poetry: structure and line breaks

[supercheesegirl]

So I've been thinking. I wrote a poem recently and had the idea to use a syllabic line, and it totally worked. This is the first time that's ever happened--usually trying to put a poem into a form doesn't work for me at all.

When I was younger, I used to just make lines of poetry whatever length I felt like making them and put stanza breaks wherever they looked prettiest. In grad school, I realized I needed to be more thoughtful and consider my choices more carefully. I had a great conference with Ellen Bryant Voigt about this, actually, which really revolutionized the way I look at line breaks and structure. In that now I look at them and consider them. I still don't really know what to do with them. There were a few times where I tried to do something cool with rhythm or syllabics, but it was just me trying to do something cool rather than the structure serving the poem, so it never worked and I had to drop it, at least mostly.

Occasionally, I'll get a feeling that a certain line will need to end *here*, but otherwise, I mostly feel like any structure, stanza length, line length, whatever is pretty arbitrary. I feel like I do want stanza breaks in my poems, partly just for the space and the air, but my poems don't necessarily suggest stanza breaks; it's more like my poems tell stories and just sort of go on and on without many natural breaks. There are lots of times when, as I'm revising a poem, I just see how many lines there are and what that's divisible by to determine how many lines in a stanza. But there's no meaning to that!

This new poem is the first time I've ever had a structure that really mattered to the poem itself, a structure that contributes meaning to the poem. And you know, that feels really good. One of the things I admire about Ursula LeGuin is how she can write a novel and have the structure of it add meaning to the story. (Read The Dispossessed if you don't believe me.) I would like to be able to do that more.

So here's my question for y'all. When you're writing a poem, how do you determine the structure? Line breaks, rhythm, stanza length, etc. If you do the thing where you have your lines start in different places across the page horizontally, why do you do that? What leads you to making the choices that you make in setting up the "scaffolding" of a poem?

Comments

[birdmaddgirl.livejournal.com]

i work on a pretty broad range, but ultimately it comes down to instinct for me. i don't have any technical ability with cadence or stresses and since i've never actually taken a formal poetry writing class i have a limited self-taught understanding of poetic rules. (i actually bought the norton anthology of poetic forms, the making of a poem, recently in an attempt to work on this. of course, i haven't had time to read it yet...) i tend to break a line and/or a stanza where my ear tells me to. it's a sloppy ass way to do it, but i trust myself. i bounce individual words around a lot.

i really enjoy structured writing though. i like to let the subject matter dictate the structure when that makes sense to me. for many years, i had two ideas floating around in the back of my head, that i wanted to write a (series of) poem(s) from the perspective of eurydice and that i wanted to try my hand at a sestina. when i realized they were the same poem, good things happened. (i still think she and i have more things to say to each other, but only the one sestina.) sometimes i write the poem any old way and pick a structure later -- this is how i ended up with my delphi poem, once i had a good working draft of it, i knew that i wanted it to spiral in and back out and that i wanted the interior stanza to be three lines, like the tripod that the priestess would be sitting on when you made your way down to her. then it was just a matter of evening out the stanzas before and after to mirror one another, so that the journey back trod a similar path that could allow the shift in focus to play against the already-traveled form.

[x-hj-x.livejournal.com]

I rarely even have a solid idea of where the finished poem will go; I usually start with a line or two as the seed, and then everything crystallizes around it—sometimes forward, sometimes backward, sometimes both. At the end, sometimes the seed is the only part that needs to be removed.

So unless I deliberately set out to write a sestina or a sonnet or whatever, the structure is usually determined by how things grow around the seed. I'll write a stanza in a semi-arbitrary fashion and then repeat that same arbitrary structure, e.g. in a poem I'm working on now, the first three stanzas have the following form:

trochaic 4
open 2
open 3
open 4
open 4

where the numbers are the number of stressed beats per line—I've never worked in syllabics, because they never seem to lend any real rhythmical structure for me.

The arbitrary nature of the random-then-frozen form tends to dictate content, rather than content dictating form. What I thought I was writing turns into something completely different. When that doesn't happen, whatever I write feels forced.

For the second part, though, I'm writing in strict trochaic pentameter, and the regular rhythm lends a sense of formality and fatalism that's right for the section (I hope) and keeps the content from going off the rails. There's an authority inherent in regular forms that can be very effective when you need it.

