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BROKEN_LINES

                                    July 09, 2003                   
                                   (originally posted to alt.gothic)

What do the line breaks in poetry mean to you?
How do you read them?

They seem like very hard stops to my eye.
Maybe harder than a period, maybe about
as hard as an emdash.

I remember this being an impediment
when I first tried to read poetry,
the flow of the sentences seemed
really weird.  It seemed odd to me
that authors were willing to let
these linebreaks fall where ever the
rhythm scheme forced them to be.
   
This is a funny reaction on my part,            
because in prose the linebreaks are              
almost completely screened out by   
your consciousness.                 
                                             
Why should putting line breaks in odd
places suddenly make them read like hard stops?

In poetry reviews they often reformat in a
linear way/with slashes/in place of
linebreaks.  Should the breaks be read as
slashes then?  To me a slash is a very
short pause, perhaps shorter than the
ordinary pause between words: "either/or"
is almost read as one word.

I might experiment with downloading
poetry in electronic form and writing
filters to change the formatting, to see
if it reads differently: convert breaks
to slashes; or  alternately some other
punctuation like a semi-colon or an em-dash.

             
             An obvious suggestion:
             listen to recordings of 
             poets reading their own 
             poems:  
                     
                 The line-break is a 
                 slightly longer pause 
                 than the space between 
                 words, but not a full 
                 stop.


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