Prompt: Line Breaks

I was reading an anthology of short poems and was paying attention not only to their brevity but to their line breaks.

In Rae Armantrout’s poem “Unbidden," her use of short lines in conjunction with enjambment contribute to a sense of disjointedness.

The ghosts swarm
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone

Line breaks are one of the main things that separate prose and poetry. They give poems their slim who-cares-about-margins appearance.(We will pass on talking about prose poems for the moment.)

Enjambment is where the poet deliberately breaks a sentence across multiple lines before its natural finishing point. End-stops are the opposite of enjambed lines in that an end-stopped line contains complete thoughts, phrases, or sentences.You can usually tell a poetic line is end-stopped if there is punctuation at the end. The punctuation could be internal (e.g. comma, semi-colon, colon, em dashes), or external (e.g. period, exclamation mark, question mark).These lines give the reader logical moments to pause at the line break. It is used in many traditional poems and it supports poetic forms using rhyme and meter.

William Carlos Williams' "The Red Wheelbarrow" is a modernist poem orriginally published without a title. It was designated "XXII" in Williams' 1923 book Spring and All, a hybrid collection that incorporated alternating selections of free verse and prose

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Notice that to maintain his very short, two-line stanzas Williams breaks two words that could be together - wheelbarrow and rainwater.

Line breaks create white space in the text and are one way that poets can exercise a greater degree of control over the speed and rhythm that you read. It is unlike our everyday language and unlike prose literature.

Personally, I find it annoying when poems have breaks that seem to be used simply to keep line lengths the same - almost like a margin. It is possible a poet will do that in order to create a shape for the poem. There are good reasons to break a line. There is no rule book but consideration should be given to the first and last words: Avoid having weak words at the beginning or end of lines. For example, action verbs and nouns tend to be strong.

"Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost has strong end words: fire, ice, desire,twice, hate, great, suffice. (Although I find that breaking a line on "ice" - "To say that for destruction ice / Is also great" - seems more in service of the rhyme than the line break. Sorry, Robert).

"Dreams" by Langston Hughes is a good example of end-stopped lines that each contain a complete thoughts, phrases or sentences.

Our two model poems by two very different poets are both 9 lines / 8 line breaks. This month's call for submissions is for a 9-line poem on any topic of your choosing. Stanza breaks are another consideration - one stanza, 4X2, 3X3 or any combination. The key here is for you (and the editors) to pay special attention this month to line breaks. Whether enjambed or end-stopped, each of your 8 breaks should be logical and pushing us to read in a particular way with a particular attention. Sounds easy. It is not.

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Birthdays and Sailing to Byzantium

It was my birthday last weekend  I think most people are curious about with whom they share a birthday. My October 20 is shared with Mickey Mantle, Bela Lugosi, Kamala Harris, Viggo Mortensen, John Krasinki, Snoop Dogg, and Tom Petty. I did play baseball as a kid, but I was no Mantle. I do play guitar, but I'm no Petty. The birthdays that I most connect to are two poets. 

Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet known for his transgressive and surreal themes and for his influence on modern literature and arts, prefiguring surrealism. I've read his poetry and about his life and I don't feel we are similar in either our lives or writing. It did connect with me that at a point he just stopped writing and the reason seems to be that he had lost hope of being heard. I know that feeling.

My strongest connection is to the poet Robert Pinsky. I've met him several times at readings and shared our connections. He was also born in New Jersey (Long Branch, down the Jersey shore). In high school he played the saxophone and it was his "first experience of art, or the joy in making art." Like me, he was the first person in his family to go to college and we both attended Rutgers. In his freshman poetry class, he encountered "Sailing to Byzantium" by W.B. Yeats. He said: "It was the speed with which he covered the ground. Wow: 'artifice of eternity'!'' Pinsky typed up "Sailing to Byzantium" and hung it on his dorm room wall, and decided to become a poet himself. Pinsky was the first poet laureate consultant in poetry to serve three consecutive one-year terms.

In my freshman year, I discovered T.S. Eliot and his poetry took me to a very different place from the poetry I had been writing in high school.

William Butler Yeats is considered one of the greatest poets of the English language. He received the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. His work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland.

I reread that poem which I'm pretty sure I had read in high school (when I naively thought Yeats and Keats rhymed) and again in college, but it wasn't the epiphany that Pinsky had with the words. Rereading it five decades later, it is opening and closing lines that hits me hardest: "That is no country for old men... Of what is past, or passing, or to come."

I was too young for this poem when I first read it. It is about mortality and the frailty of the human body as we age. Yeats wrote this poem when he was 62 and beginning to address old age - though he would live another 11 years.

