Do you break, jam or snip?

There are no simplistic rules for poets: if there were, any duffer could write poetry. Paul Celan

When I first started writing poetry – much of which was duff – I would structure my poetry in any way that felt right. It was quite arbitrary really. Once I reached seventeen I stopped one day and took a second look at the poem I had just written and asked myself, perhaps not in so many words, "Is there an underlying structure here?" This is what I came up with.

STRAY

You can't always tell a
dog by the person
pulling its lead;
some dogs are
stray:- they don't wear collars,
and answer no one's

call save that of the Wind.
They're searching for space
in archaic
tenements,
chasing after the scent
of a bitch called Dream.

Two stanzas of six lines each having the following syllabic structure: 6-5-4-3-6-5. It bothered me a little that the line 'call save that of the Wind.' landed at the start of the second stanza and I did toy with the idea of having one single block of text but I also wanted to highlight the underlying structure of the piece.


When the poem first appeared in print, in a small collection, the editor reformatted the piece as follows:

STRAY

You can't always tell
a dog
by the person pulling its lead

Some dogs are
stray
they don't wear collars

Answer no one's call
save that of the Wind.

They're searching for space
in archaic tenements

Chasing after the scent
of a bitch called Dream.

Looking back I'm embarrassed by the fact I didn't object and point out what I was trying to do with the piece but I was young and someone wanted to publish me. I'm not sure that either version does justice to the piece to be honest. If she'd turned it into couplets I might be able to live with it. But why did she drop the 'and' in front of 'answer no one's call'? Looks odd.

I can understand a poet wanting to move away from prosaic formatting but should free verse be free of everything? Is there a place for form in free verse?

In "traditional" poetry (I use the term loosely) we expect lines to be units of thought, if not complete sentences then enough of a sentence so as to make some sense on its own:

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date.
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 18)

This isn't always the case. In "traditional" poetry, you can categorise line breaks as end stopped lines (like those in the example above), enjambments and caesuras.

End-stopped lines put a clear rhythmic break at the end of each line, often reinforced by a comma or full stop.

Enjambments conversely run into each other and make meaning in conjunction with each other rather than independent units like end stopped lines:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
(T S Eliot, The Waste Land)

Caesura is a natural pause or break of which there are three kinds: an initial caesura occurs when a caesura cuts the verse into two unequal parts, the first part being noticeable shorter than the second. A medial caesura occurs when a caesura cuts the line into two almost equal parts and a terminal caesura occurs near the end of the verse. There are also apparently two varieties: masculine (which follows a stressed syllable) and feminine (just fill in the blanks).

There is a feminine medial caesura right after the question mark in the first line of this sonnet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

In 'Stray' we have an example of an initial caesura of the masculine persuasion:

stray:- they don't wear collars,

I'm not really much of a traditionalist though. Line breaks are there, to my mind, to delineate an underlying structure although I accept, in some spheres, a single line can be treated as a unit of thought (although it doesn't have to be a complete sentence) or a pair of lines (as in the closed couplet) or, as in the case of the poet Charles Olson, a unit of breath.

Pound promoted writing with professional competence, Olson championed writing with maximum energy. The energy of the poem is related to and springs from physical energies: specifically:

the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE
the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE.

Olson's philosophy was that instead of counting syllables – "the king and pin of versification" as Olson calls them – and metrical feet (the practice that turns most people away from poetry at an early age) Projective Verse offered the idea of "the breath-line," wherein each line in a poem represents a unit of breath to be spoken or sung. His 1950 essay is an interesting read.

I don't see this as really that different to the poetry of the 1800s. Back then the poem wasn't simply a piece of language that conveyed data; it was meant to be heard the way a song was meant to be sung and was structured accordingly. A stanza was a group of lines set off from the other lines in a poem, the poetic equivalent of a paragraph. In traditional poems, the stanza usually contains a unit of thought, much like a paragraph. The only real difference is that the lines adhere to a predetermined metrical and rhyming standard, e.g. the sonnet.

In a lengthy essay on the poet Creeley, Heather McHugh cites the following poem with its unusual line breaks:

THE WINDOW

Position is where you put it, where it is, did you, for example, that
large tank there, silvered, with the white church alongside, lift
all that, to what purpose? How heavy the slow
world is with everything put in place. Some
man walks by, a car beside him on the dropped
road, a leaf of yellow colour is going to
fall. It all drops into place. My
face is heavy with the sight. I can feel my eye breaking.

I've heard these called ambiguous line breaks. 'Ambiguous' just means 'can be read more than one way,' so a poet can manipulate the slight pause created by the line break to make readers wait to see which way the poem is going to take them. This is what McHugh has to say about it:

Looked at closely, this poem is an etude in that precise and psycho-prosodical art which keeps a line-break subtle. I say psycho-prosodical because a line can seem calculated to lead a reader toward presumptions which, in the wake of the line break, he will have to relinquish. A poem changes a reader's mind. And one of the ways it does so is through this play of sentence (the unit of thought in English syntax) against line the unit of poetic disposition). Sometimes predisposed, sometimes postdisposed, the trail of anticipations and reconsiderations is, in fact, the meaning of passage: for passage is something we have to navigate, through all its straits and turns. – Heather McHugh, Love and frangibility: An appreciation of Robert Creeley

It's a bit wordy but the bottom line is that the line breaks in this poem have intent. Creeley has something in mind.

