Poetry Articles for Poetry Writers at World of Poets

by Al Rocheleau

Poets often have trouble with the overall construction of their poems, not knowing how to control a poem's speed, where to break lines, and where and how to end. Well, try thinking of a poem existing as a flow of water down a hill. Gravity is naturally pulling upon it.

Undisturbed, neither channeled nor dammed up, it will flow speedily down to a level plane, its ultimate destination. So it is with poems. With water, aqueducts can be erected to channel it, and dams to stop it altogether within a reservoir. Valves can be constructed to limit the flow, or have it gush out in quantity as needed. With poems, and with words as water, you have the tools--- line-length, meter, space/indents, punctuation, and line/stanza transition-- to accomplish a variety of things with this otherwise natural flow.

When a line is short it will tend to move the reader to the next line quickly.

Example:

When a line
is short
it will tend
to move the reader to
the next
line quickly.

New poets tend to write in longer lines. Often, that's a holdover from prose writing. Sometimes, lines need to be long to capture a whole thought that NEEDS to fall on the eye all at once, but this is not usually the case. Of course, there are fixed forms like tetrameter, pentameter, and hexameter even, where lines of set stresses have been preordained.

It's like putting your poetic voice on a hanger-- the content is artificially held up by the form. This is a test for the writer--as every line must be filled with meaning and music to keep the readers attention. But when it's done right, great poetry results. This was the discipline of poetry pre-1860. (Essentially pre-Walt Whitman, who by the way, wrote a lot of VERY long lines, almost prose passages, interspersed with short lines. His is a poetry that definitely ebbs and flows.)

After Whitman, formal verse stayed prevalent for another fifty years, but things did start to open up, and poets could use shorter lines to speed the flow of their poems. Even when they did, the feel of pentameter or other meters was not totally lost-- it simply tended to get divided up in more than one line on the page. When you reach Eliot, William Carlos WIlliams, ee cummings, the Beats, short line free verse is very common, often interspersed with longer lines.

These poems flow very quickly, unless of course, the poet WANTS to stop the flow. To do so, to stop things, a longer line (or lines) will do the trick. But make sure the line "feels" as if it can't be broken. The thought and language must be strong, because the reader will focus on it.

Changing meter from a flowing one (like say, iambic pentameter) to a hard, stopping one, or one with hesitation, where you then run to catch up with the basic meter, will slow down the reader, as well as make things interesting from time to time. Use of words and phrases that stop and start work in fixed forms as well as in free verse.

A poem written in ALL iambic pentameter (duh DUH , duh DUH, duh DUH, da DUH, da DUH) can be pretty montononous unless you're doing a lot of other interesting things in the lines, like Pope and Shakespeare did. Since we are not them, and since the rules have changed for us, allowing a more natural (for us) use of language, we take advantage of that latitude.

Of course, you can use the device of changing meter stress too much, too, and make things overly choppy for the reader. The art of balance is something you learn as you go along. Remember, poetry is SUPPOSED to flow, unless YOU decide, at a particular point, that it shouldn't.

Line breaks. Five different people could break off a line to the next line five different ways. The key is for you is to decide how fast you want the reader's eye to fall to that next line. If you carry thoughts over to the next line, called enjambment, it will definitely speed your poem's flow, as opposed to ending your statement predictably at the end of one line, then going into a new thought beginning with the next line.

Enjambment is a GREAT way to spice up and speed up FIXED FORMS as well. A few well-placed enjambments can often improve a poem a great deal. But in free verse, where to break the line? You have a lot of choices. First you want to keep track of the overall sculpt of your poem, how it appears on the page. The narrower the sculpt, the faster it flows.

As regards individual lines, try breaking at various points and see what speeds up or slows down the lines, according to your desire.
If you stop after a noun, the effect of the break may not be as quick as if you break after a verb, and it may be quicker still if you break after an adjective, adverb, preposition, or conjunction since, in about that order, you are moving away from subjects and objects first, then actions, to descriptive, directing, or connecting words -- in other words, you're moving further away from the way people put thoughts together.

