Line Breaks

[ellajam]

Reasons for a line break.

This is one of the most difficult things for me to interpret when reading a free verse poem. In my mind, and in my practice, I primarily use line breaks to create distance - a separation between elements that should not be near each other - reflecting a physical position or a mental separation (which I view differently than a pause in thought or speech). From what I have gathered briefly reading a crit or two here, it seems some prefer that line breaks relate to such a pause in thought or speech.

I suppose, just out of mild curiosity, what do you consider as you are thinking about where to break a line when you write in free verse?

I think about this:

Someone told me once that you should have every line break point to the central metaphor. I kind of dismissed it at the time as impossible but I think now that ideally this is true.

The Line: http://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-4281.html

The same holds true when writing in a form, it's just as important, a poem is a poem. It may be a little trickier but maybe not, line length is important in free verse too, I find I really can't just break on the word, I still have to manipulate the poem so the breaks fall at the end of a line length that keeps the poem true to what I want to end up with.

This thread on line length is also interesting. It got mucked up when True deleted a lot of his posts but milo quoted everything so I can still follow it. IMO worth the effort.
http://www.pigpenpoetry.com/thread-11672.html