If one thinks of the literal root of the word verse, ‘a line, furrow, turning — vertere, to turn. . .’, he will come to a sense of ‘free verse’ as that instance of writing in poetry which ‘turns’ upon an occasion intimate with, in fact, the issue of, its own nature rather than to an abstract decision of ‘form’ taken from a prior instance. — Robert Creeley, A Sense of Measure, p. 48

There are arbitrary rules (e.g. an anglicised haiku with three lines having a syllabic structure of 5-7-5) and there is nature. The question we have to ask is that, since the traditional function of the line break is largely outdated, why hang onto it? Is it simply so your poem looks like poem?

Let's consider this prose poem by James Wight:

ON HAVING MY POCKET PICKED IN ROME

These hands are desperate for me to stay alive. They do not want to lose me to the crowd. They know the slightest nudge on the wrong bone will cause me to look around and cry aloud. Therefore the hands grow cool and touch me lightly, lightly and accurately as a gypsy moth laying her larvae down in that foregone place where the tree is naked. It is only when the hands are gone, I will step out of this crowd and walk down the street, dimly aware of the dark infant strangers I carry in my own body. They spin their nests and live on me in their sleep.

In the conclusion to his analysis of this poem, Robert Peake has this to say:

[I]t is because the poem employs the same fundamental unit of thought as prose, and looks like an innocuous paragraph, that a further tension exists between the strangeness of the subject and the shape of the writing. In this way, we have a prose poem that realizes numerous potentials in the form while remaining unmistakably a poem, grounded in metaphor, sprinkled with internal rhyme and repetition, and building in a non-narrative fashion toward a conclusion and after-effect that transcend words. – Robert Peake, James Wright, "On Having My Pocket Picked In Rome"

So, does my old poem work if formatted this way?

STRAY

You can't always tell a dog by the person pulling its lead. Some dogs are stray; they don't wear collars and answer no one's call save that of the Wind. They're searching for space in archaic tenements, chasing after the scent of a bitch called Dream.

or how about going to the other extreme:

STRAY

You
can't
always
tell
a
dog
by
the
person
pulling
its lead.

Some
dogs
are
stray;
they
don't
wear
collars
and
answer
no
one's
call
save
that
of
the
Wind.

They're
searching
for
space
in
archaic
tenements,
chasing
after
the
scent
of
a
bitch
called
Dream.

To borrow an expression from Ron Silliman, I could argue that the point of the short lines is to cause “the continuing refocus of attention” but to what end is our attention being refocused? It sounds pretentious.

Tim Love quotes Donald Davie in his article The End of the Line in Modern Poetry: "the amateur ... cannot be sure of having poetry at all unless he has the external features of it." I think it's a good point but it immediately raises my hackles. I want to defend my use of line breaks but I'm struggling to.

In this short poem by Lilian Moore she breaks the lines where one would naturally pause:

RED

All day
across the way
on someone’s sill
a geranium glows
red bright
like a
tiny
faraway
traffic light.

Is this the way I should have gone when I parsed my poem?

STRAY

You can't always tell a dog
by the person pulling its lead.

Some dogs are stray;
they don't wear collars

and answer no one's call
save that of the Wind.

They're searching for space
in archaic tenements,

chasing after the scent
of a bitch called Dream.

(This was my wife's favourite by the way). It seems right to break the poem into couplets because each pairing covers a unit of thought despite not being a complete sentence. Or we could try triplets:

STRAY

You can't always tell a dog
by the person pulling its lead.
Some dogs are stray; they don't wear collars

and answer no one's call
save that of the Wind.
They're searching for space

in archaic tenements,
chasing after the scent
of a bitch called Dream.

Nah, I don't like that long line.

I've been writing poetry 'my way' for thirty years. It's not that I'm incapable of change but I found a system that works for me. I try and shy away from expressions like "it felt right" and I'm not one-hundred percent certain why. Ron Silliman cuts to the chase:

It is not that line breaks 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.

So, what's he saying then? George M. Wallace interprets for us:

In other words, if I understand him aright, Ron Silliman agrees that there are any number of things that a line break choice can signify, but it really should signify something. – A Fool in the Forest

In his essay, which is worth reading, he talks about what he calls line snipping and in he lists three instances of, what I suppose I'd call, "bad practice":

Line-snipping that serves no apparent purpose can take several forms.

One is the breaking of what is essentially prose … into lines of more or less random length.

Another is the breaking of lines into a reasonably consistent physical length, so that the poem on the page has the sort of foursquare visual quality that is associated with more syllabically formal poetry.

A third questionable use of the break is to cut the line after a very small number of words or syllables, no more than, say, four being allowed to a line.

This blog originated from an expression that Rachel Fox used in a comment recently. She said that she "want[ed] to have different rules for poetry" to distance it from prose. The big question is, how many young poets writing today impose any rules on themselves other than the old standby of "it feels right"?

It's an interesting question and I'm sure some people will have a lot to say about it. Not that I'm trying to be contentious or anything.