Jeffrey Jullich asks if line breaks still have meaning

 

Hi! Long time no see.

 

I made a comment in Kasey Mohammad's blog Comment Box last week (9/27/03, cc-ed to the Poetics List), about the "line-breaks" in a Linda Pastan poem that he was reading and how the same line-breaks (identical scansion for similar sequences of [3-syllable] lines) occur throughout William Carlos Williams' poetry and others Modernists'.

 

Partially because the follow-up involved my being "back-channeled" by someone who aggressively felt that my reading of "meter"/scansion in Pastan's and 20th/21st century poetry was a sheer, quixotic illusion on my part, I am left with an uncomfortable sense about what the hell lines/verses are, nowadays. And what we're doing with them, why we're still using them.

 

I'm curious to ask others' experience with this question, both in your own poetic practice and your reading of others' ("free verse") poetry. I'm hoping you might have some feedback.

 

Do you write lines/make "line-breaks" with some conscious/semi-conscious sense of why you are making those choices (that can be explained)? Do you feel that there's a "meter" involved, even though it isn't conventional New Formalist meter? Do you feel that there is some rationale to what you're doing, but that it's carried out on an "intuitive" level? Do you have a free sense that there is no reason behind your lineations and feel that that's a liberated, "modern" position?

 

Is the perseveration of poetry into an appearance of "verse"/lines simply some sort of nominal, vestigial, semiotic cue to a bygone era that's meant to re-classify (re-dialecticize) the writing into Poetry (hence, privileging it to all sorts of liberties you do not make in your prose)? What would it say about the continuing practice of lineation if it's so vastly widespread but something no one has any conscious insight into?

 

Etc.

 

I realize that the whole issue of the "line" may seem hopelessly passé and outmoded to many — but since I'm finding my own resources that I bring to the question to be more than inconclusive, I thought I'd ask.

 

Recommended readings you find decisive in regards to this would be appreciated, too. (I recall reading a Marjorie Perloff chapter on the subject where, as I remember it, her conclusion is that no identifiable "justification" can be found for the "free verse" line. And I react to the Projectivist/Olson "breath"/"instanter upon another" explanation as itself ultimately being quixotic and illusionistic.)

 

Thanks.

 

Jeffrey

 

The great linebreak debates of the 1960s were one of those you-had-to-be-there kinds of things. An enormous amount of energy & passion was expended on just this question during that decade, so much so that the line’s absence is a major subtext in a work from the ‘70s like Ketjak.

 

Case in point: Denise Levertov once invited David Bromige, Lynn Strongin & your humble correspondent to read to one of her writing classes at UC Berkeley. During the session, a student asked if a linebreak had more of a pause than a comma or period. Levertov responded with a very prescriptive “it’s one-half the pause of a comma” answer to which David & I both piped up almost simultaneously that Levertov had it exactly backwards. A relatively heated (& none too pleasant) little discussion was then held by all. The reality (in retrospect) was that all three of us were being completely stubborn.

 

Even more importantly, all three of us held an idea that there was such a thing as a correct linebreak, that it was something you could indeed get wrong. The projectivist interpretation of Williams had been to align the line with a conception of speech, as if the same text might not be spoken with different “breath units” for emphasis, or even just because one happened to do it that way that day. Levertov’s position was actually closer to what somebody might have come up with paying more direct attention to the way Williams or Zukofsky (and especially him) read their works aloud. Bromige & I were coming at the same question the way somebody who’d primarily listened to Creeley, Olson or Duncan – i.e. the next generation – read their works. Indeed, as I’ve noted in other contexts, Duncan did go through a period (virtually that same year, 1970) in which he half-whispered to himself a count of three between every single line of his poems – just imagine the impact of that on a reading! That was no “half comma”!!

 

The mistake that David, Denise & I were all making wasn’t calibrating line breaks with “traditional” or “prose” punctuation elements, ½ comma vs. 2 commas, but rather the idea that, in the abstract, there could be such a thing as a correct answer at all. It is not that linebreaks are not meaningful, but rather that their meaning is not fixed. Like the use of rhyme, sound, metaphor, persona – any element you choose to pick – it depends entirely upon the context, the individual poem. Now, there may be obvious advantages for an individual poet to settle on a particular strategy so as to set expectations appropriately for her or his readers, but it’s not a requirement.

 

Just as one can find Jack Spicer poems that are clearly intended to be read with end stops – the well-known “Ferlinghetti” from Heads of the Town, for example – there are many poems there & in his other books that are not. Creeley’s use of end stops is different in For Love, Pieces and Life & Death. Similarly, one reason that so many new formalists don’t simply blush to death with embarrassment over their hokey tone-deaf metrics is that most literally don’t intend for the linebreak to be heard at all. If you hear the line break in their work, it deflates instantly into bathos.

 

To ask what the meaning of a line break is, let alone the “correct” meaning, is akin to asking what an edge is in sculpture. Well, it depends. Part of what is so interesting about a well-written poem is how quickly & deftly it communicates to the reader what sort of line it is using, which invariably depends significantly (tho not entirely) on the use of the break.

 

There are some general dynamics that do seem to apply to the line & which one can identify in any poem (regardless of school or aesthetics) – the word that receives the greatest emphasis tends to be the last (although this can be shifted via prosody), the word that receives the second greatest tends to be the first. If a caesura is in play – less & less these days, at least on the post-avant side of the street – the last word prior to the caesura may actually receive greater emphasis than the line’s first word. And so forth. But these aren’t rules so much as forces that different poets will exploit differently to reach desired effects during the course of writing. And those desired effects could be anything.

 

So, yes, Marjorie would be right in assert that no justification exists for “the free verse line” – which is not one thing but a couple of hundred thousand – but the larger issue is that “justification” is not the point. Again, to pose sculpture as an analog here, what is the justification for an edge? In a Sol Lewitt or, just for fun, Jeff Koons? Sculptors use edge as part of an ensemble of things to think about as they proceed about their work. But edge is to sculpture quite a bit like the line. Sculpture has – regardless of the medium or aesthetics – mass & dimension & it comes to a stop. And wherever it comes to a stop, one finds an edge. But to say that it defines sculpture the way some criticism has claimed that role for the line in poetry is, I think, missing the actual dynamics of how work gets done & what the work actually is.

 

Now I do cringe when I see poets who haven’t thought through the line – including (but not limited to) the line break – it’s far too common, though how shocking is it really that not all poetry is the best? But so what? I can find dramatically different kinds of lines in the writing of Eleni Sikelianos & Lee Ann Brown, in Lyn Hejinian & Bob Perelman & Rae Armantrout & Daisy Fried, in Robert Hass & Robert Grenier – in all their works the line is alive & active, including the breaks. And that seems to be what matters.