A HISTORY AND THEORY OF THE LINE IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE POETRY

1. ENCOUNTERING THE POETIC LINE IN ENGLISH

For me, and for generations of US readers before me, poetry has been defined by the appearance of the line break on the page, that ragged righthand margin signaling that something is at work in the arrangement of the words on paper beyond mere transcription, or perhaps, the suggestion that transcription might itself be a form of choreography. As a young person, only books offered me privacy. If I played the piano, practiced ballet, watched a VHS tape, or played a record, the sounds and sights were impossible to hide. But books put me out of reach, hidden in plain sight. The act of reading felt like a cloak of invisibility—though this may have had less to do with reading itself than my mother’s belief that readers must be left in peace to read. Reading was an initiation. I was being initiated into print culture—which felt universal and timeless—but in fact is contingent and historical. As a reader, I found that poetry felt more intimate than prose, the voice in my head guided by lineation in ways that I’ve spent a lifetime trying to understand.

There are three paradoxes at the heart of print culture: 1) reading on the page demands a kind of introverted extroversion, or extraverted introversion; 2) reading on the page offers the sounds of silent voices, heard in one’s head, and this voice is what we often call “style”; 3) reading on the page offers profound intimacy with complete strangers, and quite often these strangers are dead.

Literacy is a late development among humans, and no one has better explored what it means to transition from an oral culture to a literate culture than Anne Carson. In her masterful Eros the Bittersweet, Carson writes, “An individual who lives in an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self ” (43). Literacy requires a kind of retreat from the world, a closing off. For the person in an oral culture, “Complete openness to the environment is a condition of optimum awareness and alertness” (43–4), but “[a]s an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses” (44). Carson notes that this leads to an erotic loss, and her observation of how the poets experience their newfound literacy sounds very much like Jacques Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, the stage in which a child sees itself in the mirror and understands that it is isolated from its caregiver, rather than continuous with its caregiver. “The poets record this struggle from within a consciousness—perhaps new in the world—of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability” (45). Clearly, my childhood experience of discovering reading closely tracks society’s experience—ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.

My interest is in how poetry retains that sense of the oral; how to understand the symbiosis of the spoken voice and written record. The poetic line would seem to be a product of writing, and yet the truth is that writing makes manifest or literal a concept that had previously been an abstraction.

That the poetic line precedes its now familiar version on the page is suggested by the etymology of the word “verse.” To quote the New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics: “‘Verse,’ we may recall, etymologically harkens back to the Latin ‘versus’ meaning ‘turn,’ namely the turn at the end of the line … v[erse] is therefore lang[uage] given (1) rhythmical order and (2) set into lines” (1348). In its Latin roots, the turning suggested by “verse” is the turning of a plow (also suggested by “fers” in Old English) and the lines that result from the plow moving to one side of the field and back again, like the lawnmower leaving stripes on a football field. However, this metaphor (where poetry’s lines are the tenor, and furrows in the earth are the vehicle) breaks down fairly quickly. In the first place, every line of a rectangular field is the same length; not so lines of poetry, at least as far back as sapphic stanzas. In the second place, when plowing, the plow does not magically return to the left side of the field and then proceed to the right side of the field, in the way that English writing leaps back to the left side of the page. Like the lawnmower, the plow goes from one side to the other and then back again. A form of writing that goes from one side of the page to the other and back again in this manner does exist—it’s called a boustrophedon—and boustrophedonic writing in Greek precedes the writing of Greek consistently from left to right. In Greek tragedy, the strophe and the antistrophe were corresponding metrical units performed by the chorus, with the epode concluding the trio of lines. According to the Princeton Encyclopedia, the strophe was performed while turning toward the altar, and the antistrophe was performed while counter-turning away, followed by a stationary epode (1215). According to Britannica, the strophe was performed by the chorus while moving left to right and the antistrophe was performed while moving right to left—a boustrophedonic choreography of the poetic line literalized in the bodies of actors.

“Poetry” is a more capacious category than verse, and a later entrant into the English language. “Verse”—meaning “a succession of words arranged according to natural or recognized rules of prosody and forming a complete metrical line; one of the lines of a poem or piece of versification”—was first recorded, according to the OED, around 900 CE, while “poetry”—child of “poesis” or “made thing”—did not enter English until the late 1300s.

When thinking about the line, I find it hard to separate my own idea of poetry from my own idea of verse—or rather, even though I know that not all poetry is lineated, I tend to discuss poetry as though it were defined by lineation. Since Modernism, the category “Poetry” has contained pretty much everything that isn’t clearly another genre. While rhythm, rhyme, and meter—the classic markers of “verse”—haven’t gone anywhere, they do go in and out of style. “Doggerel” is quite clearly verse, and yet one would be hard-pressed to find a faculty member at an MFA program in the United States (or an editor at a serious literary journal) who would admit to valuing doggerel as poetry, even though “deadline poet” Calvin Trillin continues to publish his political light verse1 in The Nation. Keeping doggerel at bay might even be precisely the exclusion that makes capital-P-poetry a big tent, making room for sonnets composed entirely of lipstick colors, letters gridded out to spell a single word over and over as it intersects with itself, or even asemic writing that looks like it should be readable, but is not. Our current conception of poetry gives it the power to overlap or consume: the “memoir in verse” and the “novel in verse” remain popular, though in hybridity, the lineation of verse often reasserts itself as the primary quality of poetry. As the old joke goes, everything aspires to be “poetic,” except poetry; describing poetry as “poetic” is an insult.

2. A FLAWED BUT USEFUL ATTEMPT TO ISOLATE THE ESSENCE OF POETRY

Are poetry and prose mutually exclusive? If yes, the Venn diagram between them might look like this:

Both poetry and prose share the sentence as an organizing unit, and both would share the book as a unit of distribution, so already my diagram is flawed, but for the vast majority of writing, the above diagram could be sufficient if we want there to be no overlap. But at the very least, we should acknowledge the prose poem. If we add the prose poem to our taxonomy, we get something like this:

And if we add verse—stay with me—we end up here:

And if we added lineated poetry we begin to reach the upper end of the Venn diagram’s use:

Or we might go back to the previous diagram and simply shade everything that is not prose poetry as lineated poetry, though we might need carveouts for visual poetry, concrete poetry, erasure poetry, and poetry that is neither lineated nor in prose blocks. And where drama would fit, I have no idea, though my best guess is “everywhere.”

I know that this is a lot of Venn diagrams, and might seem like an odd way into a discussion of the poetic line in English, but I wanted to start here for two reasons. The first is that I wanted to explore where exactly the poetic line falls in our current conceptions of writing, before sliding back to the origins of writing, and looking at how what we now know as the poetic line came to be the line we recognize when flipping through an anthology or opening our Poem-a-Day e-mail from the Academy of American Poets. The second is that I wanted a visual illustration of how quickly genre distinctions can border on the absurd when too much effort is made to police those boundaries. Any good deconstructionist is suspicious of binaries and divisions, but unless we more or less agree on what the poetic line is, any discussion of the line will be incoherent—even though most of the fun usually lies in the limit cases and outliers, not the broad swath of mostly-the-case. Though without a clear sense of what’s mostly-the-case, how would one recognize outliers and limit cases as such?

The line is defined by a presence (the syllables and words in the line) and an absence but I love the aural and oral traces that inhere on the page, as well as the idea that a poem is a silent voice. Unlike drama, which is completed by performers and performance, the poem is complete on the page complete in performance. I also love that the idea of the poetic line precedes its literalization by print culture. If print culture is defined by the paradoxes I began with, then poetry in print culture would seem to up the ante on the pleasurable and constructive pleasures of writing and reading.