Blue Lake’s Piano Department Coordinator, Dr. Wan-Chin Chang, provides some tips on keeping your piano keys clean.
In this week’s Writing Wednesday, Dr. Caitlin Cowan explains line breaks and the difference between poems and “Chopped-up prose.”
In their book, The Poet’s Companion, Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux write, “Most people who are beginning to write poetry are confused about line breaks. They wonder what the difference is between a poem and ‘chopped-up prose.’” Today, I’m going to show you a writing exercise that will help you to begin to improve your understanding of the poetic line: the poem’s most defining structural feature.
A line of poetry is one or more words that are strung together before being “broken” by beginning a new line, whether or not a grammatical sentence has been created. For example, the famous poem “The Red Wheelbarrow” by William Carlos Williams looks like this on the page:
so much depends
upona red wheel
barrowglazed with rain
waterbeside the white
chickens
The first three words of the poem are on one line together: “so much depends.” Then, the writer “breaks” and begins a new line of just one word: “upon.” You’ll notice that neither the phrase “so much depends” nor the word “upon” are grammatical sentences. Instead, they are poetic lines.
But how long should the lines be, and where should I decide to break them? Poets have defined the line as a unit of breath, a unit of thought, and more. Breaking lines in different ways can change and enhance the meaning of a poem. You might also think of poetry as a kind of visual painting. How does the look of the poem change it’s meaning? What do shorter lines look like versus longer ones? Take time to think about how fast your eye or your speaking voice moves through the poem when you break the lines one way another.
The most important word on the line is the word on the end of the line because the eye is drawn there: it sticks out and is easy to see! For this reason, you might want to avoid breaking your lines on too many prepositions (like “of”) pronouns (like “I”) or conjunctions (like “and), though there are so many great exceptions to this “rule” (just look at the second line of the Williams poem above!)
I’ve removed the line breaks from the poem below. On a sheet of paper, rewrite the poem at least once with shorter lines that are intentionally broken. Once you’ve done this, use a new sheet of paper and break the lines again in a different way. You can also use a forward slash (“/”) to indicate where you would like to break a line (this is how poetry is often quoted in other kinds of writing), like this: “so much depends / upon //…” You’ll notice that I also used a double forward slash here to indicate a stanza break, which is a line of white space between lines or “paragraphs” of poetry. Here’s your source text with all the line breaks removed:
EVENING PRAYER
by Ari FeldThe survivor scraped spattered wax into a tin resting in the embers. He cleaned a shoelace in three drops of kerosene and poured the wax into a champagne flute fitted with the shoelace. The sacrament trembled and he explained. God is a pair of pliers, an ear of dry corn, the squirrel you are eating, the wire holding our tent against a gale, this weak light, a whetstone and your spit. These are no idols. God is a potato and a can of boiling water and it has never been otherwise. There is no god you cannot eat or swing against an enemy.
How does each line break you make change the poem? Keep playing with this poem or turn your eye on another piece of writing, maybe even a poem you’ve written in the past! What are you learning about the line as you break it? If you’re interested in further reading about this topic, check out James Longenbach’s book, The Art of the Poetic Line (2007); Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s essay, “Two Lines”; Dana Gioia’s essay, “Thirteen Ways of Thinking About the Poetic Line”; Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “We Real Cool”; and Eileen Myles’ poem, “An American Poem.”
Feel free to post your experiments and results in the comments or on social media with the hashtags #WritingWednesdays, #BlueLakeFineArtsCamp, and #VirtualArts
Thanks for reading this VirtualArts post brought to you by Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp!