One thing that happens when you spend your life reading and teaching poetry is that the tiniest, most arcane parts of language accrue profound meaning. Poetry scholarship, for this reason, is both intensely mechanical (think ‘trochees’ and ‘parataxis’) and semi-spiritualized; syntax can be ‘tortured’, a stanza ‘vividly alive’. I am constantly using rationalistic jargon to talk about the least rational ideas: a poem’s dumb desires, its fugitive wants.
Even the absence of language – the gaps between or beside words – come to seem like glyphs. I’m writing this in prose intended for publication on a website, which means that most of my lines will end only when they encounter the righthand margin of the ‘webpage’, itself a skeuomorph of paper. This is not so in verse, where the logic of the line, not the dictates of the page, decides where language stops. Poets might break their lines for any reason at all: to mark the end of a metrical unit; to confound or multiply a phrase’s meaning; to muddle or foreground verbal patterns; or otherwise to futz with the pace, flow, and feeling of reading. Some poets (Charles Olson, for instance) might break their lines to evoke the drawing of breath; others (John Hollander, for instance) to ‘annotate’ a sentence’s expected syntax by way of interruption. Some line breaks coincide with the end of a sentence or phrase; others don’t. In every case, a line break ushers in a pause, a momentary silence before the resumption of speech.
In an essay from 1979 that completely rewired my brain when I read it in college, Denise Levertov describes the line break as a kind of punctuation. While traditional punctuation marks help phrases become more easily parsable, the line break, for Levertov, simulates the ebbs and flows of thinking, the halting rhythm by which perception crosses the threshold of consciousness. The incorporation of this ‘a-logical counter-rhythm’, she argues, helps to move the poem ‘closer to song than to statement, closer to dance than to walking’.
If this sounds a little woo-woo, Levertov promptly swerves back into concretion, quantifying a line break as ‘roughly a ½ comma in duration’. (Here again, the poet transforms from occultist to technician.) Others have attempted similar measurements; according to linguists Deborah Cole and Mizuki Miyashita, the pauses between the lines of Japanese haiku equal either one or three morae (linguist-speak for ‘beats’) in length, while the eponymous narrator of Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist likens the pause after an end-stopped line of English verse to a musical quarter rest: ‘a place where you tap your toe without speaking.’
In other words, the line break (however long it lasts) is not the absence of notation but rather the notation of a specific, echoing absence. For me, it is the most mysterious and labile form of punctuation because it has no fixed function at all; it is every kind of dash and colon and bracket rolled into one. I like when scholars like Allen Grossman talk about the line break as a symptom of finitude and loss, or a ritual of rupture, or ‘a piece of the world broken off from the world in the interest of the perception of the world.’ In her genius poem ‘Heaven’, the poet Emily Skillings calls the line break ‘the reconstituting cliff / I will jump from / My whole life.’
If I was in an academic frame of mind, I’d conclude with an example of a really interesting line break by a critically lauded poet: the kind of breakage that creates some significant feeling of suspense or ambiguity. But I’m in more of an alchemical mood than a logical one, more interested in what I can’t see than in what I can. So I’ll leave you instead with some lines of verse from the defunct Tumblr account of my friend Nick Gomez-Hall, who died just a couple years after he wrote them:
the ground heats up and my puddles sizzle and fade.
i am still here. and so are you.
I get a chill every time I return to these lines. Look how the second tries to compensate for the loss invoked in the first – both semantically (‘sizzle and fade’) and formally (the voice breaking off into nothingness). The speaker isn’t gone, he is quick to reassure us. He was never gone. He was only elsewhere, waiting in the infinite space behind or beneath or between the words.
Image © Europeana
This essay is part of Mark Up, a series on Granta.com where writers share their thoughts on punctuation and grammar.
