END-STOPS
.
Before I lose interest in other writing I should ask what poetry is.
Today, strictly speaking, poetry is almost always free verse, which is
sometimes prose.
Free verse, though, is not freedom from rules, which would not be liberating.
Free verse is the freedom to choose your own rules, which is liberating.
Poetry, then, is a textual act which does not privilege a single reading.
Rules, techniques, forms, are methods of identifying and manipulating
parameters of a poem.
These parameters can include a range of interdependent and independent
aspects of language.
These aspects can include what words sound like (rhyme) or how many words.
They can include grammatic structures, recognizable or not, and how words
are spelled.
They can include, as we shall see, how poetry is arranged on paper.
A poet can even concern herself exclusively with exactly what the poem
means.
Strictly speaking, though, writing that does that isnt poetry
its the other kind.
She is also free to disregard this aspect of language the semantic
altogether.
.
Whatever poetry is is only immediately obvious to the eye: it has line-breaks.
These line breaks compliment, contradict, confound, and compete with
real or implied punctuation.
Thus, verse is an erratic polyrhythm: breaks, syntax, (and rhyme and
meter) simultaneously.
Of these three interdependent systems, breaks seem to be the hardest
to theorize.
Unlike punctuation, the break "has not been regulated or domesticated,"
writes James Scully.
Unlike punctuation, grammar, syntax, meter and rhyme; "It has not been
theorized." (127)
The terminology: end-stop, caesura, enjambment to indicate grammar and
line-breaks agreement and discrepancy.
An end-stop is a rational alignment of line-end and punctuation
implied or actual.
A caesura is a pause midline, with punctuation implied, actual,
or represented unconventionally.
Enjambment: a line-end when there is no grammatic or phonetic pause
incorrect punctuation.
Either grammar and line pause together or separately, but they usually
do both.
Assuming, of course that there is grammar sometimes only breaks
ration the text.
And in the case of concrete poetry there are lines in no sequence.
.
For sake of clarity in this paper I will use several terms incorrectly.
I am only concerned with poetry with line breaks (and writing about it).
Thus I will use "prose" to refer to grammatical writing with usual punctuation.
"(advantage of prose
its linebreaks being hidden/ demands the reader
work)." (Silliman 98)
"the break is where/ meaning is not, which is its own/ content" (104)
I will use "verse" to refer to writing with an overt metric structure.
Most of the poetry I analyze will be prose, little of it verse.
Prose makes its poems line-breaks significant even as its punctuation
renders them unnecessary.
Line-breaks distract from the structure of prose, but draw attention
to verses structure.
The associations between lineation and verse are, at this point, quite
well established.
Whereas the rationality of prose seems to contradict the divine intuitiveness
of lineation.
Even when the breaks fall exactly on the periods there is some conflict.
Sentences and lines seem to demand different modes of reading, even when
together.
.
"Line is the essence of verse" writes Robert Wallace in his Writing
Poems.
"The concept of the line is fundamental to the concept of poetry itself."
So says the 1993 edition of the Princeton Guide to poetry and Poetics.
"A formal structural division of a poem" said the equivalent passage
in 1965.
Barbara Herrnstein Smith: "The fundamental unit of poetic form is the
line." (38)
Turcos New (1986) Book of Forms calls line-breaks
used as punctuation "line phrasing."
"Verse is language in lines. This distinguishes it from prose."
Says Charles Hartmann.
End-stopping is "oracular," while enjambment is "meditative and ruminative
or private." (Fussell, 80-1)
Frank Scully writes: "Line breaks define energy. They may let the air
out,
redistribute rhythm, shift the weight of a word, reset our relationship
to it
.
"The line break is the most volatile, productive punctuation in free
verse." (127)
Charles Olson equated the line with the breath, one exhalation of a speaker.
Denise Levertov: the line-break is a half-comma, the line the poets
inner voice.
.
I find useful the distinction between Olsons outer voice and Levertovs
inner voice.
I think of it as a distinction between the phonetic and grammatic levels.
A line-break can exist instead of or in opposition to a punctuation mark.
A line-break can also reinforce or undermine aspects of a texts
sound structure.
A lines system of stressed and unstressed syllables reflects its
grammar only loosely.
A lines sequence of consonant and vowel sounds is irrelevant to
its grammar.
