I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out
Plagiarizing Moonlight
Kelli Russell Agodon
If you could sign your name to the moonlight,
that is the thing!
—Mark Tobey
Sometimes waves scribble their initials
over a path of moonlight. This is the closest
to a signature we’ve ever seen. Maybe,
or maybe it’s the clouds with their C-curves
crossing in front of the O—mouth open,
head thrown back and singing.
We cannot steal words if they’re kept
unspoken, but who wants to live that quietly?
Instead, I want to swim in the dark
sea across paper, climb the barges
and docks that float there. Moonlight invites itself
to our desks and we try to nail its beam
to our paper. We’ve been swimming here
for years, trying to steal what hasn’t been
written, diving to the bottom of an unread sea.
I was conducting a workshop at a state poetry society annual meeting when a man asked me how to write free verse.
“What are the rules?” he asked.
“There are none,” I said. “It’s free.”
“So it’s just random, then?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Then how do you do it?”
“I don’t know. But it takes a long, long time.”
Free verse gets the lazy rap. It’s for people who don’t want to put the intellectual commitment into sonnets and villanelles. Once, when a formalist, a person who adheres to poetic forms rather than free verse, reviewed one of my mostly free-verse collections, she asserted that my line breaks were random, arbitrary. That bothered me—not that she didn’t like my line breaks, but that she assumed I invested no time in them.
When writing free verse, it all comes down to enjambment, or breaking lines at places that are not natural like the ends of sentences or clauses. The pattern isn’t laid out; you must make the decisions one line at a time.
Now duration does not always equal consciousness. When I work on my line breaks, I can’t always articulate why I’m doing what I’m doing, but I write, break, re-break, re-stanza, and cut—all the while reading aloud—over and over and over, to help my poem come of age. The right line break resonates, rings in the bones. It echoes an emotion or idea in the reader’s brain, often without the reader realizing it until he or she takes some time to explore.
Consider the poem “Tree” by Andrew Hudgins:
Tree
I’d like to be a tree. My father clinked
his fork down on his plate and stared at me.
“Boy, sometimes you say the dumbest things.”
You ought to know, I muttered, and got backhanded
out of my chair. Nowadays, when I chop wood
and my hands gum with resin and bark flakes,
I hunker at the tap and wash them human.
But in math class, I’d daydream of my choices:
not hickory or cedar not an oak –
post, red, live, pin, or water oak. Just pine.
If not longleaf, I’d settle for loblolly.
My skin would thicken with harsh bark, my limbs
sprout twigs, my twigs sprout elegant green needles.
Too soon, Miz Gorrie’d call on me. “Why did
you do step four that way?” Who me? It looked
good at the time, I guess — and got invited
to come back after school and guess again.
And that’s when I decided it: scrub pine.
A lot can be said about this poem. Eighteen lines draw up a boy’s history and psyche better than many full-length memoirs. Every time I read it, I find a new angle or receive a new twinge in my heart. At the aforementioned poetry society meeting, several of us discussed the poem for over an hour, then used it as a model for our own drafting. Without a doubt, it is a rich piece in its images, figurative language, sounds, and themes.
But for now, let’s look at the first line: I’d like to be a tree./ My father clinked
That last word. It rings like a flung fork. It hits against a plate’s greasy enamel and makes my teeth vibrate. On the heels of a little boy sharing his imagination, an instrument of nourishment becomes a weapon of anger and intimidation.
Read the poem aloud. Several times. Feel the end words. Then read just the end words themselves.
clinked
me
things
backhanded
wood
flakes
human
choices
oak–
pine
loblolly
limbs
needles
did
looked
invited
again
pine
How do these words work together, work in you as a whole? Of course I’m not going to give you an answer. Mine is different from yours. It’s free verse, after all.
Sometimes the best way to figure out how, why, or if a line break works is to break the line at other places and compare the effects. What if the poem broke at these words instead?
