[Fred Longworth]

Under "General Talk" inside the thread that nominally considered the matter of changing the name of the "non-met" forum to "free verse", a discussion got going, significantly between Clive Watkins and Curtis Gale Weeks, on the topic of lineation in free verse. To me this is a subject of considerable interest.

The dialog began with the obvious: verse is written in lines. A line, however, is something special. You do not take a paragraph of prose, chop it arbitrarily into segments, and rename it poetry. Instead, the boundaries of a line convey meaning -- and, if done right, a great deal of meaning.

Both Clive and Curtis delved into what I took to be the question of: how may a bona fide line be distinguished from a segment of prose of equal length? Without the formal aids of rhyme and meter, how may a free verse writer keep from lapsing into lineated prose? What are these additional meanings which the boundedness -- or to use Curtis' term "isolation" -- of a line facilitate?

As one who writes almost entirely in free verse, and who has from time to time sunk into the morass of lineated prose, I would like to have on hand as large a "lineation toolkit" as I may reasonably assemble.

To that end, I invite you into this discussion.

Fred

[Clay Stockton]

Well, just to get things kicked off, I figure I'll throw down this quote from one of the early FV biggies, T.S.E. himself. It seems like an obvious place to start.

Let me be clear: by posting this quote I imply no endorsement. (Far from it.) I'm just putting something out there for us to react to.

I'm taking Eliot's quote from Steele's book, Missing Measures, p. 98:

The most interesting verse which has yet been written in our language has been done either by taking a very simple form, like the iambic pentameter, and constantly withdrawing from it, or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. It is this contrast between fixity and flux, this unperceived evasion of monotony, which is the very life of verse.

In other words, the trick to writing "interesting" free verse is to write verse that suggests meter, without actually fulfilling its form--just as the trick to writing interesting metrical verse is to disguise or strain against the metrical paradigm. In this view, what makes free verse different from a section of prose of equal length is actually the very same thing that differentiates a metrical line from prose, i.e., control of rhythm by reference to a metrical paradigm. Eliot seems to say, though, that whereas a metrical line "fulfills" the paradigm, a free verse line ought only to "suggest" it. I'd analogize this difference as being like the difference between a metaphor (which asserts exact identity between tenor & vehicle) and a simile (which asserts only likeness). A metrical line embodies the paradigm; a free verse line presents its likeness. In this view, it seems (as many have noted) that "free verse" has no meaning without reference to that from which it has been freed--not just as a matter of prosodic theory, but it would actually have no aesthetic power without reference to the "very simple form" of the metrical line.

So, as Eliot makes clear, free verse is just the red-headed stepchild of IP. There. That should settle the question once and for all.

--CS

[Rose Kelleher]

There are sections of Mary Oliver's "Poetry Handbook" and Frances Mayes's "The Discovery of Poetry" that talk about line breaks. Here are some snippets from the Mayes book:

The isolation of words on the short lines gives each word special importance...

The long, jolting, run-together line speeds up the middle of the poem violently...

All but three lines are enjambed. These run-on lines, plus the use of several conjuctions, emphasize mid-sentence words and the forceful flow of the speaker's voice. A few lines end with the or in the middle of an infinitive ("to / rise"). These give a dangling or suspended quality to the line, as though we hear an odd pause in the speaker's voice...

"The Elder Sister" is a continuous form: it proceeds without stanza breaks. This uninterrupted form intensifies the urgent all-at-onceness of the enjambed lines...A break for a stanza is a break in timing, a big pause...

The very short lines of "Scirocco" work for the complex subjects of the poem. Keats died at 25; his brief life ended in Rome...The brief lines--fleeting, delicate--break on important words. The additional attention the eye gives to the end words and to the single-word lines emphasizes more words than we would in longer lines.


There's quite a bit more on the subject in the book. I haven't read it all yet, but what I've read so far is very good.

In books like these, the assumption is always that whatever effect a particular line break may be said to have was planned beforehand by the famous poet whose work is being dissected. The after-the-fact analyses always make sense, but they don't tell you how to apply this knowledge as you do the actual writing. Are you supposed to be doing this stuff consciously? Should you be thinking about the break as you write each line, or should you first compose the sentence, and then break it up into whatever units seem most effective?

[Fred Longworth]

Clay,

You wrote: "In other words, the trick to writing 'interesting' free verse is to write verse that suggests meter, without actually fulfilling its form--just as the trick to writing interesting metrical verse is to disguise or strain against the metrical paradigm."