A line-break can disrupt or facilitate assonance, consonance, sibilance,
echoes, puns, and alliteration.
"The oldest prosody
is based
on grammatically parallel language
structures." (Turco 8)
"Phrasal repetitions at
beginnings of lines
create an effect
called
anaphora." (Fussell 80)
A lines length is (usually) maximized by the page width, but not
minimized.
A line-break can even occur in the middle of an insignificant one-syllable
word.
A line-break structure is as inevitable as the interrelated grammatic
and sound structures.
The line-break however, can bolster, oppose, comment on, ignore, and
influence these structures.
.
"L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E LINES," a chapter in The Line in Postmodern Poetry,
offers the following:
"
in favor of difference & a more individualized interior, an
intrinsic legitimacy" (178)
Parts of the poem are not subservient to the grammar of the whole.
"Polyrhythms spatial counterpart, lack of (regular, traditional)
closure as generative, tensions restored." (177)
The grammar shattered, the shards gleam along angles of their own sharp
edges.
"Not simply to restate the obvious, but to open it up, smack
" (180)
Line-breaks can open (for interpretation) a closed (single-meaning) poem
or texts recognizable phrases.
"The line thus has been set off as the mark of artifice
" (183)
An essay with stanzas will read differently than the same essay in paragraphs.
"
prose has never petitioned the line as a sign of a value." (198)
Perhaps because paragraphs are careful the sentences bundled tightly
together for (their/writers) protection.
"There is no such thing as the line
. line --- may exist."
(211)
The line means that it is uncharacterizable, and its text a controlled
ambiguity.
.
The line-break can also set up a rhythm that supersedes the other rhythms.
The line break can divide its lines into equal syllable or word counts.
Such breaks can tick off lines independently of grammatic or phonetic
rhythmic patterns.
An example is May Swensons poem "Four-Word Lines," a poem with
four-word lines.
The poems word-per-line rhythm is a metronome that drowns out grammar
and phonetics.
The sentence lengths are (in number of words) 12, 10, 18, 28, 20.
The line-lengths in syllables range from four to five with two six-syllable
lines.
The tension between line length and sentence length is a sort of syncopation:
"Your eyes are just/ like bees, and I/ Feel like a flower." (1)
The line has three downbeats to the sentences two: they are a polyrhythm.
The first two lines are iambic bimeter, the third a long rocking foot.
The next sentence: "Their brown power makes/ a breeze go over/ my skin."
This assonant rise and fall reverses the meter to the beat of line.
.
In this paper I will investigate where line-breaks and caesuras in poetry
are.
As Swensons poem demonstrates, some breaks may result from counting
words in lines.
Precision of this sort is infrequent, and counting words in sentences
is rarer.
Perloffs "The Return of the (Numerical) Repressed," addresses this
rarity -- counting:
Mathematics repairs "`ruin of a free verse determined
primarily by speech rhythm." (170)
An alternate view is that mathematics can sculpt those sentences unlikely
to say.
Throughout this paper I will use mathematics to measure poetry and demonstrate
proportions.
I will also rely on my understanding of formal grammar, also as measure.
I hope to show how line-breaks are parameters that have effects on me.
I hope to pay attention to how line-breaks are manipulated to end poems.
Adrienne Richs An Atlas of the Difficult World is useful
for investigating endings.
Well-written, it has deliberate endings of lines, stanzas, poems, poem-cycles,
and the book.
I will also read recently-re/published poems by Audre Lorde, Jorie Graham,
Tory Dent.
.
The final stanza of Jorie Grahams "Chaos (Eve)" employs accelerated
end-stopping for effect.
Here every line ends with a period: "The tree rose into sight. Stayed./
The question of the place of origin is not true, too slow." (131)
Because the poem has anticipated this moment structurally, the effect
here is dramatic.
The caesuras and sentence fragments shift force to the line-ends, acting
as upbeats.
Throughout its duration, the poem moves from enjambment to end-stopping:
commas to periods.
Enjambed stanza-breaks tie the stanzas together, periods at line-ends
pull the lines apart.
Sentence fragments and a sentence beginning with a conjunction sutures
a caesura together:
"Stepped free./ And yes it was a poorer land then./ Birds everywhere."
