A Theory of Line-breaks

Format	Frequency
2 line stanzas	7
3 line stanzas	14
4 line stanzas	4
5 line stanzas	5
6 line stanzas	2
7 line stanzas	2
8 line stanzas	1
Misc stanzas	8

Deviations from norms will be noticed. In most prose, line-breaks are deviations. The norms for poetry seem to be changing. Here are the statistics of Jane Holland's "The Brief History of a Disreputable Woman" (Bloodaxe 1997). Note the high percentage of poems with regular 2 or 3 lined stanzas. For regularity, the "Brighton Pilgrimage" poem takes the prize - 18 7-lined stanzas where the longest line is about 1cm longer than the shortest.

In the last decade or so, line-breaks seem often used to produce equally shaped stanzas in this way. Like any pattern it offers the writer chances to thwart expectation - units can be end-stopped or enjambed, for example. The requirements of form also give the writer an answer to people asking why the poet broke a line. Stanza lengths can (indeed, should) be varied from poem to poem. The important thing is not to let any line stick out more than 2cm from a neighbour. Once the poem's been shaped, minor tweaks can be made to exploit a line- or stanza-break, but these shouldn't be too obvious - such effects are often pretty cheap, and they might draw attention to the other, form-driven line-breaks. For added variety regular indenting can be used too. The final stanza is allowed to be a line shorter or longer than all the rest. It can even be a single-line.

Why do poets use the form? After all, the line-break's potential in this context is limited. I guess the form's purpose is partly to please the eye and partly to get people in the poetry mood, to get them to "read into" the work. As Culler wrote in "Structuralist Poetics", this will make readers see extra meanings (the word "red" will burst with connotations), and affect their interpretation of style (reportage will become "restrained writing"). There'll also be a tendency to read a fragment as the tip-of-an-iceberg.

Note the key-role played by line-breaks. Not only do they indicate that the text is a poem (giving it a charge, an aura), but by encouraging minor closures they help readers to focus on (and magnify) particular phrases as well as generating extra interpretations - e.g. "I am good/for nothing".

Given the charitable status granted to poetry by readers, any text is likely to seem more significant when read as a poem, so I think that it's only fair to raise the bar for text with poetic pretensions. In "A Lope of Time" Ruth O'Callaghan writes "smoking at an open window, the man notes the abandoned boat. Come spring he will replace it". I misquote; actually she wrote

smoking at an open window
                      the man
        notes
                the abandoned boat

come spring 
        he will replace it

I don't think this earns the right to be read too generously.

Rather than use the shape of the text to indicate that the work should be read poetically, writers can use the context. It's common nowadays for poetry books to include at least one poem that has no line-breaks. Lachlan Mackinnon's "Small Hours" takes this approach further. On the flap it says that the book ends with "a long poem ... written mostly in prose". The piece in question ("The Book of Emma") takes up 63 pages. Here are some extracts

• "The only television I watched as an undergraduate was the separate inaugural speech President Carter had recorded for Europe on the subject of nuclear weapons. We just didn't. Nowadays people have sets in their rooms. And mobiles. They stay in touch with home friends in a way impossible and unimaginable for us. They text and email. This may be an epistemic shift but they feel terror loneliness and grief no less than we did" (from section XL).
• "Of course in making this thing about you or around you I am talking about my youth and homesick for it. But that is not the point. The point is that at one time in one place I met someone who became to me a living conscience" (from section XLVIII)

It's interesting to note the reception to this piece

• Boyd Tonkin (The Independent) - It is a poet's prose: thrifty, rhythmic, specific, given to darting shifts in pace and focus.
• Carrie Etter (The Guardian) - "The Book of Emma" creates much of its poetry through command of sentence rhythms, repetitions of sound, and epic movement between individual experience and historical perspective.
• David Morley (blog) - "The Book of Emma", which is neither prose poetry nor poetic prose but a vivid series of elliptical, connected flash-backs that have the quality of flash fiction - except we are clearly hearing a poem... - it is a highly successful experiment in form.

