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

[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.)