by Tom Adam

Poetry has a strange dual-identity. Historically, and certainly currently, much of poetry existed to be spoken or performed. It had a rhythm and timing in the delivery, the speech or chanting of the poet being the form of the poem.

Rendered on the page, poems still have a rhythm (even if it is not patterned) and a sense of timing. One way to convey these is by using punctuation (always a good thing). The way the words are arranged on the page is another. While there have been many ways of using the page to convey timing (hello mr. cummings) I want to talk specifically about line length and how that affects the way poems are read.

I can only speak from my experience and I don’t often reflect on how long lines should be while I am writing. Most of the time I’ll have a good sense of when enjambment should be used or I’ll just go with the feeling of when pacing needs to be changed. I think most of us get a feel for our styles and internalize it as we grow as writers so that most of these thoughts don’t need to be conscious. In a Zen way, we had to learn it so we could forget it.

Short lines to me have a strange feeling of “hurry up and wait.” I read the line so quickly then there’s this long pause going to the next line. It has a bit of a choppy feel. Longer lines seem to be in one of two modes. They either barrel along, building momentum through subordinate clauses and introductory phrases and conjunctions so you want to speed up the reading just to finish a breath, or they get very slow. Ponderously dragging you toward the margin. Which is a function of the language and style of the poem.

In what may well be the most used poem in any classroom, imagine how different it would be if the poem read:

so much depends upon a red wheelbarrow
glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.

The choppy nature of the short lines (“a red wheel / barrow”) emphasizes the images of the poem, rendering each element almost discrete, worthy of contemplation on its own. Tossed all together … eh. On the other hand, Whitman’s page-spanning lines give a very different feel:

The runaway slave came to my house and stopped outside,
I heard his motions crackling the twigs of the woodpile,
Through the swung half-door of the kitchen I saw him limpsey and weak,

Reading those (from Leaves of Grass), yes, there is a pause between lines, but it has a much more natural feel to it. It doesn’t get broken, because we expect to read across a page before we go to the next line. Williams forces us to stop much sooner than we would expect. It’s as if the white space after the line has a presence in “The Red Wheelbarrow” that it doesn’t have in Leaves of Grass. Taking the second and reading it as prose loses very little.

The prompt for this week is to take a look at your own poetry, say, your last five poems, and see how you structure your lines. Are they long or short? Do you use consistent line lengths, or do they vary wildly? Look for the patterns in your writing, and write a poem that breaks them. If you favor short lines, write all the way to the margin. If you use consistent line lengths, go crazy with them. Pick an arbitrary form and use it as a guide. Let the form be the most important part. If, as I often do, you need a kicker to get the idea rolling, use the writing prompt over to the right, the one that’s there right now and use it in the first line and see where the verse takes you.

For those of you who favor collaboration, I suggest exchanging your five most recent poems with someone else, and have them decipher your patterns and give you a form to work through.

(I expect that most people here write free verse, and I am in no way suggesting this week is a good week to jump into formal poetry. That way lies madness.)

Note: When we all Get Our Poem On next week, be sure to let us know, perhaps in the comments or in your posts, how you shook things up.