We writers of poetry spend a lot of time making choices about line but very little time thinking or talking about it. Maybe it's like blinking or breathing. A lot can be discovered about making poems when you give some thought to lineation. One of those little discoveries is how choice-driven the poetic line is, even if the choice is unconscious and done by feel.
At Wednesdays@One and in other venues, I have asked writers about their lines. Why do you write such short/long lines? How did you come to vary the line length of this poem so dramatically? Why have you ended your poem with a one-word line? These are questions about choice, which is to say, about style, and writers often have a hard time answering them.
The power of line
At Wednesdays@One and in other venues, I have asked writers about their lines. Why do you write such short/long lines? How did you come to vary the line length of this poem so dramatically? Why have you ended your poem with a one-word line? These are questions about choice, which is to say, about style, and writers often have a hard time answering them.
The power of line
By assigning lines to a poem, you can drive it forward or “down”
the page, or you can retard its rhythmical progress, or vary its pace. You can extend a line across the page
visually, even “fold” it back beneath itself.
Line can contribute to flow or choppiness and it can bring a thought to
a dead stop. Visually, you can create a
slab of text or a ribbon, or, sometimes, a sprinkling or scattershot effect. Which is to say, lineation is a matter of
choice, every poem being a record of choices made in composition.
In poems with the strongest “presence” in the ear or on the page,
structure and sense often work together to dictate line, and so as a writer of
poems you need always to be aware of the line your poem demands (if only so you
can violate it). Conversely, in poems
with weaker presence, poems that are inexpert or unpracticed, lines are forced
upon the text (perhaps with rhyme-ends, over-punctuation, too-rhythmical beats,
or clichéd meter) regardless of sense.
All but one of the following poems is lineated. As you attempt to restore each to its lined
self (and maybe discover the one that is not written in lines), you will likely
experience something like this: outside of traditional metrics, lineation can
feel arbitrary, provisional, hit or miss.
By way of example, the three poems dealing with birds are restored
to their original lines at the end of this text.
To the Yellow Morning Moon
Three mornings, you make a window out of mullions and glass,
bright chip of light, less round, less palpable, each sun’s rising. Three mornings, I make you a name:
maple-snagged kite, tarnished coin, Icarus falling into the pale-blue sea. You yellow moon floating down the western
sky, I abide your losses. You make good
company at such lonely hours.
Looking at a Dead Wren in My Hand
Forgive the hours spent listening to radios, and the words of
gratitude I did not say to teachers. I love your tiny rice-like legs, like bars
of music played in an empty church, and the feminine tail, where no worms of
Empire have ever slept, and the intense yellow chest that makes tears come.
Your tail feathers open like a picket fence, and your bill is brown, with the
sorrow of an old Jew whose daughter has married an athlete. The black spot on
your head is your own mourning cap.
Autobiographia Literaria
When I was a child I played myself in a corner of the schoolyard
all alone. I hated dolls and I hated games, animals were not friendly and birds
flew away. If anyone was looking for me I hid behind a tress and cried out “I
am an orphan.” And here I am, the center of all beauty! writing these poems!
Imagine!
Adam’s Complaint (by Denise Levertov)
Some people, no matter what you give them, still want the moon.
The bread, the salt, white meat and dark, still hungry. The marriage bed and
the cradle, still empty arms. You give them land, their own earth under their
feet, still they take to the roads. And water: dig them the deepest well, still
it’s not deep enough to drink the moon from.
The Business Life (by David Ignatow)
When someone hangs up, having said to you, “Don’t come round
again,” and you have never heard the phone banged down with such violence nor
the voice vibrate with such venom, pick up your receiver gently and dial again,
get the same reply; and dial again, until he threatens. You will then get used
to it, be sick only instead of shocked. You will live, and have a pattern to go
by, familiar to your ear, your senses and your dignity.
Cell Song (by Etheridge Knight)
Night Music Slanted Light strike the cave of sleep. I alone tread
the red circle and twist the space with speech. Come now, etheridge, don’t be a
savior; take your words and scrape the sky, shake rain on the desert, sprinkle
salt on the tail of a girl, can there anything good come out of prison.
The Sparrow
I served a great heart beating This sparrow who comes to sit at my window is a poetic truth more than a natural one. His voice, his movements, his habits—how he loves to flutter his wings in the dust—all attest it; granted, he does it to rid himself of lice but the relief he feels makes him cry out lustily—which is a trait more related to music than otherwise.
The Bird Bath
I served a great heart beating its little drum in the shade of the
redbud, in the brightness of a bowl of water in the sun, standing still in the window for as
long as it drank, for as long as it visited that oasis of stone, a soldier in
the ranks of attention, a conscript to ordinary beauty.
⇋⇋⇋⇋
The Sparrow
(by William Carlos Williams)
This sparrow
who
comes to sit at my window
is
a poetic truth
more than a natural one.
His
voice,
his
movements,
his habits—
how
he loves to
flutter
his wings
in the dust—
all
attest it;
granted,
he does it
to rid himself of lice
but
the relief he feels
makes
him
cry out lustily—
which
is a trait
more
related to music
than otherwise.
Looking at a Dead Wren in My Hand
[1]
(by Robert Bly)
Forgive the hours spent listening to radios, and the words of
gratitude I did not say to teachers. I love your tiny rice-like legs, like bars
of music played in an empty church, and the feminine tail, where no worms of
Empire have ever slept, and the intense yellow chest that makes tears come.
Your tail feathers open like a picket fence, and your bill is brown, with the
sorrow of an old Jew whose daughter has married an athlete. The black spot on
your head is your own mourning cap.
The Bird Bath
(by Clark Holtzman)
I served a great heart
beating its little drum
in the shade of the redbud,
in the brightness
of a bowl of water
in the sun, standing
still in the window
for as long as it drank,
for as long as it
visited that oasis of stone,
a soldier in the ranks
of attention, a conscript
to ordinary beauty.
