Welcome to Day 21 and a full three weeks of daily poems! Today's prompt is a type of poem, or rather, a technique: playing with line breaks. In free verse (no set metre or rhyme pattern), lines don't need to be any particular length or even the same length as each other, so you can end the line wherever you want. Choosing where to end the line can become a kind of game, to double up the meaning, so the line means one thing if you stop reading at the end, something else if you keep on reading onto the next line – a two-for-the-price-of-one, in meaning. For example, look at these three lines:
Twist the tale, some: put bears in
raincoats. Let gems flower underground, muddy
usual facts with unusual lies.
At each point, the meaning changes as you keep reading onto the next line. A second way is to play with the shape of the lines, so they become symmetrical. That same poem continues, from line 3 onwards:
usual facts with unusual lies. Every
troubadour that ever troubled
history knew this: if you’re hunting the snark,
if you’re telling tall tales, if you’re
spinning fool’s gold with Rumpelstiltskin’s secrets,
The meaning of "troubled" changes slightly, but mostly the lines start developing a symmetry from beginning to end: troubadour / troubled; if you're / if you're. And a third way to play is to make the lines read as quite different statements when they're read independently. The poem finishes,
lithe lilting lies
always answer more reality.
It’s not about being
zany: you’re unpeeling the secrets
you can’t speak
truthfully.
"Always answer more reality", "It's not about being", and "You can't speak" become their own stand-alone statements. So that's just three ways to play with line breaks:
- make the meaning change if you stop / read on
- make symmetrical patterns out of one line or a run of lines
- make individual lines stand alone as different statements
Here's another poem I wrote, gently playing with line breaks, about my students. (My poem-a-day poems invariably feature my students, after class!)
I will gather you
up in fairylights and laughter
breaks against the glass.
Rosemary burns
away the office-static, pens
dance and skitter.
In the word-flood, we brim
with silence and while you read, I boil
the kettle, plate biscuits, quiet idea-mother.
I give you nothing
but kindling and tinder: you light
up, to see me: all you know
is already yours
to set fire to, so here:
here’s a hearth.
If you'd like an idea of what to write about, I suggest a fairytale – you don't need to tell the story, you can just write about it, comment on it, pick bits out of it. Maybe choose one you feel strongly about, whether that's because it made a strong impression on you as a child or because it left a clear image in your mind or because you've come to disagree with it. The advantage of using a fairytale for this is that your content is there already, free to be riffed with, leaving you free to concentrate on playing with line breaks. If you'd like a heap of fairytales at a glance to jog your memory, here's a rather beautiful site:
Happy writing!
The Meddling with Poetry course explores a host of different poetry forms as well as the musicality of language, poetic imagery, and other aspects of the poetic. It's 8 weeks long, one evening a week, and absolute beginners and experienced writers are equally welcome. You can read more details and book a place here.
