by Denise Levertov
contemporary nonmetrical forms, have only the vaguest concept,
and the most haphazard
use, of the line. Yet there is at our disposal no tool of the
poetic craft more important, none
that yield more subtle and precise effects, than the line-break
if it is properly understood.
do not mean to imply that I consider modern, nonmetrical poetry
"better" or "superior" to the
great poetry of the past, which I love and honor. That would obviously
be absurd. But I do
feel that there are few poets today whose sensibility naturally
expresses itself in the traditional
forms (except for satire or pronounced irony), and that those
who do so are somewhat
anachronistic. The closed, contained quality of such forms has
less relation to the relativistic
sense of life which unavoidably prevails in the late twentieth
century than modes that are
more exploratory, more open-ended. A sonnet may end with a question;
but its essential,
underlying structure arrives at conclusion. "Open forms" do not
necessarily terminate
inconclusively, but their degree of conclusion is--structurally,
and thereby expressively--less
pronounced, and partakes of the open quality of the whole. They
do not, typically, imply a
dogmatic certitude; whereas, under a surface, perhaps, of individual
doubts, in the structure
of the sonnet or the heroic couplet bears witness to the certitudes
of these forms' respective
epochs of origin. The forms more apt to express thesensibility
of our age are the exploratory,
open ones.
is that such poetry, more than most poetry of the past, incorporates
and reveals the process
of thinking/feeling,feeling/thinking, rather than focusing more
exclusively on its results; and
in so doing it explores (or can explore) human experience in a
way that is not wholly new
but is (or can be) valuable in its subtle difference of approach:
valuable both as human
testimony and as aesthetic experience. And the crucial precision
tool for creating this
exploratory mode is the line-break. The most obvious function
of the line-break is rhythmic:
it can record the slight (but meaningful) hesitations between
word and word that are
characteristic of the mind's dance among perceptions but which
are not noted by grammatical
punctuation. Regular punctuation is a part of regular sentence
structure, that is, of the
expression of completed thoughts; and this expression is typical
of prose, even though prose
is not at all times bound by its logic. But in poems one has the
opportunity not only, as in
expressive prose, to depart from the syntactic norm, but to make
manifest, by an intrinsic
structural means, the interplay or counterpoint of process and
completion--in other words, to
present the dynamics of perception along with its arrival at full
expression. The line-break is
a form of punctuation additional to the punctuation that forms
part of the logic of completed
thoughts. Line-breaks together with intelligent use of indentation
and other devices of scoring
represent a peculiarly poetic, a-logical, parallel (not competitive)
punctuation.
their own speech, or their silent inner monologue, when describing
thoughts, feelings,
perceptions, scenes or events, they will, I think, recognize that
they frequently hesitate--albeit
very briefly--as if with an unspoken question-- a"what?" or a"who?"
or a"how?"--before
nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, none of which require to be
preceded by a comma or
other regular punctuation in the course of syntactic logic. To
incorporate these pauses in the
rhythmic structure of the poem can do several things: for example,
it allows the reader to
share more intimately the experience that is being articulated;
and by introducing an a-logical
counter-rhythm into the logical rhythm of syntax it causes, as
they interact, an effect closer to
song than to statement, closer to dance than to walking. Thus
the emotional experience of
empathy or identification plus the sonic complexity of the language
structure synthesize in an
intense aesthetic order that is different from that which is received
from a poetry in which
metric forms are combined with logical syntax alone. (Of course,
the management of the line
in metrical forms may also permit the recording of such a-logical
pauses; Gerard Manley
Hopkins provides an abundance of evidence for that. But Hopkins,
in this as in other
matters, seems to be "the exception that proves the rule"; and
the alliance of metric forms and
the similarly "closed" or "complete" character of logical syntax
seems natural and appropriate,
inversions notwithstanding. Inversions of normal prose word order
were, after all, a stylistic
convention, adopted from choice, not technical ineptitude, for
centuries; although if utilized
after a certain date they strike one as admissions of lack of
skill, and indeed are the first signs
of the waning of a tradition's viability.) It is not that the
dance of a-logical thinking/feeling in
process cannot be registered in metric forms, but rather that
to do so seems to go against the
natural grain of such forms, to be a forcing of an intractable
medium into inappropriate use
whereas the potential for such use is implicit in the constantly
evolving nature of open forms.