I'd call it prose written in prose. Yes, it has shifts of time and subject, but thankfully so does prose. It has a consistent voice. Its imagery and analogies are developed at a leisurely pace. There are leit-motifs and unspoken interconnections. It doesn't exploit sound effects. But if it doesn't need line-breaks why does an earlier poem, "Midlands", need so many? It has these passages:

• "TB and rickets/ are back in cities, but these towns/ are too small to support/ such destitution"
• "Canals hidden/ like avenues by trees// until the bank-holiday/holiday-makers come/ in narrow-boats dolled up/ like gypsy caravans/ with new gloss/ blue, orange, red"

It's commonly said that some poems are "just prose chopped up", but even if a text is "poetry chopped up" it's faulty. In Ruth O'Callaghan's piece what are line-breaks for? I'm not the only person puzzled by latterday line-breaks

• "the free verse, now dominant not only in the US but around the world, has become, with notable exceptions, little more than linear prose, arbitrarily divided into line-lengths", Marjorie Perloff, "The Oulipo Factor", Jacket 23
• "The poetic line seems highly problematic nowadays and it sometimes seems better to avoid it altogether", Frances Presley, "Poetry Review", V98.4, 2008
• "Not only hapless adolescents, but many gifted and justly esteemed poets writing in contemporary nonmetrical forms, have only the vaguest concept, and the most haphazard use, of the line", Denise Levertov", "On the Function of the Line", 1979

Format	Frequency
2 line stanzas	4
3 line stanzas	3
14 line stanzas	1
Prose	3
Misc	13
Sonnet	1
Triangular	1

Asking the poet doesn't always help. In "Acumen 85" (May 2016) William Oxley asked Harry Guest "how do you determine where to break the line?" He replied (to my mind unhelpfully) with "... the poem finds itself ... The poem tells me when to go on to the next line and, if I find the advice reasonable, I obey". Hugo Williams wrote "if I don't want the line to be broken, I break it in an inappropriate place, forcing the reader to go on, as if there were no break" (The Poetry Review, V.104:1, Spring 2014) but why break the line at all? Of course, line-breaks do affect processing - see for example Look Before You Leap: How Enjambment Affects the Reading of Poetry by Ruth Koops van‘t Jag et al (Center for Language and Cognition, University of Groningen) - "The two experiments reported here show that poetry is indeed processed differently from prose, and that different types of enjambment are associated with different modes of processing". However, I doubt that their full potential is exploited by regular, rectangular stanzas. Nathan Hamilton's selection of recent poetry in Rialto 70 (2010) has these statistics. It's unfair to compare this multi-author sample with single-author books, but maybe it's a sign that line-breaks are regaining their power. In Mackinnon's "Midlands" the line-breaks are for making each stanza 9 lines long, which is currently considered a worthwhile aim, but perhaps "The Book of Emma" signals a further drift of norms. There's no need to add line-breaks to a text if Faber label it as poetry. If Faber accept this piece as poetry, what prose would they turn down? Anything with sections longer than 2 pages?

See also

• More on line-breaks
• Learning the Poetic Line by Rebecca Hazelton
• A Primer on the Poetic Line (David Wright)

The Poetry Circus

In a secondhand bookshop I found "The Poetry Circus", by Stanton A. Coblentz, (Hawthorn: New York, 1967). It is "a frontal attack on the sloppiness, pretence, and just plain sensationalism that prevails in much of contemporary poetry". In one section ("How to write a Modern Poem") he shows how an embarrassingly bland text (e.g. "Every nation, isolated in its own house, seeks to wall out all other nations") might be modernised by substitutions leading to something that "may be a little vague and somewhat hard to figure out, perhaps even contradictory, but no one will say it is trite" (e.g. "Every nation/in the isolation of its own libido/seeks to cro-Magnonize all others with the psychology of the alter ego"). Of course no-one consciously proceeds through these stages, but poem explanations sometimes perform the reverse process. Are they attempts to normalize, to remove from the work all that's odd to us, all that's novel? Do they dumb down? Whatever the explanations do, they don't always explain what's lost in this process. The paraphrase may even be an improvement on a confusing draft.

Coblenz's battle against the Emperors' New Clothes failed to change the course of US poetry, but I share some of his doubts about the purposes of difficulty. There are several reasons why a vague or difficult poem might be more effective than a direct one -

• In "Nature", 17th Mar 2005 they reported that blurry images can have more emotional impact than clear ones - the emotion-modules in the brain don't need detail; the detail activates other activity that might distract.
• A "Rorschach" poem can give a reader more scope for imagination.
• Exploring a difficult poem can be a reward in itself.