(131)
Enjambment binds stanza breaks, grammatic parallelism binds line-breaks,
and conjunctions bind sentence breaks.
On different levels the poem works to rejoin its own unnatural divisions:
breaks.
As the periods and line-breaks converge the divisions are instead accented
rapidly, pulsing.
Two bouncing balls synch up, accelerating as they slow down to a stop.
.
"10" of Adrienne Richs "Eastern War Time" does something nearly
opposite: decelerated end-stopping.
More than a third of the poems 25 lines are nine words long.
The grammatic parallelism accents the end-stopping: the parallel (implied)
periods of flat declarations:
"Im a canal in Europe where bodies are floating/ Im a mass
grave
.
Im a corpse dredged from a canal in Berlin/ a river in Mississippi"
Here the enjambment is found in line-beginnings (I cant use the
term "attack.")
The line-beginnings are also where the end-stopping and grammatic parallelism
are most prominent.
Lines two through eleven all start with the word (and grammatic formation)
"Im."
Lines twelve and thirteen start with "is" and "in" respectively,
offering alphabetic parallelism.
Lines fifteen through eighteen start with "I have," though fifteen has
a caesura.
After line nineteens "Im," only three of the last eight lines
start "I."
Grammatic (and alphabetic) parallelism reinforces an initial almost-consistent
use of end-stops as periods.
But the final line-breaks (and caesuras) are commas, dissolving in a
smoky mirror.
.
Tory Dents end-stopped, grammatically immaculate lines are frequently
too wide for the page.
The poem "What Silence Equals" has five interlinked nine-to-thirteen-line
stanzas in cyclic form.
The last line of each stanza is the first of the following stanza.
Consistent with that structure, the last line of the poem is also first.
(Like "Eastern War Time" which begins with the image of the smoky mirror.)
"Where the homogenous wind beats the wild grass closer to the quiet ground,"
The effect of her long line-phrased, end-stopped lines is a closed, forceful
syntax.
A second effect is the apparent division of the poem into interrelated
noun-phrases.
This effect may be an effect of the three word-lines following repeated
lines.
"Homogenous, wild, quiet/" is the second line following the first/last
line cited above.
Dents practiced syntax and frequently punctuated (commas) line-ends
clarify her poems semantic ambiguities.
The line-breaks are, for the most part, backgrounded and used to diagram
sentences.
This, though, intensifies enjambment in "Eternal Snow": "for forced prematurely
with warm water/".
.
End-stopping is logical an adherence of a poems typography
with its grammatic structure.
A line has to end and a sentence doesnt -- breaks influence grammar
also.
End-stopping means the most when employed in combination with caesuras
and enjambments.
The relationship of these aspects may shift throughout the duration of
the poem.
It may have a sudden or gradual change between line and grammatic unit.
A metaphor that works for me is A POEM IS A TRAP SET.
The periods (real or implied) are the bass drum marking major
rhythmic units.
The commas are the snare staggered with the bass, dividing major
rhythmic units.
The lines are the highhat they tick off a beat of their own.
The highhat is usually in synch with bass and snare, but usually faster.
Equally-sized lines ending on periods are analogous to hitting all three
drums simultaneously.
Your expert jazz drummer will seldom do that, only occasionally for emphatic
emphasis.
It is the interaction of the different rhythms that makes for exciting
drumming.
.
ENJAMBMENTS
.
In this essay I hope to propose a temporary taxonomy of line-breaks.
Punctuation,
with its established forms, provides a useful way of distinguishing end-stopped
lines. For
example, we can distinguish between a line that ends where a comma would
be (or is) as opposed to a line that ends where a period
is or would be. There is no equivalent measure of enjambments: I am
using "enjambment" to mean lines that end where no punctuation should
be. End-stopped
lines frequently employ line-breaks to reinforce the actual or implied
punctuation, or simply
instead of punctuation. The enjambed line does something else. It disrupts
the rhythm
of the punctuation and achieves a variety of difficult-to-classify effects.
Grammar may still
provide a certain measure a line that breaks between an article
and its
noun is more enjambed than line-breaks between noun and verb. A line
that
breaks between sentences, clauses, or between subject and predicate,
is thus even less
enjambed. However, enjambments have more to do with words than part of
speech.
.