Consonance, assonance and alliteration suggest rhyme without actually comsummating same at line end -- and this is considered a primary element of successful free verse -- so, a suggestion of meter would, by analogy (and from Eliot's argument) also seem a primary element.

This may bring out one of the shortcomings of many free verse poetry boards: readers with a simplistic aesthetic are on a nominal equal footing with sophisticated readers.

I have written a number of poems in which I incorporated metrical elements -- e.g. "near" blank verse -- only to have readers slam me with "You should either use meter or not use meter. This halfway stuff doesn't cut it." These same (shall I call them numbskulls?) persons also rail against an occasional rhyme.

So, as far as our discussion of lineation, this would suggest that a line should be "cut" in such as way that the flow of stresses suggests, but does not consummate, an underlying metrical model.

The crucial detail, of course, is that this "underlying metrical model" must lie within the aesthetic purview of the reader, else the tension against this form will be lost.

Fred

[Fred Longworth]

Rose,

I usually do my original drafts in a notebook.

I will often compose a run of text that exceeds one line, and will break it arbitrarily. Then, when I word-process it, I will experiment with different line breaks, stopping on the one that provides the best emphasis.

I have noticed a tendency among well-regarded free-verse writers to end a line on an isolated couple of words which begin a new sentence, or on an adjective which demands a noun in the next line -- this to generate a "pull" into the next line.

Mary Oliver is brilliant.

Fred

[Rose Kelleher]

Fred wrote:
I have written a number of poems in which I incorporated metrical elements -- e.g. "near" blank verse -- only to have readers slam me with "You should either use meter or not use meter.

Arrgh. In fairness to the "numbskulls," though, I will say there's a big difference between a free-verse poem that contains enticing hints of meter, and one that reads like a metrical poem that doesn't scan right. I guess a lot depends on the expectations you establish in the first few lines.

[Mark Allinson]

Here is D.H.Lawrence's take on this issue of the nature of free verse. Lawrence changed from formal verse to free after discovering Whitman.


Much has been written about free verse. But all that can be said, first and last, is that free verse is, or should be, direct utterance from the instant, whole man. It is the soul and the mind and body surging at once, nothing left out. They speak all together. There is some confusion, some discord. But the confusion and the discord only belong to the reality as noise belongs to the plunge of water. It is no use inventing fancy laws for free verse, no use drawing a melodic line which all the feet must toe. Free verse toes no melodic line, no matter what drill-sergeant. Whitman pruned away his clichés - perhaps his clichés of rhythm as well as of phrase. And this is about all we can do, deliberately, with free verse. We can get rid of the stereotyped movements and the old hackneyed associations of sound or sense. We can break down those artificial conduits and canals throough which we do so love to force our utterance. We can break the stiff neck of habit. We can be in ourselves spontaneous and flexible as flame, we can see that utterance rushes out without artificial foam or artificial smoothness. But we cannot positively prescribe any motion, any rhythm. All the laws we invent or discover--it amounts to pretty much the same--will fail to apply to free verse. They will only apply to some form of restricted, limited unfree verse.

All we can say is that free verse does not have the same nature as restricted verse. It is not of the nature of reminiscence. It is not the past which we treasure in its perfection between our hands. Neither is it the crystal of the perfect future, into which we gaze. Its tide is neither the full, yearning flow of aspiration, nor the sweet, poignant ebb of remembrance and regret. The past and the future are the two great bournes of human emotion, the two great homes of the human days, the two eternities. They are both conclusive, final. Their beauty is the beauty of the goal, finished, perfected. Finished beauty and measured symmetry belong to the stable, unchanging eternities.

But in free verse we look for the insurgent naked throb of the instant moment. To break the lovely form of metrical verse, and to dish up the fragments as a new substance, called vers libre, this is what most of the free-versifiers accomplish. They do not know that free verse has its own nature, that it is neither star nor pearl, but instantaneous like plasm. It has no goal in either eternity. It has no finish. It has no satisfying stability, satisfying to those who like the immutable. None of this. It is the instant; the quick; the very jetting source of all will-be and has-been. The utterance is like a spasm, naked contact with all influences at once. It does not want to get anywhere. It just takes place.

