Oh, Alix, you are always full of ideas! I hadn’t thought of that, and maybe you’re onto something. I’m going to write about it. Do you compose with pen or screen? Even in our sessions, I compose on the screen.
I can’t seem to write poetry on the screen (unless it’s my notes app). I type fiction and essays though - it seems typing taps into the thinking monologue and I can’t get to the weird intuitive leaps that way. Or not yet anyway. Clearly you do not have this issue 🥰
Well, in my case, part of all of this is ability. I have issues with my shoulders/neck/hands. I'm not sure I could handle pen and paper very long. I use voice-to-text a lot for prose, sometimes for poems.
That was really interesting to read, Rebecca. Your work does have a certain breathless quality to it, which I personally enjoy, but I also see that if the blocks with minimal punctuation get very long, it becomes a bit difficult to read--perhaps that's also why I enjoy hearing you yourself read it so much. Currently I'm reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which is a novel, but written in very poetic prose. It is similarly a little breathless, and since I'm reading it aloud (for my husband), there are definitely places where I long for punctuation as a way to underscore meaning but also to give breath. And I think that's what I try to do with line breaks in poetry: underscore meaning and give breath. But it is something I always struggle a bit with when reading work that has, let's say, very creative use of line breaks.
Someone commented about just doing up a copy of a poem, with her own line-breaks, which is perfect. I do it when I'm ready anyway, often just ignore what's on the page and make something up. We probably all do it. It's different when poetry is music, but then again, I ignore a lot of things when I'm playing the piano, too.
I loved listening to you read this poem. The flow of images from one to another in loose association is mesmerizing I especially liked the way "baby's breath" has two different possible meanings and the poem plays with both by bracketing the phrase between the teething ring and the feathery blossoms.
I like "cold cream softness".
And this passage is really lovely:
"the father parting the reeds the baby gone
swimming the open waters flipping her body forward endlessly
end over end "
My brain doesn't like blocks of text with no punctuation and capitalization. It starts to skim and skip and it's so hard to slow down.Hearing you read the poem gave me a foothold and made the poem more accessible for me.
I tend to prefer a lot of white space -- not only in poetry but in prose as well. Shorter paragraphs, large margins, emptiness. Because it gives my eyes and my brain a place to rest.
When I find a piece of block poetry like this one, I'm tempted to copy and paste it into a document and add my own line breaks, just to slow myself down and interact with the text, not to try to change it but to understand it.
But I also feel similarly about longer verse that has traditional line breaks, but no stanza breaks. It's really not so much about the line breaks as about white space that gives me a place to pause, that chunks the text into more manageable pieces.
Oh, Bravo!, Melanie. I am so glad you brought all this up. I cannot, CANNOT BELEIVE that you actually copy and paste a poem and just redo the line breaks on your own, to suit you. Brilliant! In the MFA program, I told my teacher that I could do this, just redo a poem several different ways without changing its meaning and he protested. Did he ever!
I love your explanation and your solution. Writers like to think that their version is the only one, the only "real" valid one, but as a student of composition I know that a text has no meaning at all until a reader, You, interact with it.
And as I think more about it, wanting to keep something in a container is a form of Control, and like most forms of Control, is an illusion.
I'm willing to concede that sometimes line breaks make a difference in meaning, but often they really don't. Sometimes it's just style or preference. Recently I had a poem that wasn't working because it had a weird rhyme scheme and an uneven mix of end rhymes and internal rhymes. A friend suggested I redo the line breaks to hide the rhymes so that the reader wouldn't be thrown off by expectations being created and then broken and that worked brilliantly. But for most of my poems the line breaks feel much more arbitrary and don't feel nearly as crucial to shaping the experience of the readers.
One thing I noticed as I explored different ways to break your poem is how your use of the definite article is very strong in the first two thirds of the poem and then almost disappears in the final third. Here's the poem with a new line starting every time you use "the". It makes a fascinating pattern that disappears visually in the block of text but you can still hear it in your reading.
