In Praise of Process: Writing and Revising the Poetic Line
On pushing the limits of language through line breaks, plus revision prompts and example poems
In our last In Praise of Process post, “What Good is Poetry in Times of Crisis?,” we considered a question that can often make writers feel stuck: How do we write in the face of systemic violence? And how does the poet’s craft straddle liberation and obfuscation, depending on how language is deployed?
This week, we want to further consider how these questions around “writing in the face of violence” can take on a new layer of meaning when we understand that sometimes, the writer’s craft is rife with tools that can themselves be understood as “violent” — specifically, the poetic line.
The Poetic Line
Line breaks, enjambment, and caesura (a term borne from the Latin verb caedere, meaning “to cut,” now understood to mean an end-stop in the middle of a poetic line) all violate the prescribed grammar of a sentence. Subjects are divorced from their verbs, adjectives from their nouns; the natural pause at the end of a clause is denied, with enjambment shoving the reader ever onward. Even the terms we use for these poetic tools—“breaking a line” or “cutting a sentence”—are themselves metaphors borrowed from the realm of injury, of trauma wrought upon the body.
When poetic craft is viewed through this lens of violence, it can raise a question of whether turning to poetry in a time of violent crisis is truly as healing or liberatory as we’d like to believe. One might question how violently breaking a sentence into pieces can lead to healing or wholeness.
Poetic tools, such as line breaks, can truly push the limits of language. They are scalpels—instruments of violence that can mete out harm but also, when deftly wielded, healing.
Breaking a line, when done with purpose and care, can unlock the communicative possibilities buried within a sentence. The writer, through playing with language and intentionally breaking the rules, resists confining or prescriptive edicts and invents new languages to say the unsayable—expressing deep and complex ideas more piercingly and concisely than would be possible through a prosaic article and argument.
This week, we simply want to offer you a few examples and revision strategies to strengthen your line breaks—to play with where your lines begin and end, how they expand and contract, within your poems.
