poetry: structure and line breaks
So I've been thinking. I wrote a poem recently and had the idea to use a syllabic line, and it totally worked. This is the first time that's ever happened--usually trying to put a poem into a form doesn't work for me at all.
When I was younger, I used to just make lines of poetry whatever length I felt like making them and put stanza breaks wherever they looked prettiest. In grad school, I realized I needed to be more thoughtful and consider my choices more carefully. I had a great conference with Ellen Bryant Voigt about this, actually, which really revolutionized the way I look at line breaks and structure. In that now I look at them and consider them. I still don't really know what to do with them. There were a few times where I tried to do something cool with rhythm or syllabics, but it was just me trying to do something cool rather than the structure serving the poem, so it never worked and I had to drop it, at least mostly.
Occasionally, I'll get a feeling that a certain line will need to end *here*, but otherwise, I mostly feel like any structure, stanza length, line length, whatever is pretty arbitrary. I feel like I do want stanza breaks in my poems, partly just for the space and the air, but my poems don't necessarily suggest stanza breaks; it's more like my poems tell stories and just sort of go on and on without many natural breaks. There are lots of times when, as I'm revising a poem, I just see how many lines there are and what that's divisible by to determine how many lines in a stanza. But there's no meaning to that!
This new poem is the first time I've ever had a structure that really mattered to the poem itself, a structure that contributes meaning to the poem. And you know, that feels really good. One of the things I admire about Ursula LeGuin is how she can write a novel and have the structure of it add meaning to the story. (Read The Dispossessed if you don't believe me.) I would like to be able to do that more.
So here's my question for y'all. When you're writing a poem, how do you determine the structure? Line breaks, rhythm, stanza length, etc. If you do the thing where you have your lines start in different places across the page horizontally, why do you do that? What leads you to making the choices that you make in setting up the "scaffolding" of a poem?
When I was younger, I used to just make lines of poetry whatever length I felt like making them and put stanza breaks wherever they looked prettiest. In grad school, I realized I needed to be more thoughtful and consider my choices more carefully. I had a great conference with Ellen Bryant Voigt about this, actually, which really revolutionized the way I look at line breaks and structure. In that now I look at them and consider them. I still don't really know what to do with them. There were a few times where I tried to do something cool with rhythm or syllabics, but it was just me trying to do something cool rather than the structure serving the poem, so it never worked and I had to drop it, at least mostly.
Occasionally, I'll get a feeling that a certain line will need to end *here*, but otherwise, I mostly feel like any structure, stanza length, line length, whatever is pretty arbitrary. I feel like I do want stanza breaks in my poems, partly just for the space and the air, but my poems don't necessarily suggest stanza breaks; it's more like my poems tell stories and just sort of go on and on without many natural breaks. There are lots of times when, as I'm revising a poem, I just see how many lines there are and what that's divisible by to determine how many lines in a stanza. But there's no meaning to that!
This new poem is the first time I've ever had a structure that really mattered to the poem itself, a structure that contributes meaning to the poem. And you know, that feels really good. One of the things I admire about Ursula LeGuin is how she can write a novel and have the structure of it add meaning to the story. (Read The Dispossessed if you don't believe me.) I would like to be able to do that more.
So here's my question for y'all. When you're writing a poem, how do you determine the structure? Line breaks, rhythm, stanza length, etc. If you do the thing where you have your lines start in different places across the page horizontally, why do you do that? What leads you to making the choices that you make in setting up the "scaffolding" of a poem?