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 then a star’s burning body approaches on silken feet leans over her bed, cups her sleeping head in its hands, and breathes
WOW WOW WOW. How cool is that? If it were formatted that way, it would be insufferable. But having you point out the structure underneath! OMG I feel so brilliant. I planned the whole thing, you know! (hahahaha)
Oh yeah it would be an absolutely abominable way to format a poem, but it's so cool to see the hidden bones that make the poem's rhythm, the way it dances and then glides into all those feminine pronouns. Ooh. It might be fun to shift to doing the line breaks at "her".
the open waters flipping
her body forward endlessly end over end rocketing through space dreaming up
the world then
a star’s burning body approaches on silken feet leans over
Well that's fun, Rebecca - and it works for me. However that may be because I've done a bit of "block" poetry too. "Lajamanu Morning" was my most intense example - you read it at the time I posted it and you probably remember.
As a novice poet and reader, whatever shape the poem takes, line breaks punctuation or not, it is the first read unfamiliarity that holds all the unconscious mystery for me and the raw impact. Rereads are an exploration for meaning and prosody. Each reread deeper curiosity emerges as I immerse myself into the ‘never will I truely know’ reality of the poem.
And along the way I start to personalise the words and phases and a relationship is formed between me the reader and you the poet and the medium between that is the channeled adventure of the poem.
Often before I choose and read my Substack banquet, I ask, ‘what does the universe want me to travel today?’
And so it is the poems are laid out before me and I choose my own adventure.
I am not sure if I have just had a visitation with the Madonna or swallowed the cycle of life whole
Hmn. Food for thought, that bit about any poem could be a prose poem as long as it's narrative. But I distinguish prose poems from narrative poems strictly by their block-like looks (vs. all manner of enjambment). Still, it's always a mess when people try to define the oxymoron that is a prose poem. As for your "dropping anchor," I'm not sure why you wouldn't read it. I floated through it effortlessly, as it's kinda a nice stream of consciousness to float on. As long as it has those nice specific nouns for imagery and such, it attracts the eye.
I think for me, a long block of text gives me a sort of sick feeling in my stomach. This is probably from school and having to force myself to read books. You know, you start out with all this white space in kid's books, then chapter books with pretty big print and short paragraphs, lots of dialogue. Then you move on to books with almost no pictures, no white space, and sometimes these long paragraphs. I think it's like, Oh no! What if I have to stop in the middle (unthinkable!)? What if there are more paragraphs that are even longer?
Totally agree. When reading a novel, there's nothing worse than turning the page to see no indents whatsoever--the entire two pages are nothing but a Bunyan-sized paragraph. I teach (part-time these days) college writing and often run across these beasts. By way of comments, I try using humor, begging for mercy. I call them giant paragraphs from Mars. I call them Godzilla on the hunt for King Kong. I remind them of their gentle reader who'd do anything for smaller paragraphs. But still...
Akin to that, I find I struggle with poems that go longer than four pages. Some poets, who divide their collections in three, like to use the middle section for this type thing. You dive in and it's like swimming an Olympic-size pool underwater.
In any event, the main point is, don't be so hard on yourself and your poetry writing style (and/or play with it in subsequent drafts).
Fascinating subject. Just like rhyming, some people are obsessed with line breaks. They are a kind of natural grammar; a point at which an orator might breathe.
Some of us however use them for effect; this is how I send unfinished texts online because there’s no new para function - press enter and it’s gone.
When we are met with unfamiliar styles, they can form barriers or rather we might, though who’s to say about block when enjambment is considered proper?
Case in point your poetry (and how wonderful your story is and its description must resonate finally) has a rhythm probably unattainable with line breaks. I haven’t found that previously - they all just seemed angry.
If readers are as open minded I sure even formalists can see real poetry when it’s there (ditto crap). Even Horace et al would nod.
Some say typing takes you away, weakens the muse. Seeing your words looking formal is like listening to your own recording on hifi. A sense of achievement and pride in your work. Naturally monitoring ego.
Maybe having heard you I get it; I know it was uphill as I first read. But the pleasure it renders far outweighed my inbuilt stuffy twat, who has taken quite a battering since I returned to poetry. It’s as if there was a poetry world I’d imagined (fame, adulation, erm…. wealth?) and the real world. Ah…
Thanks, Alex. I am glad you mentioned the not-yet-long-gone admonition against composing on the keyboard. And yet....if I hadn't started with pen and paper and my magically-possessed arm, would I have made it to anything at all?
