By the twentieth century, however, the adherence to rhythm or meter gave way, and the poetic line rushed into the vacuum, becoming the fundamental formal unit distinguishing poetry from prose. (The rather capacious exception is prose poetry—there’s always an exception when it comes to poetry!). Most of us who see lines on a page that don’t reach the right margin, even if it doesn’t have a meter or rhyme, will immediately think that we’re in the terrain of a poem. A line of poetry is not merely a sentence or a sentence fragment. The dominant thinking around the line is that it’s a unit of breath. There’s a loveliness to the metaphor, that each line works on our lungs and mouths the way that a melody requires us to press strings to a fretboard and pluck or strum the strings of a guitar. It can be that physical. If the line is a unit of breath, then each line’s length involves our body’s engagement with it. In English poetry, the iambic pentameter line has often been cast as the norm of poetry, in which the metrical iamb is compared to the heartbeat (rub-DUB), and the pentameter the length of a normal human breath. Even if it is not quite so—knowing how human beings are various—it’s entirely on point to consider how lines are measures of exhalations. Read aloud and consider these lines, from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself,” section 2:  

Houses and rooms are full of perfumes, the shelves are crowded with
perfumes,
I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it,
The distillation would intoxicate me also, but I shall not let it.

The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the distillation, it is
odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath,
Echoes, ripples, buzz’d whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine,
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood
and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and dark-color’d
sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,
The sound of the belch’d words of my voice loos’d to the eddies of the wind,
A few light kisses, a few embraces, a reaching around of arms,
The play of shine and shade on the trees as the supple boughs wag,
The delight alone or in the rush of the streets, or along the fields and hill-
sides,
The feeling of health, the full-noon trill, the song of me rising from bed and
meeting the sun.

Whitman’s lines are generous, packed, comma-laden catalogues of praise. If we read each line as a single breath, the commas as slight pauses, the poem stretches our exhalations, particularly when we reach that third stanza, in which he begins to describe breathing itself, each of the four lines lengthening a bit farther than the previous, until we get to the “belch’d words,” which seems funny and self-mocking. It’s an erotic section, as he inhabits and investigates not only his own body, but—it appears—that of a lover, with the mention of his (ahem!) “love-root” and kisses and embraces. A long line feels powerful, muscular, and oracular, as if a prophet were declaiming from a mountaintop. Allen Grossman, in Summa Lyrica, argues that with the longer line, “the speaker in the poem bleeds outward as in a trance or sleep toward other states of himself” (280), and thus moves into the ecstatic (from the Greek, meaning “out of the body”) mode.

By contrast, consider William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just to Say”:

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold

It’s possible that Williams, a doctor known to write poems on his prescription pad, wrote this note that became the first “refrigerator poem,” but the poem is also playing with our breath. So how do we read the line breaks?

Poetry’s other name, verse, comes from the Latin, vertere, to turn, which came from a
plowman’s turn down one furrow to another. In that turning, whether we’re reading aloud or in our heads, there’s a tiny pause, perhaps down the white space between lines as our eyes zag back, a shard of silence that separates the ends of lines from the beginnings of subsequent lines. In English, for what it’s worth, verse is actually an older word than poetry by a few hundred years. And how powerful a metaphor, again, that we read the words with the same plodding power of a farmer opening the earth, turning over the soil. One of Williams’s disciples, Denise Levertov, proposed that the silence be read as a half-comma, though every poet’s handling of that momentary silence may be slightly different. Perhaps, to go back to the metaphor of ploughing, it’s a momentary rest before turning down and reversing course.

If we actually breathed for every line, something happens in our bodies. What happens to me while reading “This is Just to Say” is a feeling of anxiety, of tension, gathers in me. Sure, this can be read as a sassy poem, a sort of sorry-not-sorry inversion of the story of Eden. But the way the poem makes me breathe makes me wonder if the poem itself does not contain a remorse that the words belie.

This poem also opens the door into discussing enjambment. From the French, meaning to straddle, enjambment is the continuation of a sentence over more than one line. Enjambing can create meanings that run against or in tension with the meaning of the sentence. In this poem, the one enjambment that spooks me is this one:

and which
you were probably
saving

He’s just told us that he’s eaten the plums in the icebox, and then offers “and which / you were probably”. Before we get to “saving”—itself an interesting word if this poem is a sendup of religiosity (Eden, confession, etc.)—we’re thinking of the plums as associated with this person. The plums aren’t just plums. They are somehow of this person. The speaker’s eating of them is not merely stealing. It’s also a violation of this person. So while I love the fact that the poem is full of sass, its lineation nevertheless also carries a certain amount of breathless tension about it.

