The Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival tweeted this: “Because I’m Italian, you’ll notice my lines are pretty long – I don’t take a breath that often.” -Maria Mazziotti Gillan.
How much of poetry is breathing? What you train your body to do, your mind has to work with as materials. Poetry has good bones but is flabby but can’t have good musculature without good bones to tether them too. The relationship among parts of the poem, the soft tissues vary a lot. How much of that is coming from the lungs? Even if you have gnat-attention-span you can keep coming back to the same line and work it until it shines, or rush headlong ahead, or rush ahead and sketch and come back and fix, or make it as you go, planning or not planning where it will go. But does the method go to a particular outcome?
If your cardio is generally poor and if anxiety tightens your frame, are you phrases necessarily short? If you are caffeinated, are your lines?
As poetry is an extension of the body – phantom limb syndrome even – it’s not surprising that poems vary from person to person. How long does it take a thought to complete its shape?
Some people chunk up thoughts, as Marcus McCann called it, so each line is a weight-bearing unit. Taken out of context there isn’t a weak spot at the unit of phrase or line or stanza.
Part of it is breath. Like a storyteller, it’s not the story so much as the telling. It’s how it is put exactly, each word chosen carefully for effect. Each phrase may not stand alone as a quip but it’s built towards something with a momentum that makes sense hooking backwards to what came before and gaining significance with what comes next.
The exercise at Canada Arts Connect to isolate a favorite line was, for me, a filter for seeing how lines relate to the whole. Some people reliably split the line in half so L3 with the second half of the thought from L2 and the first half of the thought from L4 lays flat. It gains its strength in the pivot, like the haiku aha. A single line isn’t quotable. It is structurally made up of voltas that break across lines.
Some make each line a thought, end-stopped. It lucidly walks statement after last, heading somewhere, often a conclusion, sometimes a conclusion blocked by a question. It is more cinderblock construction. It may be capped with something profound. Each line stands flat when out of context. Maybe the energy is in the contrast or surprise from line to line but the unit of energy is larger than line or phrase.
Other poets build a room, a context to feature their paper cut ending or one marvellous couplet with the aim of blowing the roof off. Poems take on a rhythm of dull box with gilded top entry line and bottom exit line. Other poets would cut out the room and start a rewrite using those endings since that’s where things begin to get interesting.
Some people’s creations only work over the length of the sweep. That’s not to say a line is weak. It functions but it distributes the load in a different shape of architecture of the thought. It makes more of an arched vault than a sod hut. You have to keep each phrase. You lose important things if you skim or gloss over. You have to attend but it all knits together in a way that isn’t bearing load the same way.
Other poems are using long loops of thread through a length of a book. Something appears only gathering strength by knowing the landscape long term to know what it signifies. Such a refrain of concept that may not even be explicit but a slant embedded reference, would make no sense as a quote. It would be like jabbering omg, Elena just told Clayton! What a character in a novel just did to someone not reading the book falls out of sense. Some poets have only work deeply in context.
But I wonder if part of this is less about being in a relationship of parity of hierarchy with reader, less about entertaining vs. sharing and more about unit of thought and unit of breath and heart rate.
When I am in the countryside I write differently. My thoughts go more intricate and grow long in the truth of sentence. What I notice and have around me to notice change.
When I am in daily digitial rush what makes sense is jagged, wit-primed. Breaths and ideas wing about. The more sugar or stimulants or life stimulation I have in the system the harder it is to follow a long idea or make one. Ideas tangle and significance seems everywhere.
In low stimulations environments, silence can rush in and the nattering things are visible as nattering. Something rises from somewhere below surface. The brain functions differently. I can access different things. It is more interesting to see things that interconnect body and emotion and ideology. Things are more synthesized. Understanding takes the primacy away from information.
I want to loop back through this and add samples of each kind but this has taken me the spare time of 2 days so better to get that much out there because lord only knows how long my loop might be to get back into it. I want to see if there’s substance and look longer with samples. Sometime. Maybe soon or not. We’ll see.