The line break is a useful tool in the box, as is punctuation, but secondary to the words, every time. I’m not a fan of concrete poetry where line-shape is everything – it adds little more than a sprinkling of the poet’s ego.
A snag with taking line-breaks seriously when authoring for Substack is that the platform will vandalise your intentions. It treats new-lines as full new-paragraphs; there is no new-line character on the mobile keyboard (just a full return); there’s no hanging-indent paragraph option; the lines will reflow to fit the device width, so a poem will turn differently on a phone and a laptop; and the fix of publishing the poem as an image of its perfectly-printed form means search engines can’t find it and visually handicapped people can’t read it.
Ouch, Ian! Is this true? Substack will keep your formatting if you use the "poetry" feature when posting, but as Alex said, if you're in the Substack messenger app and you hit return, game over. I do think sometimes about formatting when I am working on my website and realize that things will look VERY differently on a cell phone or tablet.
It seems hard to believe that it’s just money! Geeze. The problem I had with blocking this poem was Word, which sometimes, in spite of its value to me, I want to clobber with a club and watch die.
Word is just a complete mess now. I can’t even select long sections of text without it mucking it up. I generally draft in a plain-text editor (on a Mac, I use BBEdit, free version), so that all text is absolutely plain and I focus purely on the words. (And the breaks!)
I'm not to that point yet, but I'm glad to know that others are having issues with Word, too. I guess they always have. But geeze, I despise Google Docs with all my heart.
I wonder if the lack of line breaks mimics the feeling of handwritten pull, the conduit does not stop to consider how to shape the poem.
Oh, Alix, you are always full of ideas! I hadn’t thought of that, and maybe you’re onto something. I’m going to write about it. Do you compose with pen or screen? Even in our sessions, I compose on the screen.
I compose quite a bit on Notes, at least in rough form because I have to go and check to see if J really wrote what I thought I wrote.
Who is “J”?
I can’t seem to write poetry on the screen (unless it’s my notes app). I type fiction and essays though - it seems typing taps into the thinking monologue and I can’t get to the weird intuitive leaps that way. Or not yet anyway. Clearly you do not have this issue 🥰
Well, in my case, part of all of this is ability. I have issues with my shoulders/neck/hands. I'm not sure I could handle pen and paper very long. I use voice-to-text a lot for prose, sometimes for poems.
Yeah, I am struggling with my back myself - it’s very hard for me to sit for long these days. Writing is hard on the body
That was really interesting to read, Rebecca. Your work does have a certain breathless quality to it, which I personally enjoy, but I also see that if the blocks with minimal punctuation get very long, it becomes a bit difficult to read--perhaps that's also why I enjoy hearing you yourself read it so much. Currently I'm reading Orbital by Samantha Harvey, which is a novel, but written in very poetic prose. It is similarly a little breathless, and since I'm reading it aloud (for my husband), there are definitely places where I long for punctuation as a way to underscore meaning but also to give breath. And I think that's what I try to do with line breaks in poetry: underscore meaning and give breath. But it is something I always struggle a bit with when reading work that has, let's say, very creative use of line breaks.
Someone commented about just doing up a copy of a poem, with her own line-breaks, which is perfect. I do it when I'm ready anyway, often just ignore what's on the page and make something up. We probably all do it. It's different when poetry is music, but then again, I ignore a lot of things when I'm playing the piano, too.
I loved listening to you read this poem. The flow of images from one to another in loose association is mesmerizing I especially liked the way "baby's breath" has two different possible meanings and the poem plays with both by bracketing the phrase between the teething ring and the feathery blossoms.
I like "cold cream softness".
And this passage is really lovely:
"the father parting the reeds the baby gone
swimming the open waters flipping her body forward endlessly
end over end "
My brain doesn't like blocks of text with no punctuation and capitalization. It starts to skim and skip and it's so hard to slow down.Hearing you read the poem gave me a foothold and made the poem more accessible for me.
I tend to prefer a lot of white space -- not only in poetry but in prose as well. Shorter paragraphs, large margins, emptiness. Because it gives my eyes and my brain a place to rest.
When I find a piece of block poetry like this one, I'm tempted to copy and paste it into a document and add my own line breaks, just to slow myself down and interact with the text, not to try to change it but to understand it.
