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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Prompt: Poetry of Witness

It has become very difficult for me to watch the news the past year - and yet I have watched more news than ever before. I suspect the same may be true for many of you.

The news creeps into my poems, though I think I have intentionally tried to keep it out. There is so much anger, deceit and ugliness in the news that I don't want it in my poems.

But poets have a tradition of being witnesses and reporters of their times.  When I came upon the poem "Let America be America Again" by Langston Hughes the title echoed at a slant to me like the Donald Trump "Make America Great Again" campaign hat-mantra.

His poem begins"

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

In Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, edited by poet Carolyn Forché, over 140 poets who "endured conditions of historical and social extremity during the twentieth century—through exile, state censorship, political persecution, house arrest, torture, imprisonment, military occupation, warfare, and assassination write and give poetic witness to the times in which they lived.

Against Forgetting is organized according to historical tragedy, starting with the Armenian Genocide and proceeding through the twentieth century to the pro-democratic demonstrations in China. Each section is preceded by a short statement that gives historical background for the events in order to place the poems in a proper context. Within the sections, the poets are organized chronologically according to their year of birth and editor Forché presents a brief biographical note elucidating the poet’s personal experiences with the historical situation.

A companion volume to Against Forgetting, Poetry of Witness, collects 300 poems composed while their authors awaited execution, endured imprisonment, fought on the battlefield, or labored on the brink of breakdown or death.

We all bear witness to historical events, hopefully not as extreme as those situation, and some poets choose to write about them. These anthologies argue that such poets are a perennial feature of human history.

These poems reveal the ways in which tragic events leave marks upon the imagination.

Even poems that do not explicitly take historical events as their main subject matter may contain the events beneath the surface of the language.

In “Some Days” by Philip Terman from his collection Our Portion, there is that feeling some of us might have now of not wanting to bear witness.

Some days you have to turn off the news
and listen to the bird or truck
or the neighbor screaming out her life.
You have to close all the books and open
all the windows so that whatever swirls
inside can leave and whatever flutters
against the glass can enter. Some days
you have to unplug the phone and step
out to the porch and rock all afternoon
and allow the sun to tell you what to do.
The whole day has to lie ahead of you
like railroad tracks that drift off into gravel.
Some days you have to walk down the wooden
staircase through the evening fog to the river,
where the peach roses are closing,
sit on the grassy bank and wait for the two geese.

Carolyn Forché's own prose poem, "The Colonel," is a powerful and disturbing "documentary poem" that started as a prose piece that reached her editor who felt it was a poem.   Read the poem and hear Forché introduce and read it.

This month our writing prompt is to write a poem of witness, a documentary poem based on something in the current news from anywhere in the world. What event is affecting you? How has it entered you and your life? What can you say about it that may be helpful to others today and in the future? You own situation need not be that you "endured conditions of historical and social extremity" and the event may not be one that has attracted national or worldwide attention. In fact, it may be that those events are the ones that need you as witness.

Deadline for submissions to this prompt: May 6, 2017.