an excerpt of
Walking the Line*
I break lines for no apparent reason.
—David Grove, suggestion for a bumper sticker,
on jjgallaher.blogspot.com
I have an old friend who posts bits of poetry on Facebook every day. For the most part, I love this—love the pieces he selects. He reminds me (and all his other friends) that Tennyson, Hopkins, Yeats, Frost, Levertov—and many others in between, and beyond—have a place in our lives. But even as my heart sometimes swells to see something familiar, or to encounter something new, it also falls when something just doesn’t “work” in this format, the few lines going flat, refusing to take me into them. I find it’s easier to see “flaws” when you only have five or six lines, and these snippets either quickly fire me up or just as quickly dampen any flame.
From this, I make some generalizations. Poets writing in earlier times knew how to engage the ear right from the start. They actually led with the ear, not the eye, but contemporary poets very often engage the eye at the expense of the ear. This may be all well and good when we have the complete poem before us, but when there are only disembodied lines we may find it hard to get a “sense” of the poem. Here’s what I sometimes see in current collections: lines that do absolutely nothing to advance the cause. That is, lines that carry very little weight, maybe offering only a noun or two, possibly an adjective. I see lines that are flaccid, devoid of the energy of cadence or chime. I see lines that, quite frankly, are not lines at all—just words strung out or dropped away from, configured for no apparent reason.
I have no firm theories about the line. I have read—and enjoyed—various symposia on the line, the kind that appeared in Field maybe twenty years ago, the kind I see cropping up in journals again these days. I am fascinated by what practicing poets feel the line can do for them. But, to be honest, sometimes I do not “feel” their lines, do not fall in love with a poem for what its lines might say.
For example, one of my friend’s recent postings contained what clearly could be described as “chopped-up prose”:
Walking through the field with my little brother Seth
I pointed to a place where kids had made angels in the snow.
For some reason I told him that a troop of angels
had been shot and dissolved when they hit the ground.
It may not be fair to judge only four lines of a poem—but that was all I had, and I did not find myself wanting to search out the rest. This excerpt suffers, I think, from what Marvin Bell, in his essay “On the Practice of Free Verse,” would call a lack of interesting “syntax”:
Talk about “the line” by itself is never sufficient because lines hold hands with syntax. . . . Syntax provides the occasions for enjambments and end-stops, as well as for caesuras within lines. Syntax distributes the syllables and, in English, the stresses. Thus, the key to free verse may be the sentence.*
In recent years, Bell has conducted his own complex experimentation with syntax, and his now-several volumes of “Dead Man” poems dispense with the line almost entirely, using the sentence as their basic unit. Still, I contend that the line can give some indication of how a poem should be read. For instance, in a symposium in Center: A Journal for the Literary Arts (vol. 7, 2008), Marianne Boruch muses on the “interiority” that the line reveals:
That interiority works directly against the bright light, rational feel of the sentence—the very public sentence threaded down the page to make those lines. . . . Because the line against the larger wealth of the sentence is a rebel thing which undercuts order. With it comes all that can’t be fully controlled: the irrational, the near-deranged, the deeply personal and individual utterance.
That is one of the line’s dimensions—it can act as an agent of freedom. Simultaneously, however, it can be a form of restraint. Bell’s piece enumerates various ways to take its measure: “A line might be a unit of rhythm, syntax, or breath (Allen Ginsberg claimed to have written ‘Howl’ one breath to a line), or it might be a unit of thought, or time, or even a visual unit. One could assume only that, whatever else, a line was always a unit of attention.”
So now, as I worry my way around the edges of lineation, I’ d like to pay attention to the ways a line can be a “unit of attention” and what happens when we pay meticulous attention to it. Possibly the best way to begin such a project is to think about what an opening line can do to establish expectations, to create what I’ll call the poem’s “ambience.”
____
Some poets experiment with lines throughout their careers, while others establish a kind of “signature” line by which we come to know them. If you are a reader of contemporary poetry, you can’t hear the name C. K. Williams without instantly conjuring that long line ambling toward the right margin on the page, or read the name Robert Creeley without almost hearing the staccato near-jazz he could make of his short lines. For formalists the line is determined, in large part, metrically, but I would need more than a short review space to discover all the ways that lines do—and do not—serve the poet who writes in free verse. My intention here is to consider the line as one key element in understanding the work from a few recent collections. I’ll look first at two poets with whose work I am quite familiar in order to further understand why I am attracted to it, then branch out to examine two others I’ve read less often, hoping that I will be able to open and comprehend their work through this (albeit narrow) device.
____
*An essay review of
By the Numbers. By James Richardson. Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2010. 116 pp.
$16.00, paper.
Beautiful Country. By Robert Wrigley. New York: Penguin Books, 2010. 112 pp. $18.00, paper.
Approaching Ice. By Elizabeth Bradfield. New York: Persea Books, 2010. 112 pp. $15.00, paper.
Walking with Ruskin. By Robert Cording. Fort Lee, NJ: CavanKerry Press, 2010. 112 pp. $16.00,
paper.
____
*From Jon Silkin, The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth-Century Poetry, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 1997.