Enjambment is peculiar. It is easier to measure the weight of a downbeat
than the lift of an upbeat. Sometimes words change meaning when the line
is truncated. Transitive verbs are momentarily frozen intransitive. Sometimes
a pause is meaningful,
but sometimes line-breaks seem to reflect no meaning whatsoever, as in
prose. For
example, a break between an article and its noun. Even a break between
modifier and modified seems to work against meaning. When there is not
only
no speech pause but no distinction between grammatic units, a line break
is
a foregrounded absence. A line-break at these times may seem irritating,
playful, or
dramatic. Enjambment means, but what and how? Is it theorizable, or is
it,
as Scully writes, a practice, not a technique, meaning only meaningful
in a
social context. Not as a feature of an artifact, a style removed from
intentions, but as an exchange between writer and reader. To take Scullys
reasoning
further we would have to begin investigating the context of each reader
individually.
.
Jorie Grahams "I Was Taught Three" has an enjambed title. "The
illusion is
that the poem is magically organic that not even a part traditionally
considered
separable can distance itself." (Fussell 81) The poem moves towards enjambment
-- by
stanza eight enjambing every line and then away again to the final
end-stopped
period. Stanza nine: "was loyal. No, this/ was all first person, and
I"
(6) A very abrupt, awkward, terse, and distracting effect. It is a poem
about the translucence of language the three colored filters of
Grahams native tongues
and it illuminates its own medium. We cannot follow the lines this way,
no matter how perfect the grammar. The line breaks are as unnatural and
artificial as language. We are groping with the shattered syntax of an
alien
dialect when Graham gives our speech back to us. "that governs blossoming?
The
human tree/ clothed with its nouns, or this one" (7) The lens is
a magnifying glass which makes seven sentences seem to fill two entire
pages.
.
"XIII (DEDICATIONS)" of Richs "An Atlas of the Difficult World"
features hidden enjambments
line-breaks which occur between clauses line-phrasing more subtle
than commas. Each line ends
as if the end of the thought, the sentence, but each line-beginning forces
us to retroactively correct that impression, continuing the sentence:
"I know you are
reading this poem/ late, before leaving your office/ of the one intense
yellow
lamp-spot and the darkening window/ in the lassitude of a building faded
to
quiet/ long after rush-hour." Every line can be read as the end of
the sentence (and many of them are), in fact, except lines 25 and
26 of this 37-line poem, which are enjambed, particularly line 27 which
breaks
between "thick" and "lens." This reading assumes that the indented lines
are not
breaks but continuations of the lines above. The effect is strange. In
a
poem addressing its readers directly, each of these continuations entails
greater risk. The
first line "I know you are reading this poem" is, after all, true.
Specific effects enjambment has on certain words include ways of distorting
the word
by briefly delaying what follows it. The next line may cause us to
retroactively correct our impression of what the word was doing. This
doesnt happen
with a line ending in an article. The article is simply a severed
"the," there is little meaning to be wrung from it. In certain contexts,
transitive verbs, ending a line, may appear momentarily transitive. Other
words might change
meaning and part of speech altogether as a result of being detached from
the words that follow them. A line-break can be used to blur a
word between two of its definitions, most noticeably at a line-end. Of
course,
where a line begins is also relevant. A line might mean differently when
read without the words that precede it. This involves no retroactive
correction: when
we misinterpret the part of speech or the definition of a word that
ends a line, it is because the next line retroactively, recognizably
recontextualized it.
.
An example of transformational enjambment at a line-end can be found
in Audre
Lordes "Martha." "On the eighth day you startled the doctors/ speaking
from your
death place/ to reassure us you were still/" and the next line is
"trying." Or "Neighbors": "We made strong poems for each other/ exchanging
formulas for
each particular magic/ all the time pretending/ we were not really witches/
and
each of us went back/ to her own particular magic/ confirmed believing/
she
was always alone/ believing/ the other/ was always lying/" and the poem
ends
"in wait." "Enjambment" refers to line-ends, but enjambed caesuras are
also possible. In
"Now that I am Forever with Child" three out of four caesuras, represented
by spaces, are fully enjambed: "I recall you/ growing heavy against the
wind."
Such enjambments open a closed text, blur distinctions and definitions,
create a controlled
ambiguity, and make the language more opaque foregrounding the
poem as artifact. They
prevent us from being caught up in the poems grammar, rhythm, or
meaning.