For such utterance any externally-applied law would be mere shackles and death. The law must come new each time from within. The bird is on the wing in the winds, flexible to every breath, a living spark in the storm, its very flickering depending upon its supreme mutability and power of change. Whence such a bird came: whither it goes: from what solid earth it rose up, and upon what solid earth it will close its wings and settle, this is not the question. This is a question of before and after. Now, now, the bird is on the wing in the winds.

Such is the rare new poetry. One realm we have never conquered: the pure present. One great mystery of time is terra incognita to us: the instant. The most superb mystery we have hardly recognised: the immediate, instant self. The quick of all time is the instant. The quick of all the universe, of all creation, is the incarnate, carnal self. Poetry gave us the clue: free verse: Whitman. Now we know.

"Poetry of the Present"
Introduction to the American edition of New Poems (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1920).


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Mark Allinson

[This message has been edited by Mark Allinson (edited June 20, 2004).]

[Steven Schroeder]

Originally posted by Rose Kelleher:
Fred wrote:
I have written a number of poems in which I incorporated metrical elements -- e.g. "near" blank verse -- only to have readers slam me with "You should either use meter or not use meter.

Arrgh. In fairness to the "numbskulls," though, I will say there's a big difference between a free-verse poem that contains enticing hints of meter, and one that reads like a metrical poem that doesn't scan right. I guess a lot depends on the expectations you establish in the first few lines.

I've found that I can write loose tetrameter/pentameter/whatevermeter and have many free-verse readers totally fail to pick up on it being metrical at all (or I suppose they feel uncomfortable commenting on meter and so don't mention it at all).



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Steve Schroeder

[Curtis Gale Weeks]

Clay, Fred,

Perhaps I'm reading the Eliot incorrectly, so check me. The most relevant phrase for free verse is: or taking no form at all, and constantly approximating to a very simple one. Where is "meter" mentioned in that quote; why should the "simple one" be assumed to be metrical form as we understand it?

I wonder also if we might distinguish between the words "form" and "meter."

I'll be back to this thread. For now, I want to point out that most of the comments to this thread suggest a tendency exists to define free verse in terms of metrical verse. This is the "non-metrical" definition of free verse and is rather vague and odd, imo. Free verse can only be good insofar as it "suggests" meter?
___________

O.k., well. I'm not even sure that the operation of meter is understood. Everyone knows that meter is da DUM da DUM or some other recognizable sound patterning involving stresses-become-beats (to paraphrase it.) If that's all it is, then we could write whole poems like that: "da DUM da DUM da DUM / da DUM da DUM da DUM" would be two lines in the metrical poem. Literally. But no, metrical poems for us include words in English, recognizable grammar and syntax, and phrasal patterns, among other things. What relationship does meter have to these things? What constraints does meter place on the development of these things? How do metrical patterns tend to shape the line of rhetoric or the flow of rhetoric? (Or, for that matter, how does the use of rhyme to "cap off" a line of metrical verse, in conjunction with the meter of that verse, tend to force a given set of developments in the rhetoric?)

I suspect that when those questions are answered, we'll have at least one viable consideration for how good free verse tends to "suggest" a [<strike>metrical</strike>] "simple form" which might resemble a "simple form" found in metrical verse.

I'm all for comparing the two, but the hang-up on organized sound, on the primacy of Meters-capital-m for any understanding of free verse, goes against the grain of a true understanding of free verse, imo. Such a primal dependency makes free verse merely a shadow of metrical verse—hence the popularity of that phrase, “ghost meter." I say, when one has looked too long on the sun, he'll see it when he turns his eyes; or, when one has lived too long with Mother, every shadow after her death might at a glance look like her ghost.

If we are going to write in meter, let us at once look to it for guidance. If we are not, why must we turn to it first?
___________

Mark,

RE: The Lawrence quote.

There is a suggestion of the “emergence” I’ve mentioned elsewhere in relation to free verse...but Oh!, not quite.

Are we to take his statements as a “rule” or "law" of free verse? Wouldn’t that be a self-defeating argument?



[This message has been edited by Curtis Gale Weeks (edited June 20, 2004).]

[Robert E. Jordan]

Fred,

It’s really pretty simple. Lines in free verse can either be self-enclosed or enjambed. The self-enclosed line consists of a complete sentence or a phrase that is complete in grammar and logic.

The only real requirement is for the words in the lines to create a rhythm.

Bobby


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Visit Bobby's Urban Rage Poetry Page at:

www.prengineers.com/poetry

Thanks