Entry 364 — The Flow-Break
Why Jump-Cuts Are Not Flow-Breaks (In My Poetics)
Jump-cuts are not generally instances of flow-breaks because they usually occur at the end of a thought or image. One goes immediately into them from what preceded them, too. A line-break, on the other hand, requires one often to stop in the middle of a thought–and return all the way to the other side of the page one is reading. Or it&&&clogs one’s reading path, as here, or i t breaks in a manner much less common than a change of subject matter, as here.
More exactly, a flow-break is explicit, concrete, physical–an unusually large space or string of strange symbols or a space where it never is in prose–something objectively present. A jump-cut occurs usually after a normal space. When it occurs in the middle of a sentence, it’s not so much a physical break as a break in the thought conveyed. On the other hand, all flow-breaks cause a break in some thought.
I think I have to accept that here I’m not sure of my definition. Any literary text with persistent lineation (at either end or anywhere else in a line is poetry, that I will never change my mind about. The problem is, what else is poetry?
On reflection, I think I was right to begin with. I just need to emphasize that lineation is a significantly large physical stoppage of a line (before it begins in the case of right-margin lineation), which is usually performed by spaces but can be performed by anything else. “Thi s” would not be a specimen of lineation (as I previously held), and hence not a flow-break but a poetic device, an intra-syllabic word-break.