.
When I identify enjambed stanzas or caesuras, I am taking the first step
towards assuming that these terms can be reapplied on different scales
with a
similar meaning. Assuming the stanza is the poetic unit of meaning larger
than
the line, and that the word is the unit of meaning smaller than
the line; if I can write about enjambed stanzas can I discuss enjambed
words as well? I see no reason why not. Audre Lordes "THE AMERICAN
CANCER SOCIETY OR THERE IS MORE THAN ONE WAY TO SKIN A COON":
"Of all the ways in which this country/ Prints its death upon me/
Selling me cigarettes is one of the most certain/ Yet every day I
watch my son digging/ ConEdison GeneralMotors GarbageDisposal/ Out of
his nose as he
watches a 3-second spot" In one sense, she is merely correcting these
compound
words, the parallelism draws a parallel to "GarbageDisposal." She makes
it clear she
is not endorsing these companies. Here, enjambed words spell sarcasm
to the reader.
.
Scullys Line Break is excellent. It is central to the inspiration
for this
paper, if not the content. It is beautiful how he politicizes line-breaks
almost
without hesitation. After bad rhyme, line-breaks are central to popular
misconceptions of poetry
in all epochs. They are identifiable: you can point to them. Poetry itself:
capricious, enslaved to the poets intuition, aesthetic effect perhaps
of interest to technical
specialists. But Scully does not for a moment allow that the line-break
is
arbitrary, pretty, cool, purposefully irritating or self-consciously
poetic. For him it is always
a political strategy, always in a context and language already lost to
time.
And he and I are in agreement that poetry is already political, but
somewhere else in disagreement. That to translate a poems meter,
one should translate
not that meter but its relationship to its audience. He is not in
favor of fetishizing scrupulously inept, precisely naïve technical
experiments. He wants the context,
I want outdated meters and cocktails: quantitative classical meter, absinthe-and-martinis.
Not technique: techniques.
.
In Charles Bernsteins essay with line-breaks "Artifice of Absorption,"
he proposes the notion
of "absorption." A text or one of its aspects may have an "absorptive"
or "antiabsorptive" effect. Bernsteins metaphor is an extension
of one of those we
live by: we are absorbed by mystery novels, we are absorbed by work,
we are absorbed by our lovers. It is Bernsteins notion of the "anti-absorptive"
where the metaphor has been extended. We dont want to be
totally absorbed
by our work or our lovers or our children. We need to escape
from them into our mystery novels where, on the other hand, being absorbed
means a good and compelling book. An enjambed line can be anti-absorptive.
It
distances us from the content of the poem by disrupting our reading in
ways that remind us that we are, after all, reading. "Absorption is blocked
by misting/ this glass, or by breaking it, or/ by painting on its
surface. Any/ typographic irregularity,/ any glitch in expected/ syntax,
any/ digression
" (Poetics 33-4)
.
Another poet associated with the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement whose terminology
may be useful here
is Lyn Hejinian. In Writing/Talks in her talk "The Rejection
of Closure," Hejinian
distinguishes between the "open" and "closed" text. Her title does not,
apparently, use
"closure" in the sense normally attributed to poetry (the sense Barbara
Herrnstein Smith
uses in the title of her book) that of a poem with a
neat ending and an intact logical or formal structure. Hejinian: "For
the sake
of clarity, we can say that a closed text is one in which
all the elements of the work are directed towards a single reading and
delivers the text from any lurking ambiguity." (270) An enjambed line
("obvious when
encountered" (271)) may serve to open a closed text. It may cause us
pause, to wonder "why did Rich break this line after "this"? Hejinian
also
includes grammatic parallelism as a technique that might open a closed
text. Her
reasoning is elegant, and is behind much L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetries. Here
is a paragraph:
.
I perceive the world as vast and overwhelming; each moment stands under
an
enormous vertical and horizontal pressure of information, potent with
ambiguity, meaning-full, unfixed, and
certainly incomplete. What saves this from becoming a vast undifferentiated
mass of data
.
.
The open text, by definition, is open to the world and particularly to
the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer
over the
reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social,
economic, cultural)
hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive.