But I also feel similarly about longer verse that has traditional line breaks, but no stanza breaks. It's really not so much about the line breaks as about white space that gives me a place to pause, that chunks the text into more manageable pieces.
Oh, Bravo!, Melanie. I am so glad you brought all this up. I cannot, CANNOT BELEIVE that you actually copy and paste a poem and just redo the line breaks on your own, to suit you. Brilliant! In the MFA program, I told my teacher that I could do this, just redo a poem several different ways without changing its meaning and he protested. Did he ever!
I love your explanation and your solution. Writers like to think that their version is the only one, the only "real" valid one, but as a student of composition I know that a text has no meaning at all until a reader, You, interact with it.
And as I think more about it, wanting to keep something in a container is a form of Control, and like most forms of Control, is an illusion.
I'm willing to concede that sometimes line breaks make a difference in meaning, but often they really don't. Sometimes it's just style or preference. Recently I had a poem that wasn't working because it had a weird rhyme scheme and an uneven mix of end rhymes and internal rhymes. A friend suggested I redo the line breaks to hide the rhymes so that the reader wouldn't be thrown off by expectations being created and then broken and that worked brilliantly. But for most of my poems the line breaks feel much more arbitrary and don't feel nearly as crucial to shaping the experience of the readers.
One thing I noticed as I explored different ways to break your poem is how your use of the definite article is very strong in the first two thirds of the poem and then almost disappears in the final third. Here's the poem with a new line starting every time you use "the". It makes a fascinating pattern that disappears visually in the block of text but you can still hear it in your reading.
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 then 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.
WOW WOW WOW. How cool is that? If it were formatted that way, it would be insufferable. But having you point out the structure underneath! OMG I feel so brilliant. I planned the whole thing, you know! (hahahaha)
Oh yeah it would be an absolutely abominable way to format a poem, but it's so cool to see the hidden bones that make the poem's rhythm, the way it dances and then glides into all those feminine pronouns. Ooh. It might be fun to shift to doing the line breaks at "her".
the open waters flipping
her body forward endlessly end over end rocketing through space dreaming up
the world then
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.
Oh yeah. That's satisfying too.
Maybe you should start a service--Line-Breaker for Hire.
Hmmm... I wonder if there's a market?
I found someone else whose brain interacts with written poetry like mine does! I could have written most of this comment.
Then there's a pair of us! How delightful!
Well that's fun, Rebecca - and it works for me. However that may be because I've done a bit of "block" poetry too. "Lajamanu Morning" was my most intense example - you read it at the time I posted it and you probably remember.
If anyone else is interested:
https://davidkirkby.substack.com/p/lajamanu-morning
And I'm happy to read block poems too - as long as they are not vast and voluminous.
I enjoy the way much of your poetry just gushes out, breathlessly.
D
I will look back to it. Thanks, my friend.
As a novice poet and reader, whatever shape the poem takes, line breaks punctuation or not, it is the first read unfamiliarity that holds all the unconscious mystery for me and the raw impact. Rereads are an exploration for meaning and prosody. Each reread deeper curiosity emerges as I immerse myself into the ‘never will I truely know’ reality of the poem.
And along the way I start to personalise the words and phases and a relationship is formed between me the reader and you the poet and the medium between that is the channeled adventure of the poem.
Often before I choose and read my Substack banquet, I ask, ‘what does the universe want me to travel today?’
And so it is the poems are laid out before me and I choose my own adventure.
I am not sure if I have just had a visitation with the Madonna or swallowed the cycle of life whole
Wow. I love your approach, Lois. This is everything and should surely be the title to something-- "channeled adventure of the poem."
Hmn. Food for thought, that bit about any poem could be a prose poem as long as it's narrative. But I distinguish prose poems from narrative poems strictly by their block-like looks (vs. all manner of enjambment). Still, it's always a mess when people try to define the oxymoron that is a prose poem. As for your "dropping anchor," I'm not sure why you wouldn't read it. I floated through it effortlessly, as it's kinda a nice stream of consciousness to float on. As long as it has those nice specific nouns for imagery and such, it attracts the eye.
I think for me, a long block of text gives me a sort of sick feeling in my stomach. This is probably from school and having to force myself to read books. You know, you start out with all this white space in kid's books, then chapter books with pretty big print and short paragraphs, lots of dialogue. Then you move on to books with almost no pictures, no white space, and sometimes these long paragraphs. I think it's like, Oh no! What if I have to stop in the middle (unthinkable!)? What if there are more paragraphs that are even longer?
