Lines today

Freeform poetry doesn't have to include line-breaks merely for the sake of form. They can be saved for when they really matter - when they're sincere and authentic. The resulting work is very likely to have irregular line-breaks. There may even be several lines of prose between line-breaks. But this form is rarely seen in magazines - it's neither poetry nor prose. Two solutions are employed

• Poetrification - there's a temptation to make the piece more uniform visually by adding more line-breaks. Uniform line-lengths (as measured by a ruler rather than meter) can be created along with uniform stanza lengths. The non-functional breaks by default tend to coincide with punctuation (which also fits the breath-indication and unit-of-thought functions of line-breaks). Agonising about these line-breaks and adjusting the phrasing accordingly helps the poet spend more time with the poem and can lead to improved work (look up simulated annealing).
  In some poetry books I've read, the most prosaic pieces are those with the shortest lines, as if the poet hopes that the more line-breaks there are the better chance of reader seeing extra meanings that will salvage the piece (since there's often no penalty for redundant line-breaks)
• Prosification - Nowadays any short literary text can be considered a poem, especially if it's in a form (a shopping list or menu, for example). This didn't used to be the case (Gertrude Stein wasn't a poet) but markets changed. In conversation with Charles Bernstein discussing the birth of "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry" , Bruce Andrews said he felt more uncomfortable about the "poetry" word than about "Language". He might have preferred the term "Language Writing", but said he found "poetry" more marketable. Perhaps the time is right for prose to reclaim its ground. The main free-form short prose genre at the moment is "Flash Fiction" which often needs some character or narrative development, though as its popularity increases so will its scope. Already its limits easily encompass some texts currently accepted as poems.
  But the prosification I'm suggesting here is to do with format, not genre. "if in doubt leave it out" can be applied to line-breaks as well as adverbs. The result needn't be Flash Fiction or a "Prose Poem" (which is distrusted and tends to be dominated by surrealism at the moment), just a tighter poem. Such poems are quite often in poetry books nowadays (a single example usually). They make me wonder why the book's other poems have so many line-breaks.

Of the 2 solutions, I think the 2nd is more aesthetic though it's less used because of prevailing market forces. There's a further, more radical alternative though

• From-the-ground-up formatting - just as rhyme shouldn't be an afterthought, so the format and content can emerge together. By relaxing the subservience of the format to grammar, the formatting effects are given more range of expression so that formatting can take turns with content to be foregrounded (like instruments in a Jazz group). The resulting through-composed piece might not just be jagged-right but jagged-left as well, with white-space within lines.
  You could perhaps think of the format like the hand gestures of a speaker. Some of us barely move our hands. TV presenters do, but it often seems unnatural, the same gesture (a hand-chop, for example) repeated every few seconds. On TV recently though I saw an old lady from Naples whose hands were in constant balletic motion even in the silence between sentences. The gestures and words were loosely coupled, coming together when emphasis was required.

In the light of all this I was interested to read reviews in Iota 85 (August 2009) because there were several references to line-breaks. A review of Jorie Graham (whose work is "an exposure of actuality") contained these comments

• "line breaks take control. Like humanity, form doesn't notice its own destructive paradigm"
• "The music of Graham's form provokes change in its terrifying jolt of white space and line break, which emulates natural disaster"
• "A colloquial liveliness separates sites of divergent modulation and lexicon. Like line breaks, they contribute to a sense of disruption; the poems are not about what we think they are about, but the process that the form inspires"

Reviewing another poet in "Other Poetry" IV.1, James Roderick Burns sees similar power - "The form ... strains away from the margin like a catapult sling stretched to capacity, an event about to happen". Here the mimetic 'breaks' of from-the-ground-up formatting take on apocalyptic proportions in contrast to another review's more mundane description

• "Each line is measured to Higgins' breath worked so the break occurs always on the strong word"

But if those words are strong, aren't the line-breaks redundant? Later in another review there's

• "Maybe Walpert is of the opinion that each line needn't hold itself as an individual unit of sense, and that weak line endings are a matter of choice; but frankly it distracted me unnecessarily"

This is how I feel about much poetry - weak line endings don't become strong by lining up with other weak line endings. But I'm coming round to the idea that it's not the poet's fault that I'm distracted. In "Contemporary Poetry Review", 2009, Hannah Brooks-Motl wrote "British readers may find American poems' line breaks arbitrary, the arrangement of lines or stanzas bizarre or arbitrary". Such formats are the default nowadays, and it's not necessary that I should let myself be distracted by them. If I don't like the poem, I can decide to attack the format too, otherwise I can ignore the line-breaks - all they mean is 'please read this poetically'.

Besides, what does "weak" mean in this context? Ending on a word like "of" or "the" means that the next line can start with a substantial word - maybe it's the line-starts that we should be looking at rather than the endings.

I wondered how the reviewers might receive the poems in the issue. The poems split this way

• 50% have mostly uniform line-lengths
• 40% have uniform stanza-lengths.
• 20% have mostly uniform line-lengths and uniform stanza-lengths (the standard "multi-box" form).
• 15% use indenting
• 15% have erratic (organic?) line-breaks

There were no traditional forms that I could see (maybe there were syllabics but who cares?). There were no token prose layouts either, which is odd given the material and the number of weak line-endings.

This Iota issue doesn't contain a random sample of contemporary poetry by any means, but the statistics are worthy of submitters' attention. Any form is better than no form at all, even if the form doesn't match the content and introduces weak line-endings. Of course, the same conclusion could be drawn after reading a good many Formalist magazines too, but the weak constraints of the forms in Iota are easier to satisfy.