- but vagueness and difficulty can of course be evasion, bluffing, or a sign of more general communication difficulties.

I read the "Tears in the Fence" magazine to encounter types of work I don't often read, work that challenges and stretches me. Both poets and critics are given space to make their case. Even so, I sometimes feel that I'm encountering crop circles rather than new life-forms. Here's the start of "Love Poem 2" by Lisa Mansell

slick in the lactic stale of sextet
                                        they crabform in their calculus
        and listen to the music that kilts and sucks their scarab-wracked skin
               tantric and crystal                a tryst
                                               rustic and cusp

oceans slip by denizens of noose
       and coil unctuous          vultured in love-letter-scrawl
                       as laval scions the deserting vulva
         aztec and volatile                        liquid

It's rich in sound effects - "slick in the lactic stale of sextet" has many 'S' and 'K' sounds that are repeated through the piece. Later, 'L' and 'V' sounds begin to dominate. Sound has its own meaning-making mechanisms. The dadaists wrote "sound poetry". Less extremely, Mallarmé and Basil Bunting foregrounded sound. I side with Eliot when he said "the music of poetry is not something which exists apart from its meaning". The balance between sound and "sense" can vary in poetry. In this piece several word-choices look strange if one merely considers their sense. Why "slick in the lactic stale of sextet" rather than "slick in the lactic staleness of sex"? What does line 2 mean? "calculus" might be something to do with bones or with calculation. What sort of "music" is being referred to? What is "kilts ... their skin?" (by the way, "unctuous" means oily or smarmy; "scions" means offspring). What does "deserting vulva" mean - that it's going dry? that it's making something else dry? that it's leaving? How do any of those interpretations connect with the rest of the line (presumably they do in some way, otherwise there'd be a line-break). The poem's grammatically parsable, but commas have been replaced by line-breaks. That doesn't fully explain the splattered layout though - why the inline spaces?

I like the sound of it - I can imagine people being seduced by the sonic constellations alone - but it might as well be in a foreign language for all the "sense" I can make of it. When writing a Rorschach poem it helps to retain some referential clues - partly to tantalize. But readers aren't to know whether there's a riddle to be solved, or how much work is expected. Here for instance "kilts" could suggest the swaying of seaweed, or maybe it's something to do with "kilter" (as in "out of kilter"). The lovers could be whales, "slick" could allude to "oil-slick". Perhaps vultures and scarabs are Aztec symbols (there must be some reason why "aztec" is there). There are other symbolic links too - crab, ocean, liquid; sex(tet), tantric, vulva; desert and ocean. The rest of the poem doesn't help me, though there is "their unbelief in binary rubs at the solent-soft of her love" which reminds me of the concocted examples of modernized poetry that Coblentz developed from a simple statement.

Formalist poems are sometimes accused of being rhyme-driven, with artificial inversions introduced merely to regularise the rhythm. Mainstream poems often have mundane settings into which some mystery is embedded (a "lift" in the final line, for example) with sound having a minor role. There are sonic forces driving this poem like an ambulance siren pushing mainstream meaning aside. Or alternatively one could say that the setting is sonic, generating effects (a field, if you wish) that isolated referential meanings expand into and modulate.

Rather than send in the clowns perhaps it's time to start dismantling the Big Top. Whose fun would it spoil? Would it throw the baby out with the bathwater? Does it risk the accusation of being right-wing, reactionary, nostalgic for "The Movement"? Even suggesting that one create a table of pros and cons for the special effects displayed in such poems risks being accused of over-rationalism, of workshoppery taken over by accountancy. The poet has a Ph.D and lectures in Creative Writing so I presume all my points have been taken into account. In the end all one can say is that the proportions of the ingredients don't suit me. Maybe there are also some ingredients that I'm oblivious to. It takes all sort to make a world and I'm sure this poem has its share of fans.

More on line-breaks

Years ago I was asked to tutor some students so I went to a few lectures. During one of the lectures there was a burst of applause and someone held up a piece of paper with "1000" on it. I was told afterwards that the lecturer Ummed so much that the students had decided to count them. It didn't seem to do the lecturer any harm - he's a prof now.