Totally agree. When reading a novel, there's nothing worse than turning the page to see no indents whatsoever--the entire two pages are nothing but a Bunyan-sized paragraph. I teach (part-time these days) college writing and often run across these beasts. By way of comments, I try using humor, begging for mercy. I call them giant paragraphs from Mars. I call them Godzilla on the hunt for King Kong. I remind them of their gentle reader who'd do anything for smaller paragraphs. But still...
Akin to that, I find I struggle with poems that go longer than four pages. Some poets, who divide their collections in three, like to use the middle section for this type thing. You dive in and it's like swimming an Olympic-size pool underwater.
In any event, the main point is, don't be so hard on yourself and your poetry writing style (and/or play with it in subsequent drafts).
Thanks. I didn't mean to sound self-deprecating. Not at all.
Fascinating subject. Just like rhyming, some people are obsessed with line breaks. They are a kind of natural grammar; a point at which an orator might breathe.
Some of us however use them for effect; this is how I send unfinished texts online because there’s no new para function - press enter and it’s gone.
When we are met with unfamiliar styles, they can form barriers or rather we might, though who’s to say about block when enjambment is considered proper?
Case in point your poetry (and how wonderful your story is and its description must resonate finally) has a rhythm probably unattainable with line breaks. I haven’t found that previously - they all just seemed angry.
If readers are as open minded I sure even formalists can see real poetry when it’s there (ditto crap). Even Horace et al would nod.
Some say typing takes you away, weakens the muse. Seeing your words looking formal is like listening to your own recording on hifi. A sense of achievement and pride in your work. Naturally monitoring ego.
Maybe having heard you I get it; I know it was uphill as I first read. But the pleasure it renders far outweighed my inbuilt stuffy twat, who has taken quite a battering since I returned to poetry. It’s as if there was a poetry world I’d imagined (fame, adulation, erm…. wealth?) and the real world. Ah…
Thanks, Alex. I am glad you mentioned the not-yet-long-gone admonition against composing on the keyboard. And yet....if I hadn't started with pen and paper and my magically-possessed arm, would I have made it to anything at all?
The line break is a useful tool in the box, as is punctuation, but secondary to the words, every time. I’m not a fan of concrete poetry where line-shape is everything – it adds little more than a sprinkling of the poet’s ego.
Would it count to write a poem made solely of line breaks, would that have some of the qualities of John Cage’s 4'33"? Would be fun to try and copyright it – 32 empty lines, © me, 2026.
A snag with taking line-breaks seriously when authoring for Substack is that the platform will vandalise your intentions. It treats new-lines as full new-paragraphs; there is no new-line character on the mobile keyboard (just a full return); there’s no hanging-indent paragraph option; the lines will reflow to fit the device width, so a poem will turn differently on a phone and a laptop; and the fix of publishing the poem as an image of its perfectly-printed form means search engines can’t find it and visually handicapped people can’t read it.
Ouch, Ian! Is this true? Substack will keep your formatting if you use the "poetry" feature when posting, but as Alex said, if you're in the Substack messenger app and you hit return, game over. I do think sometimes about formatting when I am working on my website and realize that things will look VERY differently on a cell phone or tablet.
Substack could fix the poetry settings so easily, but there’s no money in it so it’s hard to motivate them.
It seems hard to believe that it’s just money! Geeze. The problem I had with blocking this poem was Word, which sometimes, in spite of its value to me, I want to clobber with a club and watch die.
Word is just a complete mess now. I can’t even select long sections of text without it mucking it up. I generally draft in a plain-text editor (on a Mac, I use BBEdit, free version), so that all text is absolutely plain and I focus purely on the words. (And the breaks!)
I'm not to that point yet, but I'm glad to know that others are having issues with Word, too. I guess they always have. But geeze, I despise Google Docs with all my heart.
I’m wary of keeping things in a cloud service in case it disappears. Paranoia looms.
I loved reading about how your tools shaped your writing!
Thanks, Megan. There is so much more to say on this subject. I may write more about how font and color affect my process.
please do!
Not off putting, gorgeous
Thank you!