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