In James Longenbach’s “The Art of the Poetic Line,” he mentions three kinds of line endings:
- End stopped lines end with punctuation, as in Dylan Thomas’ Do not go gentle into that good night:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light. - Annotated/Enjambed lines break in the middle of a sentence or thought. The line that follows provides additional information to line preceding it, effectively “annotating” the line above. This can create surprising turns for the reader, or be used to add some humor, as in Bob Hicok’s A well-stocked pantry:
My wife went into the pantry for peaches
but came out with a baby — I hadn’t noticed
the house was pregnant, she said — - Parsed lines also break in the middle of a sentence or thought, but do so at the more expected points, rather than cutting against expectations as annotated lines do. This can help make dense sentences more clear and often seems most natural, like in william carlos williams’ Willow Poem:
It is a willow when summer is over,
a willow by the river
from which no leaf has fallen nor
bitten by the sun
turned orange or crimson.
Line breaks can drastically alter the interpretation and overall experience of a poem. Some reasons to consider as you go to break your line could include:
- Breaking where a breath seems natural
- To support or alter the cadence or pacing
- To add hesitation or a dramatic pause
- To add subtlety to rhyme or alliteration. Embedding rhymes within a line rather than at the end of your lines can draw a poem forward and prevent it from feeling sing song.
- To create an interesting format on the page visually, though Medium tends to prevent much experimentation with this.
Exercise 1: Dive into
this exercise, called “Six S’s,” from Catherine Wagner in Poets
on Teaching: A Sourcebook. It’s just as useful to a solitary writer as
it is in the classroom—all it requires is taking a poem out of its lineated
form and writing it out in prose. For an example, here is William Stafford’s poem
“Traveling through the Dark” with all its line breaks
removed.
Traveling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of
the Wilson River road. It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that
road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead. By glow of the tail-light I
stumbled back of the car and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing; she
had stiffened already, almost cold. I dragged her off; she was large in the
belly. My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—her side was warm;
her fawn lay there waiting, alive, still, never to be born. Beside that
mountain road I hesitated. The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;
under the hood purred the steady engine. I stood in the glare of the warm
exhaust turning red; around our group I could hear the wilderness listen. I
thought hard for us all—my only swerving—, then pushed her over the edge into
the river.
Now your task is to break the poem up into lines in six
different ways—one for each of Wagner’s six S’s: speed, sound, syntax, surprise,
sense, and space. This won’t take as much time as you think, especially if you
print the above text six times and just use slashes (/) where you want the
lines to break. You’ll get very different results depending on how you
interpret those six S’s. For instance, if I choose to break lines in regard to
the text’s “syntax,” I have to decide whether I am breaking lines to encourage
regular syntax or to upset it. There’s a big difference between
Traveling
through the
dark I
found
a deer
dead on
the
edge of the
Wilson River road.
And
Traveling
through the dark
I found
a deer
dead on
the edge
of the Wilson River road.
Or even
Traveling
through the dark I found a deer
dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.
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