Reader and
writer engage in a collaboration from which ideas and meanings are permitted
to
evolve. The writer relinquishes total control and challenges authority
on principle and control
as a motive. The open text often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either
the
process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by
readers, and thus
resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material,
turn it
into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification. (Writing/Talks
271, 272)
CAESURAS
.
To clarify: end-stopped and enjambed are opposite ends of a spectrum.
A caesura,
like a line-break, can be at either end of this spectrum. Usually it
is somewhere in the middle. In fact, I do not yet have the
terminology to distinguish line-breaks from caesuras. For me, a caesura
is a line-break
that happens mid-line. It must be punctuated (a line-break is, in effect,
an
ambiguous punctuation mark given meaning by its context). A caesura
is usually indicated
by an extra space between words. It can also be indicated by a
double-colon, or simply any punctuation. A caesura can be implied
by grammatic structure
where a punctuation mark should be but it is still not
there. As
in the implied commas of "EASTERN WAR TIME" "I": "darkblue wool wet acrid
on her hands" or "chariots horses draperies certitudes." Or in "3": "DAUGHTER
BORN
LAST NIGHT STOP DOING WELL." Line-breaks differ from caesuras in two
respects. A
poem must have line-breaks. Line-breaks are a punctuation mark, caesuras
indicated by one.
.
These are my definitions for the purpose of this paper. I will call
"implied caesuras" pauses in a line both natural and unnatural. A natural
pause
could be a missing comma or period implied by the grammatic structure.
An
unnatural pause could be an unrecognizable grammatic structure. A sequence
of seemingly unrelated
nouns will sound the rhythm of a list. Pauses will fill spaces between
words when it is not clear how they are related. These spaces are
what Ron Silliman calls "points of non-integration." "Is it the same
or different
if the point of non-integration takes place at a linebreak as when it
happens in the middle of a traditionally punctuated paragraph..? In fact,
isnt non-integration
and the shifting of semantics at the level of grammar precisely what
punctuation
attempts to articulate, perhaps even to obliterate, through convention?"
(122) Punctuation, including caesuras
and line-breaks, can also create points of non-integration where everything
otherwise fits. An
inexplicable caesura or line-break dis-integrates, opens, the text. It
is an anti-absorptive technique.
.
There are examples of transformationally enjambed caesuras in "EASTERN
WAR TIME." In "I":
"the streetcar she must ride/ to become one of a hundred girls". Or
in "4": "but in terrible Europe/ anything was possible surely?" The first
example
changes the meaning of "one" subtly. (It is grammatically possible simply
to "become
one") In the second example the caesura seems to indicate a hesitation
I
read as doubt. The "surely" retroactively weakens the "anything was possible."
In "3"
the caesura seems to have a mimetic function: a space indicates emptiness.
"SITUATION
DIFFICULT ether of messages/ in capital letters silence". Elsewhere in
the ten-poem cycle
caesuras stand in for commas, periods, colons, and question marks ("2"):
"whats an
American girl/ in wartime her
" Rich may be using caesuras and line-breaks
to
serve the same purposes. Her choice between them may be to maintain line-lengths
within a certain range. There are only a few lines as short as
three words in the ten-poem cycle. Only "1", "4", and "10" have commas.
.
In "4" caesuras are indicated with colons. Lines four and seven (out
of
eleven) consist of quotes. In addition to quotation marks, these lines
have colons
at the beginning and end. These colons are separated from the line by
spaces. These caesuras are placed where a pause is already indicated
by the
line-breaks. The caesuras must be doing something other than indicating
a pause here.
In other parts of the book colons are stacked ungrammatically. ("An Atlas
of
the Difficult World" and in "Through Corralitos under Rolls of Cloud."
) The
colons in "Eastern War Time" frame the quotes in irony. "this is what
our parents were trying to spare us" racial violence prevalent
in U.S. And
"But this is the twentieth century." In which brutality and barbarism
are more
frightening then ever. Strangely the poem ends with quotes without punctuation.
The final
quotes the ones never said are simply italicized. "how
do you say unfold,
my flower, shine, my star/ and we are hated, being what we
are"
.
Take "6" of Adrienne Richs "EASTERN WAR TIME." It has a caesura
every
line except four. Of the 18-line poem, only lines one, thirteen, fifteen,
and
seventeen do not have a caesura, elsewhere indicated by a double-space.