So much poetry now seems to be prose with random line breaks thrown in. Sometimes I take the breaks out just to read it as prose, and see if I'm losing anything by doing that. Usually the answer is no.

I highly recommend The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry, as a thoroughly entertaining look at poetical forms and what they can mean, why different rhythms impart different shades of meaning, how line breaks can add dimension when chosen carefully, etc. I was only 30 pages in when I wrote my first Spenserian sonnet.

[supercheesegirl.livejournal.com]

So much poetry now seems to be prose with random line breaks thrown in.

Exactly! I want a poem to, you know, be a poem.

In grad school we had to take a class called the Structure of Verse, but... it wasn't the class it should have been. Our teacher was an absolute darling man, but he was very old and had a very soothing voice. Also, it wasn't a workshop. We just learned about various forms. I think it would have been much more useful if we'd been made to write in the forms we were learning about. Still, I have a ghazal that I don't think is terrible. Whiny, but not terrible. :)

[digital-e.livejournal.com]

I have similar issues with structure. I, too, took Structure of Verse but have no rhythm and am not good at counting out even iambic pentameter. Mine also sound very forced. Sometimes I work with syllabics. Sometimes, I'll work with a specific form, like the ghazal. I spent forever on my one villanelle. But a lot of it is still instinct for me. I don't want a line to end or start with certain words. I like my lines to be of similar length, and I don't like them too long or short. I'd like to think it's more than prose chopped up, that there is some internal rhythm at work

[handmadedark.livejournal.com]

Line breaks and stanza breaks are their own form of alchemy for me. I can't profess to always know why I make the breaks I do, but I often put considerable thought into it. Over the years, I've taken a handful of form-focused poetry classes and workshops, but I've never emerged from then longing to write in form.

As I'm writing a poem, the form often (but certainly not always) reveals itself to me. Sometimes it's through very specific words I want to break on, other times it's simply the rhythm. I rarely scan my own work, but I suspect that I'd find some consistent rhythmic tendencies if I did. The voice in the poem often leads the way as well---as you can seriously effect the pace of a poem with your break choices. As for starting on varying indented lines, for that choice is driven almost entirely by the aforementioned voice and packing, although occasionally content call out for this approach as well.

I have a friend who, at least for awhile, wrote all his poems out as block paragraphs and then teased the form out of it. His writing is so lyrical and dense though that there's no way you would ever mistake his poems for prose with line breaks. Often when I was stuck on a poem, I'd send it his way and he put it through his "form engine" (okay, so we're poetry geeks, I'm fine with that) and send it back with 5-7 different structural forms. It was always amazing how each structural form altered and influenced the poem.

[sleepyworm.livejournal.com]

writing a poem is exceedingly rare for me nowadays. But I have to say that I really enjoy writing when it's based on a specific meter (usually determined by the first line that gets written). The poem I posted a while back, it just felt like working on music to me. The beat came first and the words came second; it's like I had a word-shaped hole and I had to find the words that fit perfectly into that hole. Clearly I write without any semblance of form education; all I do is feel the sound and the shape of the words and push them around until they settle into the arrangement they want.

[pancom.livejournal.com]

I don't write poems cuz I'm a liar, not a poet (leastways, I don't write poems anyone wants to read). So I can't give you any real been-there advice. But I say if you want to work on form, then you should write poems in forms. What about all those forms you learned in structure? The fact that you didn't have to write in those forms was a mistake on the teacher's part. But you can make up for that mistake on your own. You can take those forms out, blow the dust off of them, and experiment with them. Consider it an exercise. And if you want to workshop what you've written, well, you've already stated you have a workshop's worth of poets here now. Hell, I might even pipe in with some non-poet comments.

[lilacgrrl.livejournal.com]

hey lady,
i'm the creative non-fiction editor of Saw Palm, USF's literary journal. http://www.sawpalm.usf.edu/1/aboutus.aspx We're publishing a hard copy next year and are about to enter the reading period. We accept all sorts of work, but are specifically looking for work that has some tangential connection to Florida. I would love for you to submit! Also, if you know of any writers to solicit, that would be great.

[robotpistol.livejournal.com]

I wrote you a really long comment and then tried to post it, and LJ said it exceeded the maximum character length. So I am going to e-mail it you instead.