A Lot of Hot Air

Thoughts engendered by a post on the Verse-Virtual Facebook page with a quote from a poem by Stanley Kunitz.

My first response was “is this really better than its prose equivalent – ‘My mother never forgave my father for killing himself’? To me the words work better unbroken.”

And this is not a knock on Kunitz, who is a marvelous poet with a keen ear, and who probably made it work. If I had read the rest of the poem, I’d probably think he nailed it. And I will. But not until after I finish writing this essay.

This is, of course, the big difference between poetry and prose. How do you tell if something is a poem? And yes, I know there are gray areas, but let’s look at the broad picture for now.

You can tell because it looks different on the page. In a piece of prose, the lines go all the way across the page, and they stop because they’ve gone as far as they can, and for no other reason. When they do stop before the far right hand margin of the page, it’s because the author has said all there is to say in that particular unit, and is ready to start again with a new paragraph. You can tell that what’s on this page is prose without reading it. Except for that odd couple of lines near the top, and when you read them, your suspicions are confirmed. I’m quoting a couple of lines of poetry. If you look down the page, you’ll be able to tell at a glance which parts are prose, and which are poetry. There…think of all the time I’ve saved you.

In a free verse poem, there are no rules for ending a line. No metric feet, no syllable count. Allen Ginsberg says a line should be the length of a breath, but so does Charles Olson, and if their typical line lengths are any guide, they must have breathed very differently.  

For that matter, Olson must have breathed differently at different times while he was writing. In “Cole’s Island,” his lines begin short and get longer. Perhaps he ran straight home after his encounter with Death and arrived out of breath, but as he went on, he recovered.

Here’s the first stanza of “Cole’s Island.”

Actually, what I get from reading this is (a) for Olson, as for Ginsberg, the breath-stop as a delimiter of the line is a lot of hot air (hard to believe he ran out of breath in the middle of “doing”), and (b) Olson has an unerring, pitch-perfect sense of what makes a line. This, as all of “Cole’s Island,” is scary good.

What can you say about the lines, other than they’re right? You can say that they start off short and get longer. Maybe he ran home and began the poem out of breath, and then started to recover.  But more likely, there are better theories. Certainly, the lines start off terse and assured. He knows what he saw, or thinks he does. He knows the point he wants to make. Or thinks he does. Maybe not. His thinking gets less and less certain, the lines longer and more tangled. Slacker? No. They’re never slack. But Olson does prove, here, that the imitative fallacy is not always such a fallacy. Tangled language really does give us the sensation of tangled, painful thought.

If I were editing a piece of prose for a magazine, I’d tell the writer, watch out for redundancy. You’ve got “suddenly” in two consecutive sentences. What’s this “would-wouldn’t-wouldn’t?” One of those good news/bad news jokes? But repetition has, or can have, a different value in poetry, and it’s a function of lineation.

 I remember a student story in Philip Roth's fiction workshop at Iowa. I don't remember the story, but I remember it ended with a one sentence paragraph, the sentence broken into two lines.

A few people commented that the ellipsis and the broken line were way too melodramatic, and the paragraph should simply read,

And the face she saw was her own.

Roth suggested that this was still too melodramatic, and that the sentence should be underplayed further. It had no business being a separate, one-sentence paragraph. Tack it on to the end of what had been the penultimate paragraph.

So line breaks matter even in prose, although not quite as much, and not quite in the same way.

Robert Frost famously said that writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down, and many people have countered that it’s a lot more difficult that way. It isn’t—it’s difficult as hell both ways—but it’s different. The challenges are different, and the rewards are different. And for yet a different challenge, you can try playing tennis with no net, no balls, and no rackets, like the mimes in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup.

And there is no one right way. I was told about one poet who writes his units of words out in prose, and only later breaks it up into lines. That shouldn’t work—it pretty much violates everything I can imagine being violated. But for this fellow, it does. My advice: don’t try this at home.

What should you try at home, if you’re writing free verse?

Mostly, remember that you’re writing a poem. The sound of words matter, the weight of words matters, and a line has to have some reason for being a line, even if it has nothing to do with breath. You don’t have to be able to articulate the reason, even to yourself, but you have to know it’s there.

Here’s the first part of Stanley Kunitz’s poem, “The Portrait,” and yes, it’s a poem, not chopped-up prose. It’s a poem of pain, and each line ending withholds a little of the pain, and each new line jabs you with a little more of it. You can read the whole poem at the Academy of American Poets’ website.