If you break after nouns, the reader can "rest" a minute-- he gets an immediate image of something. But if you break after say, a preposition, he or she needs more information to form an image (where is the thing going?) so the eye will dart quickly to the next line. You can also play nifty little semantic games with line breaks too, like say, the following.

"Lust
falls
down three flights of stairs."

The word "falls" literally fell. Verbs that connote movement work very well in this sort of context. Of course, you have to watch the meaning of your lines when you break, too. If the break clouds your meaning, do you want that break? Or do you want it BECAUSE it clouds the meaning, perhaps in a way that could open up other interpretations. In any event, line breaks are VERY subjective. Experiment. But remember that different line breaks will support or inhibit speed.

Space is great. Poetry is at least half a visual exercise. Space will stop the readers eye, whether using a small indent, or completely isolating a word or a line to the far right, or wherever, or skipping lines (one or more) for new stanzas. The more space used, the more the stop.

Punctuation of course, is the writer's "musical notation" used to slow or "rest" a line. All these slowdowns or rests we're talking about are called ceasuras. You can hesitate, rest or stop at the end of a line, or right in the middle of one using either space OR punctuation. What you use will depend on your own style and preferences, and the poem at hand.

Just as it is said the great pianist Howoritz had 20 (or 30) shades of dynamics of loud and soft, fast and slow in his keyboard work (not to mention his pedaling), so the poet learns to control the ebb and flow of his poems. Really, there are some direct parallels than can be drawn between music (for me, especially, classical piano music) and what the poet does day in and day out to perfect his or her poems.

Types of Punctuation:

Period-- stops a line. Not a jarring stop. No expectation thereafter. You just start up again.
Double or long dash (NOT a hyphen)-- Stops with a jar. There is expectation of what will immediately follow.

Comma-- very small rest, or caesura. Remember that the end of a line is a small rest unto itself. If you add a comma, you are saying "on this particular line, I want you to stop just a split-second longer--remember the small "shades" of stopping --remember Horowitz.

Colons-- A lesser cousin of the double-dash. Not as flamboyant, nor as forboding a stop, nor as often used.

Semicolons-- A useful stop, but not much more of stop than a comma. Used more to end a train of thought, without necessarily ending the stanza.

Exclamation points-- a stop like a period, maybe slightly more so, but calls a lot of attention to itself. Limit use.

Question mark-- not so much a stop as a complete STALL. It is hard to use questions well in poems. It can be done, but more often than not, it will stop a poem dead. The reader is not reading so much for questions, but for illumination, for answers. Don't use a lot of questions (and question marks.)

Ellipsis-- the dot-dot-dots... Be VERY careful how you use these. They will tend to hang up a poem, make it hover, kill a poem's momentum. I can count may five poems in 25 years where I've used an ellipsis. As a rule, substitute a double-dash, period or semi-colon in place of these.

Again, you can also use space in place of some of the punctuation above, or add spacing in addition when you think it's necessary. You're the boss on this. Remember that too many stops may stall your poem. But also know that if you use no punctuation and no spacing, you are gonna have one FAST poem, perhaps too fast to carry a lingering message.

Again, you will learn balance as you go along, and use these devices consistent with your strategy for the poem.

About transitions

Sometimes poets will not only write fragmented or isolated thoughts in lines that don't connect to the lines that follow, they will write stanzas that don't connect to the next stanza. Transition is vital in a poem, because without it, the reader will stall MENTALLY mid-poem. Think in terms of sentences. Subject and objects.

Use action verbs, and add subordinate clauses sometimes rather than ending each line or stanza as a completed statement. If you don't, your poem will slow down A LOT. Relate each stanza to the next. Consider connecting the stanzas by simply continuing the sentence. That will add speed, and seamless flow to your work.

And how do you know your poem has ended? Well, have you said the CORE of what you wanted to say? If you have, you may well find that, if you follow the flow of your poem, it will tell YOU when it's over. When you feel it is, be sure you have closed with a line, lines, or stanza that ties elements of your poem all together, creating the knowing calm that comes with water that has flowed down hill, and despite the stops and veering eddies along the way, has reached the plane of its destination.

You know what they say, water seeks its own level. Don't stop working your poem until your music and message haved reached their level, too.

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