English 4 ABC Creative Writing Instructor Terry Ehret Spring 2020 LESSON # 7: POETRY, LINE BREAKS, AND FREE VERSE LINEATION Poetry and prose are distinguished by this one difference: poems are composed in lines; prose is not. Of course, some poems are musical with rhyme and rhythm patterns. Some poems are packed with images, similes, metaphors, personification, all the “poetic devices” you learned in English literature class. But may poems seem on the surface indistinguishable from prose. And most writers of fiction and nonfiction find the art of line breaks completely mysterious. Attached you will find an introduction to most of the basic terms people use to talk about poetry. I have found that many very accomplished poets are unfamiliar with this list of terms and have little interest in analyzing poems in this way. This is rather like musicians who aren’t trained in music theory, but who can compose and perform their own music brilliantly by ear. So I recommend that you familiarize yourself with these terms or not, as suits your own comfort level. LINEATION AND PROSODY (THE ART OF SETTING WORDS TO MUSIC) The poet Ezra Pound, who was fond of creating definitions and manifestos, came up with these three reasons for poetic line breaks: 1) Idea: A poet may hold a complete thought or a complete unit of syntax in a single line. 2) Image: A poet may hold a complete image in a single line. 3) Music: A poet may choose to end a line for sound effects. A poet may also choose to break a line to fragment an idea, image, or sound. The poet Robert Hass describes poetry as “breath sculpture.” He means by this that the poet’s breath shapes the line length. Each poet’s breath is individual, like a fingerprint. And each poem’s emotions or mood may affect the breath the poet uses to shape the lines. But if the poet gets the “breath” right, then the reader can engage in an intimacy of breath by reading (and especially by memorizing) the poem. Hass felt this intimacy was an intimate as sex. Maybe more so. Some line lengths are prescribed by form. A ballad, for example, in composed of 4-line stanzas (called quatrains), with alternating rhythm (4 beats, 3 beats, 4 beats, 3 beats), and rhyme (abab). If this is too abstract, just think of “Amazing Grace,” which is written in the ballad form (also called the common meter). Most country-western songs and most hymns match this form. So also do many of Emily Dickinson’s poems. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound a 4 beats That saved a wretch like me. b 3 beats Once I was lost, but now I’m found a 4 beats Was blind, but now I see. b 3 beats You have, perhaps, heard of “iambic pentameter.” This refers to a common metrical pattern in English poetry: 10 syllables per line with every other syllable carrying a beat (ta-túm, ta-túm-- like the human heartbeat). Shakespeare wrote his poems and plays using this metrical pattern. When iambic pentameter is unrhymed, it is called “blank verse.” Another kind of form that determines line length is the syllabic form, like haiku, which has a prescribed number of syllables per line: 5/7/5. Some syllabic poems have the same number of syllables for each line; others follow a syllabic pattern. Syllabic poems may look just like free verse English 4 ABC Creative Writing Instructor Terry Ehret Spring 2020 and require a rather close study to discover the syllabic pattern. I read William Carlos William’s poem “The Red Wheel Barrow” a gozillion times before I realized its elegant simplicity of images rested on a syllabic pattern: The Red Wheel Barrow so much depends (4) upon (2) a red wheel (3) barrow (2) glazed with rain (3) water (2) beside the white (4) chickens (2) There are many traditional forms which poets use to set their thoughts and images to music. But when the poem is written in free verse, it can seem the line breaks are arbitrary. I believe most free- verse poets break their lines by instinct, or ear, or impulse, even just the size and shape of the page, without much conscious thought. That is as it should be. Line breaks should be very kinetic and organic. Somewhere in the process of revision, however, the poet will make those line breaks conscious. And if there is a way to make the poem more meaningful, or emotional, less predictable or dull by breaking the lines differently, then the poet may experiment with that. Look at the poem “Cello,” by Dorianne Laux. Notice how she uses the line breaks sometimes as a rest, sometimes to propel the poem forward, sometimes to create multiple meanings, and sometimes to