The matter of line breaks

The arrangement of the lines—that is, where the breaks occur—is not, I think a big deal. In other poems, perhaps; but not in these. These poems are written like speech, like the speech of ordinary, everyday people, marveling, wondering, waiting, hoping. So we could write the words out with line breaks, or we could write them in paragraph form, and still their amazed, ecstatic tone would burst forth.

And so I am using this loose guiding principle to determine what style of line break would best suit an individual poem: I listen to how the poem sounds, spoken out loud; I listen for its natural pauses and breaks. And I put them where I hear them. Would different people put these breaks in different places? Perhaps, and sometimes. Is this worth nitpicking? I’m not sure it is. What these poems—in the printed English collection—look like is nowhere near as important as how they sound when we read them or speak them aloud.

We can discuss in detail the significance of the arrangement of words on a page, but that discussion—if we are to conduct it meaningfully—must happen elsewhere, and already has. Literary critics and theorists have devoted much thought to this matter, and, while important, it is outside the scope of my current work.