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.

[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.)

[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").

[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).

[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.

[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.