When I read some poetry the line-breaks are rather like that lecturer's ums. Sure, I can ignore them but why should I?

• Over Xmas I read Stress Fractures (Tom Chivers (ed), Penned in the Margins) a collection of essays I'd recommend. "The Line" by Katy Evans-Bush will have the widest appeal and is amongst the longest pieces. I don't think it needed to be so long: the tight-rope sub-plot doesn't earn its keep and there are longeurs - a half-page quote by AS Byatt on pleasure belongs elsewhere. When there's a list of "pet peeves ... combined with examples of excellence" that "runs down a spectrum of enjambment" the essay's at its most useful, but by then there's too little space left to discuss why "Many poetry tutors don't like to discuss [line endings] at all; there is such a taboo on discussing this most personal aspect of poetry" (p.194). This quote raises important, unanswered questions - why is it considered personal? Is there a taboo on all other personal aspects?
  I think I need more convincing before I can believe the discipline of WS Merwin, or the effectiveness of Bunting's breaks. I'm also not sure why in a book of this type we need to be told that "Used well, [end-rhyme] has an amazing galvanising effect on a poem" (p.200).
  What I found most useful was how others might respond to line-break usages. E.g. Putting the important words at the start rather than end of the line in some readers "creates a sense of urgency as well as hesitancy, and disorients the reader, who then grabs for the emotional content as for a lifeline". Maybe so - it's a personal thing - but one that, I feel, isn't beyond the scope of experimental psychology. Maybe it's an acquired habit that only poetry-readers suffer from. How does putting heavy words at the start of lines produce more breathless urgency than unbroken prose?

  And I'd still like to know how we've reached a situation where gratuitously tidy line-breaks producing regular, boxed stanzas is considered preferable to irregular shapes or even a prose layout.

• Iota 88 arrived. George Ttoouli's review of an Elisabeth Bletsoe book discusses some line breaks.

  hedgerows
  buoyant ashstems &
  quick silver-
  dark hollythorn
  
  equivocal, the
  fields of plover;
  

  Here the line is chopped in order to double sense in multiple ways. The breaking over "quick silver- / dark" gives both the quicksilver and the silver-dark of the hollythorn sitting in the same charged couplet. Similarly, are we to take "equivocal" as referring to the hollythorn, or the fields of plover? It is both, simultaneously, and also neither: the accumulation of lines that demand alternate readings also gives the phrase "equivocal, the", the indefinite definite article of an implied dusk, where shapes are both known yet imprecise, solids liquids, objects both shaded and shining. There is something overwhelmingly wonderful at work here

  I'm unsure about some of this. "double sense" is ok, but the extra meanings need to be worth having. What is "hollythorn"? I couldn't find info online. If it's not sometimes silver then that's one imprecision solved. I suppose the 2 lines form a couplet, but is it "charged"? What's wrong with the single-line "quick-silver-dark hollythorn"? Perhaps the poet wanted to make the vowel repetitions clearer - "ant ash" and "quick sil". Do the lines demand multiple readings or is the poet hoping that if she throws in enough possibilities the reader will bother selecting those that made some sense and politely ignore those that don't? Why the line-breaks after "hedgerows" and "the"? Is it really "overwhelmingly wonderful"?

• "I found the variety of shapes that the poems make on the page refreshing; a factor in keeping my interest and attention" (Angela France, Iota 88). I don't find that variety interesting, per se.
• I've just heard about "The Art of the Poetic Line", (James Longenbach, Graywolf) In the light of the above points I think I should read it.
• In Stephen Burt's "Close Call with Nonsense" there's simple example on p.331 - "To a Poor Old Woman" shows how Williams's line breaks work

  They taste good to her
  They taste good
  to her. They taste
  good to her.
  

  They taste good to her (you might not like them); They taste good (not merely adequate); she tastes them, taking them into her body, rather than merely contemplating them
  The stated effect of the first line depends on the final word being emphasised (if WCW had a better typewriter he could have used italics). To me, the second instance (with 'to her' on a new line, after a pause) emphasises 'to her' more.

The End of the Line for Modern Poetry

In 1997 I became increasingly sceptical about the value of line-breaks in much free verse. This article considers the possibility of doing without them.