Tree
I’d like to be a tree. My father
clinked his fork down on his plate and
stared at me. “Boy, sometimes you say the
dumbest things.” You ought to know, I
muttered, and got backhanded out of
my chair. Nowadays, when I chop wood and my hands
gum with resin and bark flakes, I hunker at
the tap and wash them human. But
in math class, I’d daydream of my
choices: not hickory or cedar not an
oak –post, red, live, pin, or water oak. Just
pine. If not longleaf, I’d settle for
loblolly. My skin would thicken with harsh
bark, my limbs sprout twigs, my twigs sprout elegant
green needles. Too soon, Miz Gorrie’d call
on me. “Why did you do step four that
way?” Who me? It looked good at the time,
I guess — and got invited to come back after school and
guess again. And that’s when I decided
it: scrub pine.
The words are the same but broken in different spots: enough to water the poem down in its emotion and urgency. Again, while there are no set “rules” about free verse, there are some things to keep in mind. Does the line end at a word that may suggest a moment of suspense, a bit of double meaning? Does it end at an interesting sound or suggest meaning with its length? Usually, ending a line at an article (and, the) or preposition (it, at) weakens the line and makes it feel like no more than arbitrarily broken prose.
The following is a free verse poem that has been “prosified” to remove all line breaks. How would you break the lines to suggest emotion and meaning? Either rewrite the poem or include slash marks where the lines should break.
Course
LW Lindquist
Come on, son, pull your head out of the bag. Keep moving. I know it
hardly seems fair, the way she slices you. It’s rough how she hooks
you, drags you screaming to the bunker. She’s given you the shanks
laughing her mischievous laugh. Still. Brush the sand from your
eyes; you know you’re not the first man to kneel on her greens,
water her turf with his tears while she swings an iron through his
heart, not the first to want to drive a wedge through hers.
Rewrite the poem here, if you like:
Here is how I decided to work on my own lines breaks. In the first version, I’ve included slash marks where I decided to break lines. (Some of the breaks I retained from the previous version.)
Loch Ness Sculpture, Wyoming
Chomping on your chain-link kelp,/
you rust at the bolts of your neck pipes./
Kids scamper past the entrance to tiptoe/curbs
like tightrope walkers
and flick shards of asphalt/at cars.
You hold the 100-degree sun/in your aluminum skin./
So much you know!/
You’ve seen a new mom crumple/
at the door of her Caravan,/
stringy-hair tweens French-kiss/behind trees.
But your face fades/in the summer fog
like any forgotten/legend.
In winter, your head barely shines/
through the heaps of snow./
People slam car doors
and skitter/ over slabs of ice to their meetings./
I remember no title, town, or sculptor’s name./
All legends are a grainy shot:/
shadow shapes, black lake memory,/
the wish to return/and never know
the truth.
Here is the poem rewritten with the new breaks:
Loch Ness Sculpture, Wyoming
Chomping on your chain-link kelp,
you rust at the bolts of your neck pipes.
Kids scamper past the entrance to tiptoe
curbs like tightrope walkers
and flick shards of asphalt
at cars. You hold the 100-degree sun
in your aluminum skin.
So much you know!
You’ve seen a new mom crumple
at the door of her Caravan,
stringy-hair tweens French-kiss
behind trees. But your face fades
in the summer fog like any forgotten
legend. In winter, your head barely shines
through the heaps of snow.
People slam car doors and skitter
over slabs of ice to their meetings.
I remember no title, town, or sculptor’s name.
All legends are a grainy shot:
shadow shapes, black lake memory,
the wish to return
and never know the truth.
Experiment with line breaks in your draft. In a similar vein with your sound revisions, you may not necessarily know why a break works, but it should resonate with mystery, suspense, wonder, and sound. Try out different combinations. Mark, draw arrows, type and retype.
For more line break practice, I invite you to visit the Get Your Exercise portion at the end of the book. Also, here’s a peek at “Course” with its original breaks:
Come on, son, pull your head
out of the bag. Keep moving. I know
it hardly seems fair, the way
she slices you. It’s rough
how she hooks you, drags you
screaming to the bunker.
She’s given you the shanks
laughing her mischievous laugh.
Still. Brush the sand from your eyes;
you know you’re not the first man
to kneel on her greens,
water her turf with his tears
while she swings
an iron through his heart,
not the first to want to drive
a wedge through hers.
—LW Lindquist