understood, is its effect on the melos of the poem. It is in this,
and not only in rhythmic
effects, that its greatest potential lies, both in the exploration
of areas of human
consciousness and in creating new aesthetic experiences. How do
the line-breaks affect the
melodic element of a poem? So simply that it seems amazing that
this aspect of their function
is disregarded_--yet not only student poetry workshops but any
magazine or anthology of
contemporary poetry provides evidence of a general lack of understanding
of this factor; and
even when individual poets manifest an intuitive sense of how
to break their lines it seems
rarely to be accompanied by any theoretical comprehension of what
they've done right. Yet it
is not hard to demonstrate to students that--given that the deployment
of the poem on the
page is regarded as a score, that is, as the visual instructions
for auditory effects--the way the
lines are broken affects not only rhythm but pitch patterns.
patterns combined with rhythmic patterns. The way in which line-breaks,
observed,
respectfully, as a part of a score (and regarded as, say, roughly
a half-comma in duration),
determine the pitch pattern of a sentence, can clearly be seen
if a poem, or a few lines of it, is
written out in a variety of ways (changing the line-breaks but
nothing else) and read aloud.
Take, for instance, these lines of my own (picked at random):
Crippled with desire, he questioned it.
Evening upon the heights, juice of the pomegranate:
who could connect it with sunlight?
From "4 Embroideries: II, Red Snow"
Read them aloud. Now try reading the same words aloud from this
score:
Crippled with desire, he
questioned it. Evening
upon the heights,
juice of the pomegranate:
who
could connect it with sunlight?
Or:
Crippled
with desire, he questioned
it. Evening
upon the heights, juice
of the pomegranate:
who could
connect it with sunlight?
The intonation, the ups and downs of the voice, involuntarily
change as the rhythm (altered
by the place where the tiny pause or musical "rest" takes place)
changes. These changes
could be recorded in graph form by some instrument, as heartbeats
or brain waves are
graphed. The point is not whether the lines, as I wrote them,
are divided in the best possible
way; as to that, readers must judge for themselves. I am simply
pointing out that, read
naturally but with respect for the line-break's fractional pause,
a pitch pattern change does
occur with each variation of lineation. A beautiful example of
expressive lineation is William
Carlos Williams's well known poem about the old woman eating plums.
They taste good to her.
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her.
"To a poor old woman"
First the statement is made; then the word good is (without the
clumsy overemphasis a change
of typeface would give) brought to the center of our (and her)
attention for an instant; then
the word taste is given similar momentary prominence, with "good"
sounding on a new note,
reaffirmed_so that we have first the general recognition of well-being,
then the intensification
of that sensation, then its voluptuous location in the sense of
taste. And all this is presented
through indicated pitches, that is, by melody, not by rhythm alone.
what I called "fidelity to experience," but it took me some time
to realize what the mechanics
of such precision were as they related to this matter of pitch
pattern. The point is that, just as
vowels and consonants affect the music of poetry not by mere euphony
but by expressive,
significant interrelationship, so the nuances of meaning apprehended
in variations of pitch
create significant, expressive melody, not just a pretty "tune"
in the close tone range of speech.
the line-break is the way in which they will begin a line with
the word "it," for instance, even
when it is clear from the context that they don't want the extra
emphasis--relating to both
rhythm and pitch--this gives it. Thus, if one writes,
He did not know
it, but at his very moment
his house was burning,
The word "it" is given undue importance. Another example is given
in my second variant of
the lines from "Red Snow." The "it" in the third line is given
a prominence entirely without
significance--obtrusive and absurd. When a poet places a word
meaninglessly from the sonic
point of view it seems clear that he or she doesn't understand
the effect of doing so--or is
confusedly tied to the idea of "enjambment." Enjambment is useful
in preventing the
monotony of too many end-stopped lines in a metrical poem, but
the desired variety can be
attained by various other means in contemporary open forms; and
to take away from the
contemporary line its fractional pause (which, as I've said, represents,
or rather manifests, a
comparable minuscule but affective hesitation in the thinking/feeling
process) is to rob a
precision tool of its principal use. Often the poet unsure of
any principle according to which
to end a line will write as if the real break comes after the
first word of the next line, e.g.,
As children in their night
gowns go upstairs. . .
where if one observes the score an awkward and inexpressive "rest"
occurs between two
words that the poet, reading aloud, links naturally as "nightgowns."
