Distillations: Breaking the Line

Once upon a time, it was easy for both poets and readers to know where to expect a line break. The rhythm of the meter shows it and by the rhyme you would know it. However, the previous example is an example of why this approach is less common today. It takes a great amount of skill to write a poem in a predictable form without being, well…predictable. The limitations of meter and rhyme can limit or prevent entirely the particular expression of a poem. Certainly, other poems can be written in a form that will express ideas in almost the same way. Perhaps their sound will be more beautiful than their free verse cousins, but it is the precise and particular refinement of the words and the form that a poet chooses that create the poem itself. Therefore, the form that a poem takes is a tool to create the effect of the poem.

This column will discuss two very different free verse poems. The first is “Zombie Bombs” by Mike Allen and Ian Watson, which was published in the Spring 2008 issue of Helix. This poem combines both the standard icky zombie motifs, “Some helpers were engulfed, suffocated. / The rain of living dead,” and more poignant aspects introduced by the narrator seeing his own “fouled gasping face.” The line breaks in the first half of the poem build suspense: “sticky masses of squirming black” Black what? A quick leap to the next line yields: “titanic insects’ egg sacs.” The difference in timing between the next line and the next word may not seem like much, but everything is magnified in a poem. That is reason for caution when the topic is “Zombie Bombs.” Another strategic use of the line break is to provide multiple meanings as in the example of “If many realities exist, ours is chosen,” which may seem positive until the next line reveals that it is chosen “as a necro-dump…”

On the far side of the line break continuum is Cary Tennis’s prose poem, “You must go to the ocean and jump in,” from the April, 2008 issue of ChiZine. This is a special challenge to any formalist. Not only is it a prose poem, but it was originally part of an advice column. This is unusual but not entirely unlikely for anyone familiar with Tennis’s columns. They often have an effusive style which is almost too much for a prose poem. In this case, it is this very quality of excess that pushed it just over the line into poetry:

Think of evolution, our origins in the sea, our miraculous plankton brotherhood, our kinship with kelp that waves serenely in ancient seas. Think of the sand and how old it is; think of our cells and think of our options, how we could be plankton if need be, how we could be gas or liquid, how we could transubstantiate at a moment’s notice if only the right force came along. Think of the mutability of atomic structure, how easily matter becomes energy, how we each might fissure into energy at the time of death…

Without the clue that line breaks provide, this excerpt could be taken for prose. Indeed, in its original context, it was considered prose. So what factors justify the decision to consider these words to be a poem? In a technical sense, the effect is created by repetition: “Think of evolution…Think of the sand…Think of the mutability of atomic structure.” However, the effect of the commands themselves cannot be discounted. They are direct and full of imagery: “our kinship with kelp that waves serenely in the sea.” Because this is a prose poem, there are only two line breaks at the end of the two paragraphs. Like poems of a more traditional form, these line breaks are meaningful, the first ending with “his final field trip,” and the second, which marks the end of the formed poem, “are we fresh out of amazement?”

In the end, free verse and prose poems make both readers and writers work harder. Poets need to deliberately choose the place for each line break rather than following a preplotted course. On the other hand, readers are called upon to open up their ideas of what a poem can be. Can this be a bad thing? Is it possible for poetry to go too far? There is only one way to tell—keep trying until something breaks.