The Tribune in the Woods on prose versus versus. Responding to Laura Carter on lines & line-breaks.

My two cents: a line-break is a break in the sentence flow. If you break the line where there is no natural pause in the sentence, you emphasize the break: you juxtapose the "natural", ordinary flow of a sentence with the artifice of the poem.

This may be a way to heighten the intensity, by creating kind of a special, demarcated space. But "unnatural" breaks, after a while - especially if the actual sentences are not all that interesting - become simply annoying, or emphatically boring.

I usually like to "work with" the line-break. I use it to try to give more music (rhythm) to the sentence. I use odd or "unnatural" line-breaks rarely, & in conjunction with a particular meaning the sentence is conveying. What I like about line-breaks is that in addition to adding rhythm to the sentence with a pause, they also fortify the rhythmic unity of the individual lines. So these 2 things - the unity of the line & the rhythm of the break - work together.

But my aim & my practice is to get to the point where I don't have to think about this stuff. Because I'm really more interested in the overall momentum, and in the coalescence of a larger content or argument as a whole. Make it natural, make it flow. Then the real original content & diction will appear, almost magically, on its own.

This is probably the most conventional approach to these issues. But perhaps there's some advantage to developing a kind of natural, thoughtless practice, one which fits your own thoughtless nature. Natural, anyway, for thoughtless people like me. Painstaking poets will take a more painstaking approach.

p.s. this issue is complicated by the fact that a "natural" line-length does not always correspond with a "natural"-sounding break. This is where rhyme comes in very handy. Rhyme adds a 3rd layer of interest, like from a new direction, to (1) rhythmic unity of line and (2) rhythmic interest of the break. Rhyme is like the mortar used by masons, except you have to imagine a mason who erects some fantastic structure which follows the inclination of the mortar rather than the structure of the bricks.

for me, the quatrain became a "line" as Dale Smith describes it. it became second-nature expressive. whether it can be so again is my question to myself.

Every subculture begins with an act of demarcation, a drawing of boundaries : us vs. them.

But when writers do this, they simultaneously erase the more compelling boundary line : writing vs. world.

More thinking on C. Wright's comments quoted at Hotel Point.

What is good poetry?

It's possible that the fundamental aspects of poetic structure & form have been summarized permanently, say in Jan Mukarovsky's On Poetic Language, where he says, agreeing with Wright, that the line (in counterpoint to the phrase) establishes the basic music/rhythm underlying (heightened, intensified) poetic speech. Perhaps making debates & polemics out of these basic elements is no longer relevant (as it was in last mid-century).

What the poet does with them (in terms of diction, style, subject-matter) is maybe where analysis (poetics) begins, now.

Have to run, more later, maybe. Looking for Mukarovsky's name in my own hgpoetics archives (I was trying to remember it). Sheesh, what a gabber I've been.

Another blog-range response to Jonathan :

Lake's outline of the effect of lineation, syntax and meter in poetry in this particular essay is clear, simple to the point of simplistic, bare-bones, basic, unoriginal, and accurate. I don't see anything particularly Victorian about it, maybe because I'm a Victorian?

But what interested me about it was that the analysis of poetry came through a description of fiction & narrative - how the minds of writer & reader "dream" & evoke the mimetic signals in the text. He points out how the mind shapes "wholes" (in a "fractal", recursive expansion) out of these minimal but subtle & delicate language signals. This really is an area which I think you can make the argument has been dealt with mainly through disruption, "dis-figurement", in postmodern poetics.

My own interest has been engaged in the composition of long semi-narrative poems in which story & landscape & character "appear" in surprising ways, which experience makes me think there is more to be discovered through such synthetic rather than disjunctive processes.