It’s time for that most mysterious aspect of poetry: line breaks. This chapter is titled “Lay a Path: Path Attention to Line.” Fittingly, the line from Billy Collins’ “introduction to poetry” Runyan uses here is this:
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out
(Sidenote: In Runyan’s book “How to Read a Poem,” I especially enjoyed chapter 3, which was also about the topic of line breaks.)
This chapter includes two fantastic poems. One I knew, “Course,” by LW Lindquist, and one I didn’t, “Tree,” by Andrew Hudgins. Runyan encourages readers to notice the line breaks in these poems and experiment with doing it differently.
I didn’t want to mess with perfection, so I played around with a poem titled “Courage” by Amelia Earhart—pilot and poet. First, here is her original poem with the proper line breaks.
Courage
Courage is the price that life exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
From little things;
Knows not the livid loneliness of fear
Nor mountain heights, where bitter joy can hear
The sound of wings.
How can life grand us boon of living, compensate
For dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
Unless we dare
The soul’s dominion? Each time we make a choice, we pay
With courage to behold resistless day
And count it fair.
Amelia Earhart
Here’s what I did:
Courage is the price that life
exacts for granting peace.
The soul that knows it not, knows no release
from little things. Knows not
the livid loneliness of fear nor mountain heights
where bitter joy can hear
the sound of wings. How can life
grand us boon of living, compensate
for dull gray ugliness and pregnant hate
unless we dare the soul’s dominion?
Each time we make a choice,we pay
with courage
to behold resistless day and count it fair.
What do you think? Would you do it differently?
Back to my poem, revising with an emphasis on line breaks. Something is happening at the end—something not based on the day we planted the cross, other than the fact that it is always windy in the Panhandle. It’s something that snuck in because I found the word “zephyr,” which will eventually change the poem.
Roadside Oddity (#3)
There’s nothing odd
about a wee white cross
beside a Texas highway.
Just a cross.
Entwined grapevines rising
from prairie grass
The earth curves away from the crash
tire tracks lead nowhere. yellow tape
insists DO NOT CROSS.
We cross pasture bleached by drought
stare at ivory sky. The wind, a mere
zephyr, lifts our skirts.
Still enjoying. 🙂
Line breaks are such fun to play with. We should never settle for our first breaks.
I love the way you’ve worked with the different line breaks! And as Laura says, we should always be willing to experiment.
I did chapter 4 already, since it’s easy to play with line breaks (and, while I was at it, I changed some words as well). I don’t know what to do for stanza breaks, and I admit it bugs me a little that the number of lines in each stanza is not the same.
—–
My mother favored the fireplace.
She threw sprinkles that colored
the flames like fluid movements
of dancers in jewel-toned tulle.
Mom had a newspaper log roller,
cast-iron black. We tucked in sheet
after sheet, putting old news to rest;
cranked the handle; saved a tree
and a trip to the recycles.
But the flames didn’t take
on sheets altogether
too miserly, rolled all tight.
Flames choked out
before the next layer of news.
The happenings of weeks
and months of yesterdays
don’t easily burn away
in ashes.
I have the same hang-up–thinking that the number of lines in a stanza need to be equal. I think order is beautiful, that’s my problem. Which leads another problem, that I can force a poem into any form, even though that doesn’t always serve it well.