POETICKS

At New-Poetry a thread has been going on for a few days about lineation. A post to it by Jim Finnegan particularly appealing to me quoted the following “‘chestnut’ of most teaching/textbooks, particularly that second stanza….”  It’s by William Carlos Williams:

To a Poor Old Woman

munching a plum on
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand

They taste good to her
They taste good
to her. They taste
good to her

You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand

Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

My reply:

Hey, thanks, James–that’s a chestnut

          I was        unfamiliar with.  Terrific,              I think it        does things I don't      see how any formal poem        could, valuable things.    (Don't take my line-breaks seriously--just foolin' around.)

Surely one could write a book about lineation using the above as one’s sole example of what it can do–conventionally–i.e., without the use of Cummingesque devices like infra-syllabic flow-breaks.  I’m too busy right now to say much about it here, except to direct myself here to do at least a few pages on it for my final statement on poetics, and to note how effective the last of Williams’s stanzas is . . . because its line-breaks are absolutely where the reader will expect them to be.  A kind of lineational resolution.
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Skincarerx.com Discounts

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.