clarify the image or thought. She moves the resting point around, so that the poem has movement and energy. Technically, we call this shifting the caesura (midline pause) and balancing end-stopped lines with enjambed lines. It is a good demonstration of what Robert Frost referred to as “playing tennis with the net down.” Cello by Dorianne Laux When a dead tree falls in a forest it often falls into the arms of a living tree. the dead, thus embraced, rasp in wind, slowly carving a niche in the living branch, sheering away the rough outer flesh, revealing the pinkish, yellowish, feverish inner bark. For years the dead tree rubs its fallen body against the living—building its dead music, making its raw mark—wearing the tough bough down, moaning in wind, the deep rosined bow sound of the living shouldering the dead. English 4 ABC Creative Writing Instructor Terry Ehret Spring 2020 Because the poem’s rhythms, line breaks, and internal music are so well-crafted, you don’t notice how often she’s used “living”(4 times) and “dead” (5 times). And only after many readings might the reader become aware of how the images and sounds of the words in the poem lead inevitably to the controlling metaphor of the cello, which is the poem’s title, but which makes its appearance indirectly only in the second to last line. IN-CLASS WRITING EXERCISE: EXPERIMENTING WITH LINEATION Directions: Read over the poems reprinted here without their line breaks. Pick one of these. Spend 5-10 minutes reading the poem over and over until you find the rhythm, the (s)pacing, the breathing that you feel is most satisfying and meaningful. Mark the line breaks with a forward slash mark (/), stanza breaks with a double forward slash (//). Then reconstruct the poem in your journal with your new lineation. There is no right or wrong way to do this. The writing exercise is just to see what kind of line breaks you are naturally inclined to make. The original poems with the poet’s line breaks and spacing are on p. 7 of this handout—but don’t peek! Pachuta, Mississippi/A Memoir by Al Young I too once lived in the country Incandescent fruits in the moonlight whispered to me from trees of 1950 swishing in the green nights wavelengths away from tongue-red meat of melon wounded squash yellow as old afternoons chicken in love with calico hiss and click of flit gun juice music you suck up lean stalks of field cane Cool as sundown I lived there too. Bluefish by Laurie Sheck Opened by the knife it is beautiful archeology, abstract as desires the body has abandoned. Its eyes a milky blue. Its scales prisms that break light. Its whole body arched toward death the way a woman having placed a stone in each pocket enters the still water. We wrap it is plastic, take it to the car. But once beneath sunlight and a knife, its body, opened, was strangely diminished. Intricate cage. Psalm by George Oppen Veritas sequitur . In the small beauty of the forest the wild deer bedding down—that they are there! Their eyes effortless, the soft lips nuzzle and the alien small teeth tear at the grass the roots of it dangle from their mouths scattering earth in the strange woods. They who are there. Their paths nibbled thru the fields, the leaves that shade them hang in the distances of sun the small nouns crying faith in this in which the wild deer startle, and stare out. The Dance by William Carlos Williams In Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess, the dancers go round, they go round and around, the squeal and the blare and the tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles tipping their bellies (round as the thick-sided glasses whose wash they impound) their hips and their bellies off balance to turn them. Kicking and rolling about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those shanks must be sound to bear up under such rollicking measures, prance as they dance in Breughel’s great picture, The Kermess.” English 4 ABC Creative Writing Instructor Terry Ehret Spring 2020 ASSIGNMENTS FOR WEEK 7 (DUE ON 3/13) Note: If you are taking the course for a letter grade of an A or B, you will need to attend two literary events on campus or in the community and write a brief review of your experience. The first of these is due on March 13. You can find the guidelines for this and a student sample review in the Supplemental Information Packet you received on the first day of class, and also on canvas. 1. Read pages 135-159 in Writing down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg, or a comparable number of pages in your selected text.