Importance of the Line

Anybody ever ask you, “What’s the difference between prose and poetry?” Like there’s one difference. Let’s run with this, though, say there’s the most important difference.

"Focus" -- WIX Stock Photo

Ask me, I say it’s the intense focus given to each line in a poem. As opposed to the attention given to the sentence, or even paragraph, in a directed passage of prose.

It’s “the line” I want to talk about here. For as “finished” as a poem may be in its entirety (a philosophical topic for another day), a poem, a stanza, or a strophe, is only as strong as its best lines — its weakest are those that don’t pull their own weight.

Not all lines in a poem need to be stars, but they must have reason for being, and the more functional (or catalytic) their reason, the greater synchronicity exists between lines. The considerations given to producing this effect is the ultimate goal of a poet concerned with the vascular system of a poem.

So, what constitutes a line? Does it begin and end in a full sentence, or can it be a partial phrase? Is there normal punctuation, or can you make the rules up as you go along? As you can see, this is a vast subject with many permutations that’s better suited to appear in the poet’s handbook I may write in future.

In the meantime, I’d like to steer your attention to the end (the break) of each line, and beg that you give this aspect of it, in every poem you attempt to craft, your greatest focus of all. Where you choose to stop a phrasing of words is where you direct your audience to zero in — that tail floating in air — where each reader breathes a moment, the caesura, before rounding the bend to the next line following.

Whether you intend for your readers to rush along to the next line (enjambment) or not, they will, inevitably, process the last word(s) of a line in some fashion; this suspension, even in a split-second, conjures an image or sound or conceptual connection for them. And you, as the poet, have the opportunity to intentionally guide this process to the benefit of the proceeding and following lines, as well as the poem overall.

Today, I offer you a tiny piece of crafting advice concerning what not to leave dangling at the line’s end/line’s break. If you’ve worked with me on The Centrifugal Eye literary journal, or on a freelance project, you may have already heard my take on this:

“Glue words.” Those would be prepositions, conjunctions, articles, pronouns, and helping verbs . . . those sorts of words. And why shouldn’t you break lines after glue words? Well, do we ever really want to see the glue holding things together? Glue isn’t meant to be seen. Glue words "stick" nouns, verbs, adjectives, and the occasional adverb, together. These latter words are the ones that stimulate vibrant images in our readers’ minds: peacock, pomegranate, gyrate, stretch, glistening, serrated, wildly. Right?

A line loses strength when it peters out on an empty abstraction, such as “the,” “and,” “your,” “onto,” “but,” “like,” “is/are.”

Some poets feel the first word in a line is the most important, and if this is you, too, by all means, try to also start each line on a high. However, it’s been my observation, as a longtime poetry editor, that words beginning a line just don’t engage the brain the same way as they do at line’s end — it’s by accumulation that words form pattern and concept, so the mind typically collects the first word or two in a line (or sentence) with a vague sense of abstraction, anyway.

Writers just turning to poetry often ask me how to go about writing a poem. My initial answer to them is to “focus on one line at a time.”

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