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

[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.)