Grossman believed that the shorter line was not a line full of bodily tension, but, to use Jason Schneiderman’s paraphrase, “at less than ten [syllables] lies monastic meditation, a fall into a kind of silence that leaves one alone with oneself.” If that’s the case, then Williams’s poem offers us both a brief post-it note and momentary aloneness of the poet.

One of the most delightfully surprising enjambments to open a poem is from Marianne Moore’s “An Octopus.” Here’s how it begins:

An Octopus

of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat,
it lies “in grandeur and in mass”
beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes;
dots of cyclamen-red and maroon on its clearly defined
pseudo-podia
made of glass that will bend—a much needed invention—
comprising twenty-eight ice-fields from fifty to five hundred
feet thick,
of unimagined delicacy.

An Octopus // of ice. It’s almost as if we see the octopus freeze into a glacier, at the same time that we see the glacier’s tentacles of ice emanate from its cold center. Her lineation is consistently surprising, of variable lengths, as if she’s following those arms of ice.

Okay, let’s test your skills in enjambing the line. How would you break these lines, and why? Just place little slash marks between the words where you believe a line break should take place.

1.
The whiskey on your breath could make a small boy dizzy. But I hung on like
death; such waltzing was not easy.

(Theodore Roethke, “My Papa’s Waltz”)

2.
Even in Kyoto hearing the cuckoo’s cry I long for Kyoto

(Basho)

3.
We real cool. We left school. We lurk late. We strike straight. We sing sin.
We thin gin. We jazz June. We die soon.

(Gwendolyn Brooks, “The Pool Players”—whole poem!)

4.
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the
white chickens

(William Carlos Williams, “The Red Wheel Barrow”—whole poem!)

5.
Let poems be mistaken for the realignment of the earth

(Craig Santos Perez, untitled poem)

Okay, let’s see how you did.

1.

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy.
But I hung on like death;
Such waltzing was not easy.

From the point of view of lineation, the stanzas of Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” could not be more traditional, with a regular rhythm and line length, all of which end on rhymes (both direct and slant). Three of the four lines are end-stopped, with only the first employing enjambment. This is how much of English poetry has looked for many centuries. It was written in the middle of the 20th century, but metrically it would be at home in the 19th, 18th, or 17th centuries, without anyone batting an eyelid.

2.

Even in Kyoto
Hearing the cuckoo’s cry
I long for Kyoto

Basho’s 17th century haiku, as translated by Robert Hass, makes delicious use of enjambment. While syntactically, the lineation follows the natural breaks in a sentence after the two initial clauses, the fact that the subject and verb of the poem don’t appear until the final line makes the poem enact longing itself. The parallelism of the two Kyotos, sandwiched by the cuckoo’s cry, embodies the speaker’s sense of inhabiting a city that can’t be possessed by the speaker of the poem.

3.

We real cool. We
left school. We

lurk late. We
strike straight. We

sing sin. We
thin gin. We

jazz June. We
die soon.

Gwendolyn Brooks’ oft-quoted marvel, “The Pool Players,” takes our expectations of rhymed couplets and flips that script. It’s the syncopation of her enjambments that embodies the excitement of these young toughs skipping school and feeling the energy of their being a unit, a posse, a gang. Who doesn’t know that elixir of group identity, which emboldens us to take risks, to prove ourselves as worthy of such a group. Brooks’s reading of the poem, captured in audio, veritably swings, and that “we” hangs in the air of the enjambment, so that we, readers of the poem, pay attention to these truants, these hopeless youth, in a way that the society and the community have not. The disappearance of the “we” in that final line, after that spine of “we’s” that extends down the page, is among the most haunting things I’ve read in a poem.