The Line between Prose and Poetry

Early in the 17th century, Campion and Milton both expressed their dislike of jingling rhyme. As the century progressed, dramatic poetry (whose plain verse and accomodation of speech rhythms foreshadowed free verse) "grew even freer; with apparently incomplete lines, increased enjambment and a recognisable degree of sprung rhythm" [Hobsbaum, 1996, p.94]. Between the 18th and 19th centuries the trends that led to the current dominance of free-verse were already in motion. Gradually there were more verbs than adjectives and more subordinate than serial constructions. Form and content began to slide apart: "to the tendency towards parenthesis, and the persistent enjambment, Keats adds the effect of directing the sense not with the couplet, as one would find in Pope, but against it." [Hobsbaum, 1996, p.29]

By about 1820 most of the leading poets' work was stanzaic in structure, while a half century before it had been mostly linear. Also oblique metaphors had taken the place of explicit similes [Miles, 1964]. During the 19th century priorities continued to change towards grammar, semantics and speech patterns and away from surface structure.

Rhyme, alliteration and other sound effects are still used. Witness, for instance, this extract from a piece of recent criticism

    "Bellflowers, seldom seen now, stellar, trim."
    Note the triple statement of the el(l) sound counterpointed against 
    the duple m; the narrowing of el(l)'s vowel to ee and i - boldly 
    interrupted by recapitulation of ow; and the modulation of s through 
    st to t.

    (Of Talisman, by Peter Dale). W.G. Shepherd in Agenda 33.1

To some there's more than just sensory pleasure in this. Denise Levertov wrote that "In organic poetry the metric movement, the measure is the direct expression of the movement of perception. And the sounds, acting together with the measure, are a kind of extended onomatopoeia - i.e. they imitate, not the sounds of an experience ... but the feeling of an experience, its emotional tone, its texture" [Denise Levertov, 1973]. But there's a limit to how much can be expressed by such sound effects, and the primal heartbeat of iambs can dull the senses after a while. Looking through books on poetry technique one will see examples of alliteration and repeated vowel sounds (the mournfulness of long 'o's or 'u's, the precision of 't's). But it's suspicious how often the same examples are used. Pick any old poem and you're statistically likely to find a cluster of similar sounds and it's not hard to justify the pattern - no harder than finding patterns and meanings in tea-leaves. It's been estimated [Wesling, 1985] that only about 1% of old poetry exploits the sound effects; in the remaining poems the poet's inner ear has got stuck on a particular noise; the sound and sense each going their own way. So during the twentieth century the redundant metres and clangy rhymes were gradually removed. The remaining sound effects stuck out, looked cheap. Many of those went too. Without metre and rhyme, the line break became less necessary.

The consequent loss of a clear boundary between poetry and prose continues to worry many. It's not clear why we need a carefully drawn dividing line. It's true that poetry has had to fight to preserve its territory against encroachment by the developing novel and everyday speech (adverts, songs, Hallmark cards), but constructing artificial, typography-based distinctions isn't going to help the cause - "cut-up prose" isn't accepted as poetry by much of the reading public.

Perhaps the line is defended because prose is judged as intrinsically inferior to poetry. One can sympathise with people who hold this view (send them flowers?) but I suspect that their case rests on definitions of poetry and prose that can't deal with the very texts that challenge their view (for instance, some of Beckett's later work). And they may be saddened to learn that Coleridge and Wordsworth spoke about the absence of an "essential difference" between the languages of prose of verse. Valery wrote "if I were seized by a desire to throw away rhyme and everything else...and to abandon myself completely to the desires of my ear, I'd find no truth essential to poetry standing in his path." Browning, Poe, Goldsmith and Coleridge all did prose drafts of their poetry sometimes, and weren't averse to de-versing a troublesome section of a poem-in-progress, working on it and then re-versing it back into poetry.

Cultures vary in their attitude towards the prose/poetry divide. Some want overt structure in their poetry, and see its loss as symptomatic of a loss of morals or control in society as a whole. Some insist on classifying works as (strictly) poetry or prose, thus driving works away from the grey area. Others create new genres (prose poetry, experimental fiction) to contain the troublesome material.

