'What we need right now is tenderness,' former poet laureate Ada Limón says in an interview on NPR's Fresh Air. Limón's work documents everything from kingfisher birds to the cosmos itself. "I'm embracing my strangeness," she says of her poetry.
Her new collection is Startlement, and she read the title poem. Here is the transcript version and it has no line breaks. I suggest you read the transcript version and think about where the lines would or should break. Does it need line breaks? Okay, there is punctuation here, but are they the ends of lines? Is it that simple? And what about stanzas? All one stanza or multiple? Then, listen to the interview. Can you hear line breaks?
"Startlement. It is a forgotten pleasure. The pleasure of the unexpected blue-bellied lizard skittering off his sunspot rock, the flicker of an unknown bird by the bus stop. To think, perhaps we are not distinguishable, and therefore, no loneliness can exist here. Species to species in the same blue air, smoke, wing flutter buzzing, a car horn coming, so many unknown languages to think we have only honored this strange human tongue. If you sit by the riverside, you see a culmination of all things upstream. We know now we were never at the circle's center. Instead, all around us, something is living or trying to live. The world says what we are becoming, we are becoming together. The world says one type of dream has ended, and another has just begun. The world says once we were separate, and now we must move in unison."
I like thinking about line breaks when I write poems. I have that right. I don't have the right to change another poet's line breaks (or no breaks), but I like to think about them.
No cheating - but you can see the poem here
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