When I am trying to gauge the strength of a poem—or a sequence of words that calls itself such—I sometimes try a simple test. Remove all its line breaks and other typographical devices, and see how it reads when formatted as prose. I find this sobering in assessing my own efforts, and revealing when applied to poetry in general.
The words change when viewed this way. Some texts show themselves to be perfectly good prose essays or stories. (Robert Hass’s “A Sunset,” a moving meditation on gun violence in the September 9 New Yorker, is a case in point.) Some are exposed as just rather boring. And some, of course, seem ill at ease in the format, wanting more room to breathe.
Yet the deflation or crumpling doesn’t essentially alter the working of these words. The poetry—at least the sort of poetry I’m interested in—survives. Strong images remain strong. Striking turns of phrase remain striking. Even meter and rhyme will assert themselves, perhaps subliminally, without the aid of conventional layout.
Our usual way of presenting poems on the page has two functions. The first is to accentuate, to smooth acceptance of, the beauties already evident in a prose arrangement. Some imagistic work is so dense that the reader needs a little pause, a catching of the breath, to appreciate it. Empirically, it seems that three or four meaty words—nouns, verbs, or modifiers that require a little brain action to assimilate—are about enough for a single line. Line breaks also help forms emerge from the background, and allow for playful variants like severe enjambement (such as breaking a single word between two lines, in the manner of e. e. cummings).
But the more common function of line breaks, in today’s poetry, is simply advertisement. It is to place the words in a kind of frame or on a kind of pedestal. It is to stake a claim. This is important! This is deep! This merits leisurely attention! The claim may or may not be justified. Yet we have hypnotized ourselves into a kind of rapt acceptance of anything written in lines. My trip to the grocery store gets an attentive audience if I have told it with line-breaks (or read it aloud, with expressive pauses, to a familiar type of hyper-supportive crowd).
Try the deflation test on any of a thousand poems in major journals, and ask yourself just how much survives. Or apply it to some lines considered classic. Is there really much going on with certain famous verses by William Carlos Williams? Do we really care that much about Williams’s red wheelbarrow or refrigerated plums? I don’t, no matter how many anthologists tell me I should.
I find poets I work with rather too focused on lineation, stanza structure, and the like. These, done well, are helpful adjuncts, no more. Critics of a certain kind, too, head straight for these formal elements. A favorite word is “enactment.” An enjambement in Milton’s Paradise Lost “enacts” Satan’s fall. A line cut in in a poem by Geoffrey Hill “maps urban and class division.” A half-line in Shakespeare “symbolizes Hamlet’s aborted vengeance.” Really? These are the perceptions of a zealous graduate student, not a reader who is responding to the poetry itself.