Yeats chose Byzantium as the setting for his poem because it represented a mythical, timeless realm of spiritual beauty and artistic excellence. It was at least a symbolic escape from the aging process and the material world of his own time. Byzantium's rich history in art, particularly its gold mosaics, further contributed to this idealization of a place where the soul could transcend mortality through creative expression.

The Byzantine Empire is long gone, but the legacy of the empire and its capital city, Byzantium, can still be seen today. The former capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople, is now known as Istanbul, Turkey. The city is still considered a crossroads between Europe and Asia.

The poem still reads to me like the kind of poem I would never write. It feels old. I don't write poems that are very similar to Pinsky, though I am closer in style to him than Yeats. 

Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats (1865 –1939)

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

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Prompt: Ways of Looking

In the early-career Wallace Stevens poem, ''Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,'' the reader is presented with something seen from different perspectives. Perception is subjective, so these short stanzas shift and evolve but are not directly connected, other than by their subject. Each haiku-like stanza is its own way of looking at the blackbird.

Two selections from Jane Kenyon's poem "Three Songs at the End of Summer" illustrate how her poem also looks (in 12 small stanzas divided into 3 sections/songs) at something more abstract from different perspectives.

A white, indifferent morning sky,
and a crow, hectoring from its nest
high in the hemlock, a nest as big
as a laundry basket....

Crickets leap from the stubble,
parting before me like the Red Sea.
The garden sprawls and spoils.

Spruce, inadequate, and alien
I stood at the side of the road.
It was the only life I had.

Is Stevens' blackbird a symbol? Its color might suggest mystery. Its appearance in the poem shows a kind of interconnectedness as it separate from and also part of nature. If it is a symbol of the world itself, it can represent the complexity of our perception. Stevens gives us the bird in the natural world (a bird in the snow) to the psychological (a man mistaking a shadow for a blackbird).

What is the "correct" way to perceive the blackbird or reality? Of course, there isn't one way because our understanding of the world is shaped by our individual perspective.

In your poem, be attentive to the details of your subject and its surroundings. Present multiple interpretations without a need to select one as correct. You need not have 13 ways - though many 13 ways parodies of Stevens' poem have been written. You could have as few as two ways of seeing. Your subject can be a thing (a river, a painting), a person (a lover, a baby), a scene (a baseball game, a thunderstorm) or something we can't literally see (terror, jealousy, the end of summer).

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Finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards

If you are looking for new reading recommendations, you might start with this year's finalists for the 2024 National Book Awards in poetry, fiction, nonfiction, translated literature, and young people’s literature from the National Book Foundation.

The five finalists in each category were selected by a panel of judges; the winners will be announced at a ceremony in New York City on November 20. Each winner will receive $10,000 as well as a bronze medal and a statue; each finalist will receive $1,000 and a bronze medal. Winners and finalists in the translated literature category will split the prize evenly between author and translator.

Five of the twenty-five finalists are debuts, and ten of the honored books are published by independent or university presses.

POETRY

Anne Carson - Wrong Norma (New Directions)

Fady Joudah - [...] (Milkweed Editions)

m.s. RedCherries - mother (Penguin Books)

Diane Seuss - Modern Poetry (Graywolf Press)

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha - Something About Living (University of Akron Press)

FICTION

’Pemi Aguda for Ghostroots (Norton)

Kaveh Akbar for Martyr! (Knopf)

Percival Everett for James (Doubleday)

Miranda July for All Fours (Riverhead Books)

Hisham Matar for My Friends (Random House)

NONFICTION

Jason De León for Soldiers and Kings: Survival and Hope in the World of Human Smuggling (Viking Books)

Eliza Griswold for Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Kate Manne for Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia (Crown)

Salman Rushdie for Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder (Random House)

Deborah Jackson Taffa for Whiskey Tender (Harper)

TRANSLATED LITERATURE

Bothayna Al-Essa for The Book Censor’s Library (Restless Books), translated from the Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain

Linnea Axelsson for Ædnan (Knopf), translated from the Swedish by Saskia Vogel

Fiston Mwanza Mujila for The Villain's Dance (Deep Vellum), translated from the French by Roland Glasser

Yáng Shuāng-zǐ for Taiwan Travelogue (Graywolf Press), translated from the Mandarin Chinese by Lin King

Samar Yazbek for Where the Wind Calls Home (World Editions) translated from the Arabic by Leri Price

YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE

Violet Duncan for Buffalo Dreamer (Nancy Paulsen Books)

Josh Galarza for The Great Cool Ranch Dorito in the Sky (Henry Holt)

Erin Entrada Kelly for The First State of Being (Greenwillow Books)

Shifa Saltagi Safadi for Kareem Between (G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers)

Angela Shanté for The Unboxing of a Black Girl (Page Street Publishing)

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org