On the Line

Some thoughts on how we move from silence into silence

Photo by jules a. on Unsplash

Last week, I taught the first of four classes on lineation and stanza breaks. I’ve taught lineation for years, but my sense of lineation’s potential (its potency) deepens every time I teach. For one thing, lineation isn’t logical—sure, you might be aware that you’re using enjambment to create a particular effect, but our contemporary approach to lineation doesn’t start in the intellect, it starts somewhere in the body.

An organic approach to lineation begins with how we feel our way intuitively from experience into to language—an embodiment in words of life’s energetic qualities. A line is a measure of movement. But a line is not a line without the break. So lineation simultaneously tracks our relationship to silence. Jorie Graham wrote, “I think I am probably in love with silence, that other world. And that I write, in some way, to negotiate seriously with it.” But what is silence? What is “that other world”?

Writers on lineation—quotes I love

“The meaning of a poem is in the cadences and the shape of the lines and the pulse of the thought which is given by those lines.” –George Oppen

“When words and music meet in poetry or in song, our speech naturally becomes more lyrical.” –Diane Ackerman, A Natural History of the Senses

“Silence, either within a poem itself or within the consciousness of a reader as she navigates a poem, is analogous to the invitation of a ‘release’ as it facilitates a give-and-take relationship between reader and text.” –Leslie Ullman, “Towards a Poetics of Pull-and-Release: On Silence in Poems,” Library of Small Happiness

“Poetry is the sound of language organized in lines.” –James Longenbach, The Poetic Line

“The sentence imitates insight.” –Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form

“The resonance we experience in a well-made thing, a passionately made thing, a thing made from a full commitment to the art it instances, captures the way it expresses both energy and stillness.” –Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form

“Enjambment is an excess of being, or being in process, reaching toward itself. The sentence moves and arrests movement.” –Robert Hass, A Little Book on Form

"Punctuation often serves to force a pause, but the pause isn’t silence." –"How Poets Use Punctuation as a Superpower and a Secret Weapon," New York Times

From silence into silence

Silence, after all, isn’t the absence of sound (where would that be possible? deep space? even there, as in the desert, we would hear our blood rushing). In poems, it’s the nonverbal space between words, the pause between pulses of thought, the gorgeous absence of certainty, the momentary disruption that happens in blank parts of the printed page. Silence is a space in which we are temporarily not doing, not saying, are paused in mystery, in potentiality, attentive to the gap. Silence is where we feel the poem’s resonance, reverberation most.

What is your approach to lineation? How would you describe your relationship to silence as a poet?