4.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

This poem—which tormented a generation of high school students with the endless wonderings about the secret situation and why so much depends upon it—is virtually impossible to lineate as Williams has. It makes one want to parody it:

so much depends
upon

a poorly
built

poem designed
to torment

varsity-lettered
jocks

But seriously, this poem’s enjambments are among the most delightful and most like the visual art that inspired it. Though Williams’s attendance at the watershed 1913 Armory Show of modernist art appears to have been more myth than fact, it’s clear that he was inspired by how modern art was obsessed with changing how we saw the world, making us more conscious of our perceptions—what philosophers call phenomenology. That’s what Williams’s poem enacts in its enjambments. For example, if we read slowly enough, we see first a red wheel, and then we see a whole red wheelbarrow. It’s as if a camera has panned back from a hyperfocused view, as if we’re looking at the world through binoculars, and then we lower them and see that the wheel is part of something larger. It happens again with:

beside the white
chickens

At first, we see just a field of white. But then, the next line pans our visual field back to see that those were merely the white feathers of chickens. I’ve always wanted to change the line:

glazed with rain
water

because—although I love the assonance of “glaze” and “rain”—water doesn’t feel like much of a surprise. Still, I suppose you could say that the rain drops become something broader and deeper with the enjambment. I always wish it read:

glazed with light
rain

because then, at least, a little alchemical transformation appears, in which the gleam of light turns into water. But why fuss over a classic?

After years of reading this poem, one day, it occurred to me that this poem’s little couplet actually resembled wheelbarrows. I doubt that’s what he intended, but once I’ve said it, it’s hard to unsee it. You want to grasp onto “rain” and push that barrow along.

Williams, of course, inspired by modern art, was also impacted by modern technology. He, and e.e. cummings, both could compose on a typewriter. Suddenly, the page was not merely a site of transcribing the breath of each line, but a canvas to be explored. Here’s an untitled one by cummings:

in Just-
spring      when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman

whistles      far       and wee

and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring

when the world is puddle-wonderful

the queer
old balloonman whistles
far       and       wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing

from hop-scotch and jump-rope and

it's
spring
and

      the

              goat-footed

balloonMan       whistles
far
and
wee

Suddenly, the poem isn’t beholden to the left margin. Spaces within lines appear. Lines themselves don’t quite feel like units of breath, but visual blots of paint.

There’s something to be said for minimalist lineation. One of the poetic children of Williams, Robert Creeley once said, “You can’t derail a train by standing directly in front of it, or, not quite. But, a tiny piece of steel, properly placed….” Minimalist lines can act as a tiny piece of steel to derail the train of reality. When we read the opening to his “The Language,” we feel the speaker of the poem wrestling with each word and its implications:

Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything.

Creeley chews over what saying “I love you” might mean, and how to locate it in the body in a way that’s gentle, not violent.

Before we turn to the fifth poem in our little quiz, I wanted to share the opening section to June Jordan’s “The Bombing of Baghdad” as a more maximalist version of lineation.

The Bombing of Baghdad

I

began and did not terminate for 42 days
and 42 nights relentless minute after minute
more than 110,000 times
we bombed Iraq we bombed Baghdad
we bombed Basra/we bombed military
installations we bombed the National Museum
we bombed schools we bombed air raid
shelters we bombed water we bombed
electricity we bombed hospitals we
bombed streets we bombed highways
we bombed everything that moved/we
bombed everything that did not move we
bombed Baghdad
a city of 5.5 million human beings
we bombed radio towers we bombed
telephone poles we bombed mosques
we bombed runways we bombed tanks
we bombed trucks we bombed cars we bombed bridges
we bombed the darkness we bombed
the sunlight we bombed them and we
bombed them and we cluster bombed the citizens
of Iraq and we sulfur bombed the citizens of Iraq
and we napalm bombed the citizens of Iraq and we
complemented these bombings/ these "sorties" with
Tomahawk cruise missiles which we shot
repeatedly by the thousands upon thousands
into Iraq
(you understand an Iraqi Scud missile
is quote militarily insignificant unquote and we
do not mess around with insignificant)
so we used cruise missiles repeatedly
we fired them into Iraq
And I am not pleased
I am not very pleased
None of this fits into my notion of "things going very
well"

In its torrent of lines, that first section creates in us is a sense of the relentlessness of the bombing campaign of what’s now called the first Gulf War, and what was then called the Persian Gulf War. It’s a catalogue of targets that clearly moves beyond militarily-significant sites. As the Gulf War media coverage made a lot of noise about how the so-called “smart bomb” made wars surgical and more humane, Jordan’s poem claps back against this censored version of what happened, naming all the targets, one after another, that add up to nothing less than a version of total war. Jordan’s poem also cunningly alludes to Brooks’s poem in its summoning up of a collective that has emboldened itself to act without remorse, under the cover of protecting the collective.

