Lineation Redux (4.14.19)

Attached are some poems that I have “de-lineated.”  The project for this coming Wednesday is to read them carefully enough to see any possible formal devices (e.g., rhyme, meter, verbal end-stop or enjambment, punctuation) and/or any logical/rhetorical/syntactical cues that might suggest a line ending or beginning, or a stanza break, and then indicate with a slash (/) where the line breaks.  If you think the text suggests or should have a stanza break, insert a double slash (//) where you think the text has/should have a new stanza.

I will bring the originals to W@1 so we can compare your line breaks.  It’s likely fruitless in most instances to try to guess what line breaks the author originally inserted, though this might be a fun guessing game!  More fruitful will be to assess each poem here according to the above suggestions about rhythm and formal devices and try to “re-lineate” based on what your ear and your eye tell you.

Like everything else in poetry, when it comes to lineation, there are conventions and there are innovations; there are “schools” and there are unique styles; there are traditions and there are experiments.  The point of this project is to help us all to think about the decisions—conscious or otherwise—that we make when writing poems.

Spoiler alert: the text of one of the poems here actually is printed with fully justified margins, left and right.  So it looks on the page like what we usually refer to as a "prose poem."

For a slightly deeper discussion on lineation, you can re-visit our project dated 12.12.17 (there are two blog entries), on my http://clarkspoetryblog.blogspot.com/.  You’ll find the discussion in the blog archive, under 2017-December.

To My Dear and Loving Husband

─ Anne Bradstreet, ca. 1678

If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; if ever wife was happy in a man, compare with me, ye women, if you can. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, nor ought but love from thee, give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay, the heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then while we live, in love let’s so persevere that when we live no more, we may live ever.

The Birds of the Air

─ W. S. Di Piero, 2014

The Cooper’s I now see farther down trail pulls my vision to red-tail mates dialing through blues above a sparrowhawk’s crown that turns from phone lines toward elk cows bugling near the heron hunting gophers—the just enough always too much already. This coastal track we followed years ago poppies redwoods fiddleheads monkeyflower mistletoe oh the healing mistletoe that clings to the live oaks it falls from while we agreed we could not be as we were and wind rushed through our ears our voices as it’s rushing now as if our voices still say no this can’t be what we meant or wanted. How many times we said that. It must have been what we wanted talking so much helplessly about what’s not here anymore is its own kind of plenitude, isn’t it? How lucky are we.

Owl Poem

─Caroline Bird, 2002

I refuse to write about an owl, better to write about a person with an owl, or a person who wants an owl, or better still, a person who hates owls and will never have an owl.

Once Upon a Cold November Morning

─Mark Strand, 2012

I left the sunlit fields of my daily life and went down into the hollow mountain, and there I discovered, in all its chilly glory, the glass castle of my other life. I could see right through it, and beyond, but what could I do with it? It was perfect, irreducible, and worthless except for the fact that it existed.

Waking Up

─William Bronk, 1994

Mr. Dread was in the bed. I’m leaving he said then did.  Well, we’ll see.

The Scenario

─Kevin Young, 2018

The two of us, black, met one night dancing alongside each other to Tribe at a party in the world’s smallest room. Someone from Carolina brought moon-shine & over the beat, the clanking heat, Phillipe leaned over his date to say, Hey man, we should be friends. What you know yo. And that was that. Popping the caps off brown Red Stripe bottles with his teeth he’d drink out the side of his mouth, sly. We heads kept ours dreaded, crowned—a decade later he was gone. The Scenario, our favorite of 500 songs.