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]

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.