flower heads"? Again, feels arbitrary.

Now, in this particular case I suspect I'm also running into the fact that the poem is so short, I don't have much time to get invested in it, and what it's saying doesn't hit any particular buttons that will overcome that limitation for me. If it were four times as long, it would have more opportunity to hook me, and then I would be more inclined to like the overall effect even if I could look at any particular line break and go "eh, why?" But in this case I have a tougher time seeing why these lines end where they do, except that the poet had filled them up.

[ursula]

I'm glad you like my poem!

Anand is setting up a contrast between quick/spikey/sharp and slow/curved/round. So the reason to break after "annuals", in the middle of that list of stripey or spikey S words, is to contrast the time they last with the irises that "live for years".

"Ring" and "void" are matched images: there's an emptiness at the center of the circle.

[swan_tower]

Ah, I should have spotted the ring/void one; that's essentially rhyming images at the end of the line instead of phonemes.

I see what you mean about the contrast between annuals and irises, but my reaction to that one is more of an "eh" -- and this reminds me of one of the other things that gets between me and a certain kind of poetry, which is my astonishing ignorance of the natural world. :-P If the imagery of a poem depends on me being able to vividly see a flower or a tree or a bird in my mind's eye and go "yes, you have captured that perfectly," it's liable to fall as flat as a pancake, because my ability to ID such things very nearly stops as "that's a flower, and that's a tree" . . .

[ursula]

I guess I shouldn't have chosen an example poem by a plant ecologist, then :)

(Come to think of it, I know just enough about plants that sometimes I have the reverse problem with fantasy novels: it niggles at my suspension of disbelief when a hopeful peasant lad hikes through a forest for days without noticing the trees.)

What do you think of "I remember the carrots"? I guess there's still a gardening image, but it has a conversational rhythm you might appreciate.

[swan_tower]

Come to think of it, I know just enough about plants that sometimes I have the reverse problem with fantasy novels: it niggles at my suspension of disbelief when a hopeful peasant lad hikes through a forest for days without noticing the trees.

Yeah, that's why I've made a concerted effort to learn more about the flora and fauna of the environments my characters wander through -- especially the natural historian, who bloody well ought to pay attention to that sort of thing.

re: "I remember the carrots" -- the conversational rhythm does work pretty well for me, and I'm familiar enough with carrots to have the visual (though even there, that's a semi-recent thing; before moving to California and attending a farmers' market regularly, "carrots" to me were the already-decapitated things in the grocery store, and so the greens would not have been in my mental image). I think it also helps that the lines are longer and could almost pass for iambic pentameter if I didn't look too closely, so they feel like a more recognizable form to me, and don't have the choppy feeling that shorter lines in free verse so often have.

[watersword]

Funnily enough, this is something I have been thinking about in my poetry workshop of late! I think about controlling the breath of the audience, where people naturally pause and where they don't, about what words I want to leap out visually by being surrounded by white space (especially when I work on a poem I don't left justify all the lines for).

[swan_tower]

See above re: my comparison to somebody out of breath -- that aspect would make more sense to me if I didn't see

so many
free verse
poems where the
lines are so
short
that it feels
like someone
has taken a
cleaver to
the rhythm.

(Please do not take the above as any attempt at poetry. Unless you can usefully employ it as an object lesson, of course!)

And maybe part of it is that I very much hear poems in my head, so while I'm not insensible to the visual effect on the page, that has less effect on me than the elements that would be brought out in performance.

[pameladean]

I wanted to let actual poets weigh in first, since I am only a very occasional poet. But when reading others' work, I've seen line breaks in free verse used to control the breath when the poem is read out loud; to create either thematic or grammatical parallels; to create and then thwart expectations of where the next break will be -- this last is usually an echo or an underlining of a thematic push against expectations but sometimes it's just playful, and sometimes both.

Don't forget that some of this is play; there's a lot of humor in free verse, as there is in regular verse; sometimes along with serious matter and sometimes just being itself.

I'm not sure if you have time for this, but I found free verse easier to approach historically. C.S. Lewis, not a great fan of free verse, pointed out that early works in that form are reacting strongly to centuries of formal verse: referring to it, pushing against it, leaning on it, breaking it apart -- these fragments many of those poets really did shore against their ruins. After it was an established form many poets did things very differently, but getting used to it gradually as the poets themselves did was helpful to me.

P.

[swan_tower]

You know, maybe I should look for recordings of poets reading free verse out loud. (Except that if poets are anything like novelists, many of them will be abysmal at performance, which might do more harm than good when it comes to understanding how this works.) Because this discussion has made me realize that a large chunk of my problem is that when I look at many free verse works, I can't hear a breath pattern that sounds at all effective to me.

Grammatical parallels, those I can spot, and I like them. Thematic parallels, I can sometimes see; sometimes not. Thwarting expections . . . I think I often fail to create any in the first place (or rather, the poem does not create them very effectively for me), so that part often falls down?

Good point about trying early works. I may do that, because yeah, seeing how a thing developed can be very helpful in understanding what its later incarnations are trying to achieve.

[pameladean]

I don't know what recordings exist, but Jane Yolen and Jane Hirshfeld both seem to me to be very good at reading their own works.

P.

[swan_tower]

Alas, I've never had the pleasure of hearing either. (Well, I've met Jane Yolen. But she wasn't reading poetry at the time.)

[okrablossom]

Robert Hass' _A Little Book On Form_ has a chapter titled "How Free Verse Works" and, elsewhere in that book, gives a whole list of what lines/line breaks do/do well.

[swan_tower]

Thanks! I may take a look at that.