Consider the caesura.
"A rhetorical and extrametrical pause or phrasal break within the poetic line."
This is how my Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics defines the caesura. There's a lot in the definition, like the presupposition of intent (rhetoric), meter, phrasing, and of course, lines. Which is to say, the PEPP understands caesura as a formal poetic element, not, in case you're wondering, as an organic element of ordinary speech. It's not about taking a breath as you do when you are in conversation, or the natural cadences of everyday speech.
Caesura is one of the figures of poetry. It is a tool, a strategy, part of the meaning of a poem. When you and I think of caesura, we tend to see it as a space separating two or more parts of a line of poetry. And when moderns like us write poems with caesura, we often insert blank space typographically. Watch what the San Francisco Renaissance poet, Robin Blaser, does with caesura in this poem:
You might call this example typography run amok. Or you might suspect Blaser is representing breaths or speech patterns. Or, you might think that he's drawing your attention to particular words, word associations, word order, and to various degrees of stress (heavy to light to non-existent). Whatever he's doing in this little poem - which has a lot to do with feeling your own experience as a palpable thing - Blaser certainly wants caesura to be a part of the meaning. Reading it, you might feel pressure to pause slightly, to skip a beat here and there, to read in a stop-and-go way. That is, you might feel you're being asked to slow down as you read, to make the words palpable, which is another way of asserting the meaning of the poem: the palpability of experience or awareness or consciousness. All of which lends this poem immediacy.
Typographically, the poem looks chaotic. It bends and/or breaks - or self-consciously ignores - the conventions of meter. Hard to make out iambs, trochees, dactyls and anapests here! What does caesura look and sound like in a more regularized setting? Here is what it looks like in Old English poetry, where the caesura was a critical element of structure, sound and meaning:
Something you can't see but would hear if spoken by an expert reader*, are the stresses, both heavy and light, primary and secondary, in each verse and line. (In OE studies, the half line on either side of the caesura is called the "a" and "b" verse.) Suffice it to say here that each verse contains two heavy-stress syllables and two light-stress. Generally in Old English poetry, the heavy-stress syllable comes first, followed by the light-stress syllable. This arrangement of stressed/non-stressed syllables repeats across each "a" and "b" verse, a pattern that's reinforced by the repeating alliteration as well.
All of which is to say that Old English poetry, which is accentual, incorporates caesura in order to create structure, repetition, emphasis . . . meaning. It is a shaping tool.
But what, exactly, does caesura shape? In a word, sound. The caesura you can "see" typographically, is merely a convenience for literate, sight-oriented readers of texts. It is there to indicate not a pause, per se, but a repeating pattern of stresses and non-stresses in a spoken text, for it is vocal stress, not typographical spacing (page real estate, if you will) or even "breath-space," that determines accentual-syllabic forms of poetry. That would be every kind of poem from ancient Greek epic to Old English saga, to iambic pentameter. Stress is also the key to the poems of Walt Whitman, Gerard Manly Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams . . . and contemporary hip-hop. In Old English poetry, it's simply that stress is a predictable - required - pattern of sound that repeats once each line, that splits a line of OE poetry into two verses with an identical pattern of stress. This is how it looks in a modern translation of Beowulf, by Seamus Heaney . . . first the OE version, with the gap minded, and then the Heaney version of the opening lines:
You can rough out where the caesura falls within the line. You'll see that, as in the case of the second and third lines in Modern English, the word and syllable count is not quite irrelevant, but it's not determinative either. It's all about the number and relation of stresses or beats.
Modern English poetry uses caesura liberally as a way rhythmically to mark off segments of a complete thought that unfolds inside a passage of poetry. The complete passage could be a line, could be a stanza. It could be a sentence that begins and/or ends in the middle of a line and is marked with a period or semi-colon or some other punctuation that indicates a shift in thought.
In OE poetry, the caesura functions as a kind of fulcrum, rhythmically, rhetorically . . . and sonically. I can't stress this point enough. Sonic balance between the two halves of a line of OE poetry is what the poetry is all about: order, norm, regularity, expectation. For OE poetry - and for most poetry in the Western cultural tradition - order is the given. From Aristotle's Poetics down at least to the poetry of Tennyson, order is beauty is art. One of the distinguishing factors of Modern poetry is its abandonment of order and the expectation order creates for a reader.
I want to discuss what the critic Austin Warren called "a rage for order" in his book of that title, but that will have to be in another posting. For the time being, my point is just that in poetry written before modern times, in the West at least, the caesura functioned as a stabilizing force.
Enough here to say that in modern and contemporary poetry, the caesura does more than bifurcate a line into two sonically equal halves. Rhetorically speaking, the caesura often serves to interrupt the flow of thought, rather than to qualify or deepen it. And rhythmically, the caesura often breaks the flow of a line or a thought. Break? Disintegrate!
This passage is from a poem by Robert Duncan, "Transmissions," a segment from his long poem, Groundwork: Before the War. You can see how deeply typography has influenced the construction of the passage, how some lines return to the margin while others begin at various positions away from the margin; and how many of the lines are broken internally. Generally, the caesuras seem to break along sense units: not one but many . . . But not always. there appears to be no rhyme (no pun intended) or reason to the spacings. The language is heroic (many energies, brute strength, potency of the pure, clean realized ovoid dream, Pythagoras, vault of Heaven), allusive, and self-regarding. Look at me, it says, not at the flow of thought you think you may be following. The caesura lends power to this triumph of words.
Duncan, a Language Poet, was known for treating words materialistically, as the materiel of the poem. For him, spaces count, either intellectually or rhythmically or both, wherever they are "inserted":
The returns to margins in the poem are not schematic but follow rhythmic and architectonic impulses in the felt flow of the ongoing versification . . . . The demarcation of stanzas then 'counts': a space of one and a half lines counts as one verse of arrest or attention--a silence in which the preceding verse may be echoed and/or the following verse be awaited. But silence itself is sounded, a significant or meaningful absence, its semiotic value contributing to and derived from our apprehension of the field of the poem it belongs to.
Lest the above seem a bit overcooked, just think of Duncan's explanation of his poem's versification as this: silences are as much a part of a soundscape as utterances. The silences come in the form of internal spaces within the line, lines beginning two or three or more tabs away from the margin, and line/stanza breaks of varying length.**
Other poets use the caesura, following Duncan's lead, not just liberally but strategically, integrally. Reading their poems, you always feel on broken ground, like you're walking on large gravel that can twist an ankle. You have to walk slowly and deliberately, pausing between steps. Take this poem, "Underneath (2)," by Jorie Graham:
Explain caesura in this poem!
"A significant or meaningful absence," is how Robert Duncan described the caesura in his book's commentary. Read Graham's poem visually and you're likely to be frustrated. Who wants to work that hard, even with poetry? What's the payoff? Well, that comes from reading out loud. Go ahead, try reading Graham's poem out loud, pausing "significantly" where the spaces indicate you should. I think you'll have a completely different experience, a much richer experience.
Just as soon as I think up a project related to the caesura, I will lay it on you. Meanwhile, make your silences meaningful!
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