X. J. Kennedy's
definition of a run-on line is that "it does not end in punctuation
and therefore is read with
only a slight pause after it," whereas "if it ends in a full pause--usually
indicated by some
mark of punctuation--we call it end-stopped" (my italics on "slight
pause"). Poets who write
nonmetrical poems but treat the line-break as nonexistent are
not even respecting the
traditional "slight pause" of the end-stopped line. The fact is,
they are confused about what
the line is at all, and consequently some of our best and most
influential poets have
increasingly turned to the prose paragraph for what I feel are
the wrong reasons--less from a
sense of the peculiar virtues of the prose poem than from a despair
of making sense of the
line.
the line itself, is that such comprehension by no means causes
poets to write like one
another. It is a tool, not a style. As a tool, its use can be
incorporated into any style. Students
in a workshop who grasp the idea of accurate scoring do not begin
to all sound alike.
Instead, each one's individual voice sounds more clearly, because
each one has gained a
degree of control over how they want a poem to sound. Sometimes
a student scores a poem
one way on paper, but reads it aloud differently. My concern--and
that of his or her fellow
students once they have understood the problem--is to determine
which way the author
wants the poem to sound. Someone will read it back to him or her
as written and someone
else will point out the ways in which the text, the score, was
ignored in the reading. "Here
you ran on," "Here you paused, but it's in the middle of a line
and there's no indication for a
'rest' there." Then the student poet can decide, or feel out,whether
he or she wrote it down
wrong but read it right, o r vice versa. That decision is a very
personal one and has quite as
much to do with the individual sensibility of the writer and the
unique character of the
experience embodied in the words of the poem, as with universally
recognizable rationality,
though that may play a part, too. The outcome, in any case, is
rather to define and clarify
individual voices than to homogenize them; because reasons for
halts and checks, emphases
and expressive pitch changes, will be as various as the persons
writing. Comprehension of
the function of the line-break gives to each unique creator the
power to be more precise, and
thereby more, not less, individuated. The voice thus revealed
will be not necessarily the
recognizable "outer" one heard in poets who have taken 01son's
"breath" theory all too
literally, but rather the inner voice, the voice of each one's
solitude made audible and singing
to the multitude of other solitudes.
decisions in open forms is a problem only when the writer has
an inadequate form sense.
When the written score precisely notates perceptions, a whole--an
inscape or gestalt--begins
to emerge; and the gifted writer is not so submerged in the parts
that the sum goes unseen.
The sum is objective--relatively, at least; it has presence, character,
and--as it develops--
needs. The parts of the poem are instinctively adjusted in some
degree to serve the needs of
the whole. And as this adjustment takes place, excess subjectivity
is avoided. Details of a
private, as distinct from personal, nature may be deleted, for
example, in the interests of a
fuller, clearer, more communicable whole. (By private I mean those
which have associations
for the writer that are inaccessible to readers without a special
explanation from the writer
which does not form part of the poem; whereas the personal, though
it may incorporate the
private, has an energy derived from associations that are shareable
with the reader and are so
shared within the poem itself.)
traditional modes provide certain standards for objective comparison
and evaluation of poems
as effective structures, (technically, at any rate) open forms,
used with comprehension of
their technical opportunities, build unique contexts which likewise
provide for such
evaluation. In other words, though the "rightness" of its lines
can't be judged by a
preconceived method of scans ion, each such poem, if well written,
presents a composed
whole in which false lines (or other lapses) can be heard by any
attentive ear--not as failing to
conform to an external rule, but as failures to contribute to
the grace or strength implicit in a
system peculiar to that poem, and stemming from the inscape of
which it is the verbal
manifestation.
models, even if in the last resort nothing could substitute for
the gifted "ear." The melos of
open forms is even harder to study if we look for models; its
secret lies not in models but in
that "fidelity to experience" of which I have written elsewhere;
and, in turn, that fidelity
demands a delicate and precise comprehension of the technical
means at our disposal. A
general recognition of the primary importance of the line and
of the way in which rhythm
relates to melody would be useful to the state of the art of poetry
in the way general
acceptance of the bar line and other musical notations were useful
to the art of music. A fully
adequate latitude in the matter of interpretation of a musical
score was retained (as anyone
listening to different pianists playing the same sonata, for instance,
can hear) but at the same
time the composer acquired a finer degree of control. Only if
writers agree about the nature
and function of this tool can readers fully cooperate, so that
the poem shall have the fullest
degree of autonomous life.