In a nutshell, as we compose or build our lines, we come to realize that there isn’t a magically-singular answer to how a poem should look or sound. As James Longenbach has shown in The Art of the Poetic Line, poetic lines can unfold in a variety of ways, but three are predominant: 1) the end-stopped line, where the sentence ends at the line; 2) the parsed line, in which the sentence unfolds in more or less a direct fashion, and 3) the annotated line, in which the linearity of syntax is interrupted or complicated. There have been poems written using just one of these modes, but far more strong poems contain surprising and powerful deployments of all three. A good poem pays attention to and maximizes how it attends to its lineation, containing, carrying forth, and transmitting the feeling of the poem that we’re creating.

One more digression, before we revisit the final poem from our quiz, into prose poetry. The irony is that at the same time that the line became the defining feature of poetry, the prose poem also rose in prominence in modern European poetry with 19th century French experimentalists like Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé. While examples from world prose poetry predate this moment (see Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book or Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North or even the Bible), the twentieth century saw prose poetry become mainstream. An entirely different essay could be written about prose poems and their various relationships to form on the page. However, I’d like to share one prose poem that is both prose and not prose.

In a book-length long poem, This Connection of Everyone With Lungs, Juliana Spahr hearkens back to the Whitmanic line but goes past his sometimes-nationalist boundaries into imagining a planetary connection of all of us with lungs (all of us). These prose sentences are not quite prose sentences, but more like lyrical strophes, single-lined stanzas, language-probes sent into the deep spaces that ideology has driven between us:

December 4, 2002

Embedded deep in our cells is ourselves and everyone else.

Going back generations we have nine thousand ancestors and going back
twenty-five we get thirty million.

All of us shaped by all of us and then other things as well, other things such
as the flora and fauna and all the other things as well.

When I speak of yours thighs and their long muscles of smoothness, I speak
of yours cells and I speak of the British Embassy being closed in Kenya and
the US urging more aggressive Iraq inspections and the bushfire that is
destroying homes in Sydney.

And I speak of at least one dead after rioting in Dili and the arrest of
Mukhlas, and Sharon’s offer of 40 percent of the West Bank and the mixed
results of Venezuela’s oil strike and the overtures that Khatami is making to
the US.

When I speak of the curve of yours cheeks, their soft down, their cell
after cell, their smoothness, their even color, I speak of the NASA launch and the
child Net safety law and the Native Linux pSeries Server.

When I speak of our time together, I speak also of the new theories of
the development of the cell from iron sulfide, formed at the bottom of the
oceans.

I speak of the weight of the alien planet.

And I speak of the benefits of swaddling sleeping babies.

Beloveds, all our theories and generations came together today in order to
find the optimum way of lacing shoes. The bow tie pattern is the most
efficient.

I want to tie everything up when I speak of yous.

I want to tie it all up and tie up the world in an attempt to understand the
swirls and patterns.

But there is no efficient way.

The news refreshes every few minutes on the computer screen and on the
television screen. The stories move from front to back and then off the page
and then perhaps forward again in a motion that I can’t predict but I suspect
is not telling the necessary truths.

I can’t predict our time together either. Or why we like each other like we do.

I have no idea when our bodies will feel very good to one of us or to all of us
together or to none of us.

The drive to press against one another that is there at moments and then
gone at others.

The drive to press up against others in the same way.

Spahr’s lines inhabit the body-mind in such a lovely way, the perfect form for her attempt to thread us all together. Notice how Spahr spools out four successively longer strophes, then four successively shorter strophes, beginning with the invitation to an expanding connectedness, following by a narrowing into strophes of two nearly opposite images—that of the “alien planet” and of “swaddling sleeping babies.” Read aloud, such lines demand us to draw deeper inhalations to spool out increasingly longer exhalations. Thus, Spahr deploys the line as a way to expand and contract our consciousness into her vision of “this connection of everything with lungs.”

Now, onto our final poem. Let’s see how Craig Santos Perez lineated these words:

Let poems be mistaken for the realignment of the earth