Given an isolated, unclassified text, I suspect that the following stylistic factors are used by readers to determine whether they consider a text to be prose or prose. Poetry is seen to have

• More surface effects (rhyme, meter, word-play, typography, and most of all, line-breaks)
• More specifics: "3 starlings fluttered by" rather than "Some birds flew by"
• More metaphor, metonymy
• Wider vocabulary: "vermilion" rather than "red"
• More obscurity, discontinuity, brevity, ambiguity
• A less hierarchical structure (webs rather than trees), fewer forms in which syntax provides structure - less fact, argument, narration [Fredman, 1983, p.128]

Prose which has some of these features is considered 'poetic'; prose with more of these features is considered 'purple', 'experimental' or (currently most damning of all) 'really a prose-poem'.

The Line Today

We are free of the convention that all poetry must be in a recognised form. We don't even begin all our lines with capitals any more. Yet most of us still use line-breaks. Indeed, the line-break for some (e.g. Hartman [Hartman, 1980], and probably many readers of literature) is the one remaining distinguishing feature of poetry on the page.

Because we've dispensed with so many other devices, the line-break's become if anything overloaded with functions. The line for Hartman [Frank, 1988, p. ix] is the primary means by which the poet is able to create and control attention. For Frances Mayes [Frank, 1988, p. 165] it's the unit of attention (the sentence being the unit of meaning). For Olsen it's a unit of breath. Line-breaks can be used in place of punctuation characters. They can disrupt, defamiliarise, build up tension, emphasise. They can show where someone reading out the poem should pause, helping to impose the writer's intended rhythms onto the reader so bringing the various possible rhythmic inflections into line. More extremely, the page can be used like a canvas, the lines stuck like pieces of a collage, or the page can be air, giving the lines room to move like the parts of a mobile. Line-breaks also help switch the reader into poetry mode if opening a poetry magazine or book isn't enough. Just as there's Art which is only viable in the laboratory setting of a gallery, so there will be poems that demand a certain frame of mind before they're considered worthy of more than a glance, and white borders supply that frame.

One can find poems demonstrating the effectiveness of all these devices. Far more frequent however are poems with carefully chosen words intersperced with line-breaks which seem arbitrarily scattered. Of course, with sufficient ingenuity one can usually concoct a reason for some of the line-breaks, but aren't there better things for readers to concentrate upon? I wonder how conscious present day poets are of their use of the line-break? Consider the following stanza that begins Silos, by Rita Dove

   Like martial swans in spring paraded against the city sky's
   shabby blue, they were always too white and
   suddenly there.

I find the line-breaks distracting. The first may be there because of the approaching right margin, but the other looks more like a conscious decision. If the intention is to emphasise the word "suddenly" then how about underlining it? That would be heavy-handed, but no more so than the line-
break. Maybe it's there to surprise us. But the element of surprise wears off when, as in this poem, the device is used so often. This element of randomness in the positioning belongs to a different, more avant-garde kind of writing. If line-breaks are an effective device, perhaps they should be used more sparingly, like paragraphs. Using them at the end of each clause (as many poets do) is a waste: the interplay of 'the line' and 'the clause' - moving them in and out of phase - can be effective. Using line-breaks so that each stanza has the same number of lines and all the lines have about the same length seems, on reflection, a sentimental relic of our traditional forms. The shape poems of Lewis Carroll and George Herbert are far more imaginatively constructed.

For many modern poets, it seems that the line break is as important as the paragraph break in prose - if a reason for using one doesn't naturally arise soon enough, one's just put in anyway. No-one's going to bother too much about where they are. But in the UK at least, we daren't leave them out completely.