The line-ends
are a mixture of comma, period and ungrammatic end-stops and enjambments.
Thus is
ambiguity created in certain lines. "youre fourteen, fifteen/ classmates
from Vilna" could be
taken at least two ways. It could mean ages fourteen, fifteen versus
fourteen
or fifteen different classmates. The effect of these consistent caesuras
is to fragment
and disorient. It prevents a coherent fragment of words from forming
beyond a
certain length. It conveys panic. It is like walking through a forest
looking
for snipers between trees. It has a march rhythm. The text weaves in
and out of its gaps. Parts of sentences emerge. "you never knew the
forest outside Vilna/ could hide so many would have to." The confusion
between
enjambed and unfinished sentences compounds the confusion between the
second and third person.
.
That last caesura, between "many" and "would" functions almost as a slash.
It
hinges a sort of a parallelism. It divides paths the sentence could or
does take. In the last example, the caesura functioned as an and-slash.
In
other instances, a caesura might function as an or-slash. A caesura divides
the
syntax into mutually exclusive simultaneous parallel structures. This
can be seen in "1948:
JEWS." "---Marry out, like your father/ she didnt write
She wrote for
wrote/ against him" It is clear that all three of the possibilities
are
exclusive: she didnt write / she wrote for / she wrote against.
The
enjambed "against" does not, however, support my interpretation of this
structure. None of
these investigations, sadly, brings me any closer to understanding caesuras.
Do they differ
from a line-break when used in the same position? A gap in the
line is disorienting, but less so. It indicates a gap while the line-break
performs it. It can transform words, but the retroactive correction is
nearly instantaneous.
.
"FINAL NOTATION," uses caesuras as "but"s. "FINAL NOTATION," the ultimate
poem of An
Atlas of the Difficult World, must end deliberately. The poem
has a caesura
in every line in three of the four stanzas. These caesuras are overtly,
misleadingly parallel. They are all commas. However, they function grammatically
as missing conjunctions
joining what are otherwise independent sentences. "it will not be simple,
it will
not be long/ it will take little time, it will take all your
thought/ it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath/
it will be short, it will not be simple." In lines one, three
and four, the caesuras would seem to be "buts." In line three I
would expect an "and." I read stanza two as "and" "but" "and," and
"and." In stanza three similar line-lengths (and identical stanza lengths)
to stanzas one
and two create the afterimages of commas where there are none. Stanza
four
reads "and" and "and." No "but"s but "and"s (close) the stanza, poem,
book.
.
When we equate line-breaks with caesuras, poetry dissolves. What little
these marks conventionally
denote disappears. There is poetry, as we shall see, that abandons the
difference
between caesuras and spaces. There is poetry that abandons punctuation
and grammar. There
is poetry that abandons the left margin. There is poetry that abandons
the
horizontal line and finally the line altogether. Alice Notleys
poem "White Phosphorus" uses
a unique type of caesura. The poem is written in quote sentence fragments,
apparently with line-breaks. The sentence fragments seldom add up to
anything grammatically coherent.
"Whose heart" "might be lost?" "Whose mask is this?" "Who has a mask,
& a heart?" "Has your money" "been published, been shown?" "Who can
&
cant breathe?" "Who went" "to Vietnam?" ("We know who died there")
(Messerli 504)
There are numerous identifiable enjambments. There are particularly anti-absorptive
quoted fragments enjambed between
stanzas. Caesuras here, however, require rethinking. The gaps between
quotes arent quite the
same. Inexplicable space mid-sentence is conventional in comparison to
spaces in Notleys poem.
.
Lyn Hejinian is another poet who makes these relatively useful terms
inapplicable. I
have seen three books of her poetry. Each one is formatted consistently
differently
from the others and consistently throughout itself. My Life is
essentially written in
40-word paragraphs, presumably without line-breaks. The Cell can
also be described as written
in paragraphs. It has small paragraphs with a hanging indent. Writing
is an
Aid to Memory confounds the notion of caesura. It is written
in small
ungrammatic fragments indented freely. The fragments have implied caesuras
but no caesuras. The
line-breaks are less noticeable than the indentation. It is divided into
42 numbered
parts of varied lengths. The Sun & Moon edition has no page numbers.
