Eye as measure

"The sense of line in my own work is something dynamic, to find what suffices in any given situation, though I must admit that, speaking of geometry, the eye is the measure by which I generally lineate. Within me is an inner carpenter who seeks to plane lines consistently throughout the course of a stanza or poem. While I love and advocate messy and serrated music, it takes conscious effort on my part to craft lines longer or shorter than the ones that come before it. I think this is related to my sense that as poets we are crafting something that when well-made can be held in the palm of the hand like an inlaid box. Ultimately, I have little use for a box that resembles a drunk rhombus or a ragged sleeve--I may look at such artifacts curiously, but I'm certainly not going to store anything in it." --Tim Seibles

Harmony in the Boudoir

After years of marriage, he stands at the foot of the bed and
tells his wife that she will never know him, that for everything
he says there is more that he does not say, that behind each
word he utters there is another word, and hundreds more be-
hind that one. All those unsaid words, he says, contain his true
self, which has been betrayed by the superficial self before her.
"So you see," he says, kicking off his slippers, "I am more than
what I have led you to believe I am." "Oh, you silly man," says
his wife, "of course you are. I find that just thinking of you
having so many selves receding into nothingness is very excit-
ing. That you barely exist as you are couldn't please me more."

--Mark Strand

The poems become funnier

"I was very surprised to find out, as my poems pick up more and more of the past of human beings, the ancient culture, more and more of the grief and the suffering of human beings--the poems become funnier! I don't understand that, but I love it. I feel that there's some way that as the mind gets more mature, in the midst of a lot of grief, it's able to dance a little." --Robert Bly

More excellence from A Broken Thing

"Play no tricks on the readers, and exact no requirements. Readers do not have to do anything, which includes reading the next line in order to understand the line they are in. If you have to tell your reader, just keep reading, it'll all get clear in a moment, then you are writing prose, which is dependent on progressive clarification--a device called 'plot'--rather than singular and memorable elucidation." --Alberto Ríos

A Short Panegyric

Now that the vegetarian nightmare is over and we are back to
our diet of meat and deep in the sway of our dark and beauty-
ful habits and able to speak with calm of having survived, let
the breeze of the future touch and retouch our large and hun-
gering bodies. Let us march to market to embrace the butcher
and put the year of the carrot, the month of the onion behind
us, let us worship the roast or the stew that takes its place once
again at the sacred center of the dining room table.

--Mark Strand

[Beautiful!]

Item:

I strolled through the neighborhood of beautiful houses
All of which I had written

Down the long dark street
Past the cemetery

Where all the tombstones
Had my small white face.

Over my shoulder burned the lamp
Of the moon.

The pages, in the wind, flew, were fluffed and ruffled
Like water by stones into a tune.

I watched the horse and the rat
The rabbit and fox

Leaving their tracks
On the snowy drafts.

The fox looked like me
Had my face

A long sharp chin
A shifty eye.

The wind riffled its beautiful pelt.
My spelling faltered

Under the spell of myself.

--Lynn Emanuel

A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line

Good read. To wit:

"When a line is perfect, it has the completeness of a highway on-ramp--it has its own structure, its own intelligence, and it transports the reader to something larger." --J.P. Dancing Bear

"Many waves rhyme with each other, meaning they resemble other waves in sound and appearance. One of the things that calms people who visit the shore is this sonic regularity, as well as the swelling of momentum as water gathers force before coming to the locus of return, the tide's break point, the shore. The same goes for a poem. The ear enjoys a good rhyme at the end of a line because we enjoy they rhythmic and sonic regularity those rhymes support. And we enjoy a line that swells and builds momentum as it moves toward its line-break, its moment of physical return." --Camille Dungy

"Sentences cannot be emotional because they do not require the reader to perform acts of integration and combination, which are the actions of mind that provide the complexity necessary for emotional investment. However, the lineated sentence requires the reader to integrate and connect each line with the lines that come before and after it, engaging the meat of the poem in the very substance of emotion: connection." --Karla Kelsey