Letting go of the Line

In the States many twentieth century poets have tried doing without line-breaks. W.C. Williams' early attempts (Kora in Hell: Improvisations, 1920) opened the way for others. Acceptance was grudging though - in 1959 Simon [Simon, 1959, p. 665] was able to say that "the prose poem as such is with us still, but its accomplishments having been absorbed by other genres, it has become the occasional 'aside' of writers whose essential utterance takes other forms". Since then major poets as different as Creeley (Presences, 1976) and Ashbery have used the form, and for a variety of reasons

• "they had a desire to recapture for poetry modes of thought and expression seemingly denied it" - Fredman [Fredman, 1983, p.8].
• "Something that needs expression is not being fully released by regular poetry. It may simply be a time of rethinking poetry, the kind of rethinking that cannot be done inside of poetry for a while." - Russell Edson [11]
• "...suddenly the idea of [prose poems] occurred to me as something new in which the arbitrary divisions of poetry into lines would be abolished... the poetic form would be dissolved, in solution, and therefore create ... more of a surrounding thing like the way one's consciousness is surrounded by one's thoughts..." - Ashbery [12, p.126]

Fredman [Fredman, 1983] feels that US poets write more prose than UK ones. Perhaps they can more appreciate the potential of prose tropes too, and can more easily combine these with poetic tropes. Fewer European poets have escaped from the French prose-poem genre. Even Ashbury thought that "There's something very self-consciously poetic about French prose poetry" [12, p.126] and had to start afresh. Zbigniew Herbert, Charles Tomlinson, John Burnside and Geoffrey Hill are European mainstream poets who sometimes format their poetry as prose. They can afford to - if the rest of us followed their example, it would be received more as an affectation than an attempt to remove affectation (rather as the use of "i" rather than "I" would be, however well-reasoned one's argument from first principles).

The majority of poets and editors do not seem ready to accept poetry formatted as prose - and with some justification. Donald Davie, in a different context, put his finger on the problem when he said that "in translating rhymed verse the rhyme is the first thing to go and metre the second; whereas the amateur...cannot be sure of having poetry at all unless he has the external features of it." The prose-formatted texts would have to survive without some of the licence that poetry readers usually grant. In the UK at least, magazines can't afford to lose any more readers by taking chances.

I've seen line-breaks used as punctuation (but what's wrong with standard punctuation?), to control emphasis (why not italics?) and to denote a pause (let's use Hopkins' stress marks too!). I've also seen line-breaks used thoughtlessly. Poets often follow an "if in doubt, leave it out" policy for words, but not for line-breaks. I think that some types of poems would be no worse if reformatted as prose. Better, in fact, because there'd be fewer distractions. Although I think there's a strong case for more poems to be formatted as prose, I don't think changes will happen soon. It's the last line of defence before poetry looks like prose, one that many dare not abandon.

References

• Benedikt (ed), "The Prose Poem: An International Anthology", Dell, 1976.
• Russel Eldon, "The Prose Poem in America", Parnassus, 5, no 1:321-5
• Frank and Sayre, "The Line in Postmodern Poetry", University of Illinois Press, 1988.
• Stephen Fredman, "Poet's Prose: The Crisis in American Verse", Cambridge University Press, 1983.
• Charles Hartman, "Free Verse: An Essay on Prosody", Princeton University Press, 1980
• P. Hobsbaum, "Metre, Rhyme and Verse Form", Routledge, 1996.
• Denise Levertov, "On the Function of the Line", in "Light up the Cave", New Directions, 1979.
• Denise Levertov, "Some Notes on Organic Form" in The Poet in the World, New Directions, 1973.
• Josephine Miles, "Eras and Modes in English Poetry", University of California Press, 1964.
• Clive Scott, "The Prose Poem and Free Verse", in "Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930", eds M. Bradbury and J, McFarlane, Pelican, 1976.
• John Simon, "The Prose Poem: A Study of a Genre in Nineteenth-Century European Literature", Diss., Harvard University, 1959.
• T. Steele, "Missing Measures", University of Arkansis Press, 1990.
• D. Wesling, "The New Poetries", American University Press, 1985.
• "The Craft of Poetry: Interviews from 'The New York Quarterly'", Doubleday, 1974
• "A Symposium on the Theory and Practice of the Line in Contemporary Poetry", (many), Epoch 29 (Winter 1980).
• Center Volume 7, (2008) has a "Symposium on the Line:Theory and Practice in Contemporary Poetry"
• Extravagances, Hesitancies, & Urgencies: On the Line in Poetry (Mark Irwin)
• "The Line" by Katy Evans-Bush in "Stress Fractures" by Tom Chivers (ed) (Penned in the Margins, 2010)
• "The Art of the Poetic Line", James Longenbach, Graywolf

A version of this article appeared in Acumen 29, Sep 1997