Shaping Surprise: The Art of Line Breaks in Love Poems
Ever wondered what unfolds when a line breaks unexpectedly? In this exploration, I delve into the realm of surprise within love poems, discussing the unique approaches of Agha Shahid Ali, Eloise Klein Healy, and George Oppen.
"Stationery" by Agha Shahid Ali
Ali's lines cascade like moonlight on paper:
The moon did not become the sun.
It just fell on the desert
in great sheets, reams
of silver handmade by you.
In this cosmic invitation, the syllabic dance creates a rhythmic ebb and flow. The line breaks here act as a magician's reveal, dropping paper leaflets on the wind, urging, "Write to me."
The syllables per line tally thusly: 8, 7, 4, 7, 10, 9, 7, 3. The line shrinks itself down, and then opens back up once more before shortening again. But no need to count; line length can be felt even when not measured. The poem reaches its longest line at "The night is your cottage industry now." After that point, it shrinks back down again and ends on the shortest line: "Write to me."
In the introduction to Mad Heart Be Brave: Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, Kazim Ali writes, "The Urdu and Arabic forms, including the ghazal, Ali worked in lend themselves to this treatment of the line as a unit of poetry itself [...] In all of Ali’s poetry, one really hears the line quoted against space."
Activity: Feel the cadence of your own poem. Experiment with line lengths to mimic the pulse of your emotions.
"Asking About You" by Eloise Klein Healy
Healy's prose poem breaks free from lineation, creating an urgent intimacy:
Instead of having sex all the time, I like to hold you...
In this unbroken stream of desires, Healy's words flow like a love letter. The absence of line breaks intensifies the urgency, capturing the essence of a conversation where every moment is precious. Healey's eight sentences sans line breaks focuses attention on the cadences of a speaker becoming more emboldened. James Longenbach's idea of feeling the "possibility of [the line's] presence" in a prose poem (from The Art of the Poetic Line) resonates here, as the prose form dances with the prospect of lineation.
Activity: Imagine your poem as a letter. Experiment with and without line breaks, sensing where the words breathe best.
"The Forms of Love" by George Oppen
Oppen's deliberate line breaks unveil the memory of a lover's night:
Parked in the fields
All night
So many years ago,
Each subsequent break is a spotlight on the main clauses (the roots of the sentences: "We saw," "I remember," "I remember," "We groped," "We walked.") This guides the reader through a journey of perception and memory. The surprises lie in the revelations after each break, mirroring the act of remembering—unfolding piece by piece.
His line breaks propel us further into the poem's image, and finally, into the uncertainty of the image. They also soften the poem's distinctions between the past and present modes of experience. Line breaks can provide an unexpected relationship to time by creating literal cracks or portals internal to the grammatical sentence. They offer surprising places to rest outside of the relentless forward motion of time. How lovely is that?
Activity: Reflect on the pacing of your poem. Experiment with breaks to emphasize moments of revelation or introspection.
Open to Surprise: A Line Breaks Revision Activity
Take a journey into your own poem. Remove line breaks from a poem in progress, and read it anew. Sense where breaks want to emerge naturally, bringing fresh intention to each one. Whether drawing the reader closer to an image or structuring a perception, let the surprises guide your revisions.
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