Young Writers Society

Lines

Some of you participated in the Lines Workshop and got a couple sneak peaks at how lines are made, and what they can do to a poem. For those of you who couldn't make it, you can find the transcript Here. Feel free to peruse it if you wish.

So what is it about lines that makes them worth so much in a poem?

In this thread I'd like to see what your thoughts are about how lines change a poem. When we say that "the end and the beginning of any given line has special emphasis," what do you think that means? What sort of emphasis do you think it is?

To get us started, I'll quote the some of the line workshop and you can decide what you want to talk about first.

Poetry is a lot more like prose than you think. While a novel is broken up in descending order: series, books, chapters, paragraphs, and sentences, poetry is broken up into books, cantos, stanzas, lines, feet, words, and syllables....

... [Lines] do not need to always start or end a sentence.
They can include multiple sentences.
When reading poetry, you read with the punctuation, and do not stop at the end of the line.
The first and last word of a line have extra importance due to space.

What personal experiences have you had with lines that might support or disclaim this?

When we say that "the end and the beginning of any given line has special emphasis," what do you think that means? What sort of emphasis do you think it is?

When you are reading, your eye scans the page from left to right along with the words. That microsecond of time, as your eye hangs on to the (rightmost) last word of a line and zips back to the (leftmost) first word of the next line is exactly what emphasizes the words. There is also a visual emphasis as well.

What personal experiences have you had with lines that might support or disclaim this?

I remember reading something about how in a poem, you shouldn't break your lines at a preposition. So this is a good rule of thumb to follow and it makes sense to me, because if you're writing a poem like:

The stars are with
me in heaven

that is SUCH an awkward break, because prepositions are words we just kinda skip over, they don't hold as much meaning or emphasis as your nouns, verbs, adjectives and the like!

It's funny, I just wrote a poem, where my first line was something like:

Forbiddence, now there's a waltz she knows the tune of
by heart.

And when I saw this thread, I was like :facepalm: because I totes did that preposition thing. It's the way that the words "now" "waltz" "knows" "of" sound together that I liked. What do you guys think about preposition breaks? xD

Preposition breaks aren't something that you always have to avoid, especially not if you're lining up something that's multiple noun phrases, or an image that you really want to stick out.

At the same time, I think that if it's just a little noun phrase, like [of the sun] or other weak descriptions, then there's no point to break it there. You can usually find other places to break it to create a better emphasis on a different word. For instance in the lines you suggested from your poem, I probably would have broken it after knows because "the tune" or, just gotten rid of the preposition completely.

I think the biggest thing about this rule is that it helps you identify things that should really just be their own subject to a sentence, or things that can connect without the prepositions stacking them.

She was the daughter of the godfather in Sydney can become as simple as She was the Sydney godfather's daughter.

The bigger one I think becomes a problem is ending with conjunctions, because it just leaves you hanging instead of tossing you right through the word, so you're stuck there waiting to know what that's connected to, and usually in poetry it's something really huge, like this sentence.

For me, line breaks are like a spasm of my finger on the enter key when I breathe. There's a place that just feels natural to put a line break. Then when you read back through it, if it could be interpreted in a way that you don't want it interpreted as because of the line break, it might be a good idea to change it.
Think of where you might take a very tiny break in speaking, or a tiny break in your brain. There are many such places that could work, but they might not all work together.