Many people have remarked upon the weakness of poems, especially poems in free verse, in which the poet has constructed lines simply by writing conventional sentences and forming them into lines by breaking at the punctuation marks or at the ends of phrases. I totally agree that poets who are learning the artistry should recognize that problem and eliminate it from their writing. However, the problem lies not in the use of sentence structure, but in the boring quality of flabby sentences and the uselessness of the line breaks that result from this approach. There are plenty of sentences in effective poems, even metrical poems, and even with end rhymes.

I've often been moved by Robert Creeley's mix of conventionally patterned sentences and "violations" of those patterns, e.g.:

"The Whip"

Creeley constructs his lines in such a way that the poem is like a whip, the whip of the speaker's agony. It's like Creeley agonizes the poetic line, agonizing the poem line by line. In the "psychological" introspection of the moment, the speaker thinks to "say this wrongly"--which of course is exactly rightly, as a poem, i.e. as this poem. For a striking contrast, the soothing flow of the early lines of blank verse with enjambment (and thus flowing voice) in Bryant's "Thanatopsis":

To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts.... [it keeps flowing]

[detailed brief essay on Coleridge's experiments with the blank verse form, by Edward Zuk, e.g. compare Bryant's flow with Zuk's comments on what STC was doing with meter/rhythm]

And thinking of Bryant, I also like these lines from "To a Waterfowl":

And soon that toil shall end;
Soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest,
And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend
Soon, o'er thy sheltered nest.

Especially the way he builds energy into that third line.

Sentence: And soon that toil shall end; soon shalt thou find a summer home, and rest, and scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend soon, o’er thy sheltered nest.

The connective “and” followed by the wonderful word choice in “scream,” dynamically counteracting the restfulness, but all within the ease of “summer home” and fellowship; then the fulcrum of the semicolon—semi-fullstop, fusing two sentences into one—on which balances the weight of the first two thirds of the line, and the equal weight of the last third. Emotionally charged first two thirds, objective last third.

And scream among thy fellows; reeds shall bend

Metrically (the poem’s pattern being iambic, u s u s u s…):

u s u s u s u ; s u s

One can feel the weight on the fulcrum, the energy built into the line, of the balancing of two kids on one end of the teeter-totter and one on the other. Then the syntactical possibility of completion with bend, but no punctuation, and sure enough a word beginning the next line that nullifies the momentary stop-complete, and is followed by a brief pause, releasing the energy into the rhythmical flow of sheltering nest.

u-s , s u s u s

Compare Wyatt's use of the semicolon (in contextual flow, of course) in the line also quoted in the section on "voice."

They flee from me, that sometime did me seek
With naked foot stalking in my chamber.
I have seen them, gentle, tame, and meek,
That now are wild, and do not remember
That sometime they put themselves in danger
To take bread at my hand; and now they range
Busily seeking with a continual change.

Wyatt set up the (Petrarchan?) opposites in the first line, and then showed us the vulnerability of lives within the "danger"--a key word, it seems to me, in the meaning and effectiveness of this poem--of court politics, with it's mutabilities that illustrate the perpetual change that characterizes all being. His semicolon in that line joins while separating, thus barely containing the tensions of, while balancing, far and near, and the opposing behaviors of intimacy and turning one's back, like the opposing impulses of a wild animal or a flock of birds that might take crumbs from the hand or might scatter. We, as good readers, "feel" all of that in our bodies.

Creeley could have put a semi-colon at the end of his first line of "The Whip," but the energy flow and tension are different.

Can somebody tell me the earliest published poem with a line that ends with "the"? Williams did it twice in a row (couplet) in "Spring and All."

What about the one-word line? It can be very effective; and a tour-de-force example is "The Locust-Tree in Flower," Williams's evocation of Persephone-Kore, consisting entirely of one-word lines. But very often, in poems that I receive, one-word lines are very ineffective, and throw away that line's opportunity for effective line construction, including use of line break. Here are two examples from poems that I've received (these poems had good moments too).

"...clumsy with their mouths [that's promising, building big expectation]
spilling poisonous, unseen formations of
sound
which disintegrates...."

I don't really hear much of anything in that line, or have much thought there.

"I am sitting here
waiting
for something to happen--"

Some readers might like this one, because it causes us to wait for something to happen, but it seems to me that effective artistry would do that more richly. I think that even with this content, more imagination must be caused to be happening. The one-word line must be participating in an ongoing contextual dance of imagination, it must perform its moment's step or gesture in that dance.

And don't forget that dancing is an aphrodisiac. Too often the one-word lines that I see are like the moment when somebody steps on somebody's foot.

Comments?

Tom Koontz, Editor
Barnwood magazine
Barnwood Press