If enjambment in syllabic or stressed metrical verse creates a tension by holding a key part of meaning over to be delivered in the following line, it's my understanding that this tension is heightened by the sudden disruption to any correlation between line length and semantic/syntactic units.
In that context, how does free verse deal with enjambment? I've noticed a number of well-known poets largely steering clear of it, turning each line into a semantic and syntactic chunk, only invoking it in clearcut cases. Meanwhile, others use it regularly, seeking to fragment and distort both meaning and expected sentence structures. This varyiing use of enjambment also seems tied in with contrary aesthetics and approaches.
One last question though...and, no, it isn't loaded, it's simply an attempt to shake off my own prejudices: how can enjambment in free verse ever generate as much tension as in metred verse if it lacks the additional tool of simultaneously breaking with form?
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Matthew, you communicate so succinctly what the line break is and can do: '[it] creates a tension by holding a key part of meaning over to be delivered in the following line'. For me it is, beside rhythm/music, the main draw to poetry, the potential to play with meaning and the construction of meaning - and how it can be multiple and fleeting - in the reading of the poem.
ReplyDeleteWell, it breaks with the "form" of prose, right? And that's all that can really be pinned on "free" verse? Finally, it's only "free verse" if the writer says it is. Same with a "prose poem." See Patrick Campbell's wonderful "Prose Poem" for a definition/embodiment. By the way, I can't seem to change my email here -should be lizawilliams@optonline.net
ReplyDeleteIt's all too easy to inject line-breaks that create tension by breaking the form or the grammatical unit. If prose writers used the same methods it would seem crass. Ditto for provoking premature parsing (e.g. "I'm dying/ to meet you."). Another problem is that once free-versers employ meaningful line-breaks they feel impelled to use meaningless ones too, driven as much by the love of rectangles as by any thought of tension.
ReplyDeleteTension in prose can easily be missed if you read it faster than you read poetry. I once ran a "Slow Reading" workshop on a Graham Greene story. After each paragraph we discussed what questions were raised, what mysteries were solved. It begins with "She found me in the evening under trees that grew outside the village. I had never cared for her and would have hidden myself if I'd seen her coming. She was to blame, I'm certain, for her son's vices. If they were vices". What genre of story is this? Where and when is it set? How old are the characters? Ask 3 questions that you think will later be answered.
Some readers don't ask themselves such questions as they go along, missing out on tension/release. I think poetry readers more often do, provoked perhaps by line-breaks, but more so by textual brevity.
So I'd agree with you that form creates the most obviously breakable expectations. The subtlety of Greene's tensions is that not only might readers miss them, but the tensions might be relieved in the next paragraph, the final paragraph, or never.
" how can enjambment in free verse ever generate as much tension as in metred verse if it lacks the additional tool of simultaneously breaking with form?" It can do it by disrupting other expectations. Jack Gilbert, in "Looking Away From Longing":
ReplyDelete"On the stones by the river a woman is beating
an octopus."
I defy anyone not to have expected "clothes" after that line break; it's a "what the hell" moment that emphasises how far from home the speaker is. Or by throwing weight on the first word after the break - Philip Gross, speaking of marine pollution:
"Listen. Catch the glitter-swish
of shoals switching grey-silver-grey to
off."