It ends: "the situation is in fast with fast evidence/ it is now
a rarity/ I glance toward what the eye can pronounce aside/ an addition
of information must fly". There are grammatic and ungrammatic structures
in a sequence
of brief phrases. The breaks do not delay or distort meaning. They mean.
.
Leslie Scalapinos "Or" is a play with line breaks and caesuras.
The caesuras,
indicated by dashes, are notable in their frequency and where they occur.
"or/
-others/ -ah, (a sigh)/ -or/ as -oar// boy/ beaten -and gang/ abused,
as
the/ son of -the father at the/ lead of the opposition -and will/
-who come -the family does -here." (Messerli 1052) The very short lines
are
divided by hyphens into shorter sections whose relationship is unclear.
Tina Darraghs "volcanic
tuff" abandons grammar further, abandoning words. "ur/ mit/ mals, re/
tan of an/
la rae mi a/ called deer f/ ley first foun/ mic, adj." (Messerli
1090) This poem is apparently fragments of a found text. The found text
seems to be some kind of dictionary or reference text. The comma-caesura
in
the last line hardly registers as a pause. The unclear relationship between
word-fragments
make space and comma mean similarly. Like line-breaks, enjambed caesuras
seem to mean
more intently. However, enjambment relies on a degree of grammatic continuity
to interrupt.
.
Susan Howes "Articulation of Sound Forms in Time" is good. Part
two, "Hope
Athertons Wanderings," blurs the distinction between caesuras and
implied caesuras. It also blurs
distinctions between spaces and caesuras. Finally it challenges the distinctions
between words. The
poem begins with the gesture of a narrative. "soe young mayde in March
or April laught/ who was lapd M as big as any kerchief" (7)
Its confusing punctuationless lines give way to grammarless lines. "rest
chondriacal lunacy/ velc
cello viable toil" (10). Spaces between words expand "chaotic
architect repudiate line Q
confine lie link realm/" (13) contract, and disappear. "ReddenBorderViewHaloPastApparitionOpenMostNotion
is" (15) These lines
are not the extent to which Howe confounds the line. Her poetry includes
text printed upside-down, different texts printed atop each other. Finally,
her poems will
abandon the horizontal. Lines which intersect each other at various angles
free themselves
of sequence. They are lines. They have breaks. But there is no telling
which lines the breaks come between. Examples include "Thorow" and The
Nonconformists Memorial.
.
Marjorie Perloff, in "Collision or Collusion with History," discusses
Howe. "Most contemporary feminist
poetry takes as emblematic its authors own experience of power
relations... There are
Howes subjects as well, but in substituting "impersonal narrative
a narrative made of
collage fragments realigned and recharged for the more usual lyric
"I," Howe is
suggesting that the personal is always already political
" (Poetic
310) Howe: "I wouldnt
want to say what the political role of any poet should be. Who
am I to say? For a long time I thought it was my
political purpose to find some truth that had been edited out of our
history
. I love words. I hope they are allowed to suggest all meanings
possible. I hope that language will always be an undiscovered country.
All poetry
that sets words free is political. The irony is that political
poetry, poetry
with a specific political agenda for improvement, tends to imprison knowledge.
But words
will always escape into their own mystery. At least I hope." (Politics
195)
.
Line-breaks: end-stops, enjambments and caesuras, to summarize, mean.
They can open a closed
text, and create ambiguity. They can be points of non-integration. They
are anti-absorptive
techniques. They signify poetry, a sign which can mark a text and change
how it is read. They can be thought of as drums playing grammatic
polyrhythms. Sometimes they can make a beat that drowns out the other
sounds.
They are the seams of poetic syntax. As such, line-breaks and caesuras
are
similar. And, as poetry takes on newer forms, the distinction between
the two
may sharpen or blur. They are cracks in the windowpane and facets in
the kaleidoscope lens. If language is a conduit conducting meaning, they
are the
shooting sparks. They are only standardized in how they look. How they
function
is contextual: punctuation given meaning by the text and context. Scully:
"The line
breaking proposes to trouble the sentenced surface, to release ideologically
suppressed meaning." (135)
Line-breaks and caesuras are social practice. More importantly, they
are play. Line-breaks mean.
.
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.
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.
Bernstein, Charles, ed. The Politics of Poetic Form. New York:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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