Line Breaks

must be related to cats. Understanding aside, often they elude one's best efforts even to befriend them. Curious creatures, they.

A line break causes and solves problems. It interrupts the scan of a poem (if not the reading of it) but it may add something to the line interrupted: line-meaning. Thanks partly to the break (and partly to the words and punctuation that operate before it), the whole line gets to break from the rest of the poem and raise its own flag of meaning. The flag might be a discrete thought; a whisper of some unfinished thought, provocatively or otherwise purposefully unfinished; a resonance word or phrase (often the pivot of a thought or the turning point in a story); or a summary or encapsulation or focal point of what has been said or of what will be said. Line-meanings come packaged with many intentions, and their effects on one's attentions are more various still.

But let me make this more personal. Sometimes I wake, like I did this morning, with thoughts about how to change a set of line breaks in a poem I've already written (in this case, an old poem I hadn't thought much about since writing). I make the changes and save a new version. Potentially something gained; nothing lost. But then I smoke on the thought: It's strange how fragile a poem is. I'm more amenable to edits than a lot of would-be poets are, I bet, especially in the first hours after a poem's would-be birth and in the first couple days after that. But it's strange. I change a stanza's line breaks and the whole poem has a new light. Sometimes it's brighter and I get a little tickle in the stomach, and sometimes it's dimmer but I feel like I did the right thing. Switching metaphors, poems as I currently write them are balloons in their early stages of being blown: A little inhalation and the thing sags and wrinkles (sometimes interestingly); a little push of breath and it tightens and expands.

And since my relationship to poems as I currently write them is more that of discoverer than architect, there's a feedback in play when I change a few line breaks. Usually my unhappiness with some break -- it's too boring and too many near it are boring (boring breaks are inevitable -- if everything sings you get noise -- but too many and you can sap a poem's energy), or it's posturing more depth than it can deliver, or it's confusing and not a good confusing, and so on -- is what starts me down the road (that runs through sleep) to changing it. But once I do change it, the game is up for grabs. The words added to or taken from the following line make it necessary to re-think that line and its break. And the process repeats itself on down the poem (If I sound like a programmer checking his own code, that's because I am, in effect.). Then the wholes get their say: Each stanza and the full poem, in their new light, make me want to tinker with line breaks poem-wide all the more. Sometimes I resist but usually I don't.

I realize I'm making this sound more neurotic than it really is. O the navels I've gazed. It's a burden, yes, but most times it's also fun -- fine lines, I suppose, between compulsions and needs and between needs and pleasures.