I love this poem, everything about it. I love letter poems a lot a lot. And the opening image is perfectly drawn.

Also, thank you for encouraging Dana to share her MFA statement. It was great.

I should do scansion on some of your poems. It would help me see the beats better. I read your work and I don’t realize that you are writing in a certain number of beats per line. This must mean that you do it very naturally. Or that I am a lazy reader. ;)

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the line. It’s all very interesting to me. Nathan and I have been talking a lot – a lot a lot – about the line. It’s interesting to see what different people do, how they approach it. And, um, you are not a lazy cuss. Nobody is going to buy that assertion for a minute.

Yes, stanzas. That’s a whole nuther issue, isn’t it? I have seen and even occasionally written exactly what you talk about from time to time – regular stanzas whose final line are sometimes end-stopped and sometimes enjambed. I don’t know how I feel about the effect. If I want a strict structure where every stanza is the same number of lines, I try to have a reason for that structure. I feel like the poem needs to work with the form, and that the stanza breaks need to make some kind of sense – enjambed or not. I try to think of it like music. Where is an eight rest needed? Where is a quarter rest needed? A half rest? To me, the stanza break is like a half rest. I think the break can be end stopped or enjambed, as long as there is a reason for the poem to “hang” in that spot for a half rest. Is the half rest really warranted? Would a simple line break, which is about half as much of a rest, do the trick?

I often find myself rewriting and tightening to make a poem fit the way I want to score it. The paring can be a good exercise and strengthen the piece, but there’s always the fear that the content will bend too much to fit the form, and then the content will take a back seat to form, which would not be a good thing.

Of course you make sense. Everything you say makes sense and is very thoughtful. Your habits and preferences as a reader serve you well.

Lines: eek. I don’t have any consistent approach; it depends on the poem. But my language is always highly rhythmic and tending toward pentameter, and lately I’ve been doing four beats to (most) lines to try and maintain a dynamic tension. I admire poems with a lot of enjambment, but I’m not always too successful with that myself. So usually my line breaks permit at least a slight pause, though they don’t presume it. I also pay attention to line length in most (but not all) poems. I do feel that poets over the last 100 years or so have focused too much on the eye and not enough on the ear; I think that most of the time we need to be conscious of both in roughly equal measure. For example, as a reader, much neo-formalist verse leaves me fairly cold, with its end-rhymes obvious only to the eye, but I love poems where rhymes fall at regular, metrical intervals but are hidden by the arrangement of line breaks, so that one only discovers them after a second reading, or by reading out loud. Ai does this especially well. If I weren’t such a lazy cuss, I’d try to write poems like that myself more often.

One can’t discuss line theory without considering stanzas, too. I’ve noticed in American poetry over the last couple decades a strong trend toward poems that create an illusion of order with regular stanzas of two, three or four lines. Almost every poem in the book I was reading this morning, for example – Doty’s Atlantis – does this. Often the breaks seem completely arbitrary, but they do appeal to the eye, and the addition of white space can make a long poem easier to take in, for some reason. I won’t deny I’ve experimented with that approach, but I don’t really understand it. So most of the time, if I have stanza breaks, they fall where paragraph breaks would if it were prose. This reinforces a tendency to make lines break along (slight) semantic divisions, too. Of course, in a poem whose momentum depends in part on non sequitors, like the one above, a lack of stanza breaks can be much more effective, I think.

Does any of this make sense? I apologize for the imprecision of my terminology. As you know, I’ve never taken a poetry workshop, and have rarely read any theory, so this is all stuff I’ve come up with on my own, based on my habits and preferences as a reader. I think you and I share a basic, populist presumption that one shouldn’t require any specialized knowledge to read and understand a poem. This more than anything predisposes me to favor less artifical-seeming arrangements of words on the page.

Hey, how do you choose your line breaks? I’ve been thinking about the line and line breaks a lot lately. I might have asked you this before, but please indulge me.