another problem with line breaks

In Isabelle Correa’s poetry workshop yesterday, we talked a little about a poem I had submitted and how it was formatted. It had little punctuation, which is what I tend toward in poetry, and very long prose lines. I had lined it into chunks to make it a little less off-putting, but did it work?

The poem below is an example of a brand new block-text poem. (it would be completely blocked but Word hated me this morning.) Is it inviting? Or off-putting? Does the format invite you in, or shut you out?

There's an evolution of how I came to write poetry without line breaks. A long time ago when I first started writing I wrote with pen and paper and it was magic. My right hand holding that pen seemed to be controlled by someone outside of myself, just as the words I was writing down seemed to be coming from somewhere else entirely, some entity of air up above me on the left side. I was a conduit. I was a scribe. I wrote the poems down in a fever.

When I was able to type poems, I loved seeing what they would look like if they were actually published in a book because I seriously expected to be famous. But I didn't enjoy typing very much and I didn't have a fancy typewriter just an old Royal. When I was able to type on the computer everything changed. I could mold and trim and resection and operate and eviscerate endlessly on the screen. I was hooked. I still did line breaks but they were more arbitrary than they had been when I felt like I was being controlled by some outside force. I was never very comfortable with them.

Then came publication. And education. And in due time the dreaded and dreadful (and yes amazing) MFA. I took a dual concentration at Vermont College for my MFA—creative nonfiction and poetry. Creative nonfiction changed my life and my writing for the better—forever, but I didn't learn a thing in the poetry portion.

Not a thing. I read a lot of crappy poems and a lot of crappy poetry books. I barely paid attention—in one ear and out the other. And I had this one professor who was convinced that “line breaks were everything” and he broke lines viciously in ways that made no sense whatsoever ending up with these artificial constructs of his poetic will (and ego). I was so put off by the whole experience that when I published my poetry thesis, I did the entire book of poems without line breaks—I Will Not Give Over.

Sometimes people call these blocked poems prose poems, but I don't think that's accurate. Any kind of poem can be a prose poem regardless of what it looks like on the page. I think it’s more about narrative than lines. In any case, even now when I write poems like the one below my instinct is to just not break the lines.

But I know that if I were presented with poetry that looks like this I wouldn't read it, at least I wouldn't if it were very long. I would feel lost in the big chunk of words.

So how come I make poems that I wouldn’t read?

dropping anchor

the thing beneath all the other things the bedrock the longing 
the tender soil of the heart the teething ring the baby’s breath 
feathery blossoms blowing across the windows the longing 
the soft pillowy hours when the sun crawls across the ceiling 
across the floor the mother’s hands their cold cream softness
the mysterious approach of evening the doves cooing cooing
the mother lifting the father parting the reeds the baby gone
swimming the open waters flipping her body forward endlessly 
end over end rocketing through space dreaming up the world 
till a star’s burning body approaches on silken feet 
leans over her bed, cups her sleeping head in its hands,
and breathes the everlasting daylights into her.