line masterclass

What, actually, is a line? How can, should, will it be broken? Why? What is the effect and affect of the line as whole or as component? How hard do you think about your line–breaks? Do you think hard enough? Is it possible to think the space between lines? What happens if you try? If the line break contains no innate grammatical rationale, is it a form of irrationality? Are you, deep down, a little scared of it? """1. Perspectives on the line break w/Discussion:"" Video of Levine"" Culler/Hollander"" Donaghy’s Pediscripts"" Olson, Line as breath"""2. Examples w/Discussion:""" Dickman, Control"" Wagner, I walked…"" Levine, What work is"" Middleton, Cannakale"" Riley"" C.K. Williams, ""3. Exercise: Take line-breaks, keep length, keep end words, if you change them, they have to have exactly the same stress, syllables, type (adverb, pronoun, verb) and cadence…""""""""""""""""""""""""""""

"from Projective Verse, by Charles Olson (1950)!"… the syllable is only the first child of the incest of verse (always, that Egyptian thing, it produces twins!). The other child is the LINE. And together, these two, the syllable and the line, they make a poem, they make that thing, the—what shall we call it, the Boss of all, the “Single Intelligence.” And the line comes (I swear it) from the breath, from the breathing of the man who writes, at the moment that he writes, and thus is, it is here that, the daily work, the WORK, gets in, for only he, the man who writes, can declare, at every moment, the line its metric and its ending—where its breathing, shall come to, termination.""The trouble with most work, to my taking, since the breaking away from traditional lines and stanzas, and from such wholes as, say, Chaucer’s Troilus or S’s Lear, is: contemporary workers go lazy RIGHT HERE WHERE THE LINE IS BORN.""Let me put it baldly. The two halves are:""the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE"the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE""And the joker? that it is in the 1st half of the proposition that, in composing, one lets-it-rip; and that it is in the 2nd half, surprise, it is the LINE that’s the baby that gets, as the poem is getting made, the attention, the control, that it is right here, in the line, that the shaping takes place, each moment of the going.""I am dogmatic, that the head shows in the syllable. The dance of the intellect is there, among them, prose or verse. Consider the best minds you know in this here business: where does the head show, is it not, precise, here, in the swift currents of the syllable? can’t you tell a brain when you see what it does, just there? It is true, what the master says he picked up from Confusion: all the thots men are capable of can be entered on the back of a postage stamp. So, is it not the PLAY of a mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at all?""And the threshing floor for the dance? Is it anything but the LINE? And when the line has, is, a deadness, is it not a heart which has gone lazy, is it not, suddenly, slow things, similes, say, adjectives, or such, that we are bored by?""…"""I would argue that here, too, the LAW OF THE LINE, which projective verse creates, must be hewn to, obeyed, and that the conventions which logic has forced on syntax must be broken open as quietly as must the too set feet of the old line. ""…""If a contemporary poet leaves a space as long as the phrase before it, he means that space to be held, by the breath, an equal length of time. If he suspends a word or syllable at the end of a line (this was most Cummings’ addition) he means that time to pass that it takes the eye—that hair of time suspended—to pick up the next line"""

Only after the dancers had left the floor did I notice the circular patterns of black scuffs and streaks their heals had made on the polished wood. This patter, I recognized, was an enormous encoded page of poetry, a kind of manuscript, or, more properly, a pediscript. If I were standing before you saying this, you wouldn’t have to read it. These lines are instructions for your voice to mimic mine (you may not be moving your lips as you read, but your breath and throat muscles are changing subtly in response. Just as a manuscript is a set of rules for summoning the speaker (from beyond the grave, if necessary), the pediscript is a set of rules for executing the dance. In order to interpret that dance chart you’ve got to get up and move... "[Donaghy, Wallflowers]

Denise Riley, "Sorrow alone reveals its constant pulse

"" A trusted oak deceives a pliant back

coiled into it like a fern shoot aping

an archbishop’s crook, held high as

an emblem of truth paraded through

hazy woods in its veil, to get snapped

off by a beautiful soul’s wild anxiety

pacing around its homemade jail of

catastrophic thought, quit by a slash

clean down to the dear bone. It wills

to twitch its hem aside then motor on.

Let no air now be sung, let no kind air.

"Philip Levine "What Work Is "We stand in the rain in a long line waiting at Ford Highland Park. For work. You know what work is--if you're old enough to read this you know what work is, although you may not do it. Forget you. This is about waiting, shifting from one foot to another. Feeling the light rain falling like mist into your hair, blurring your vision until you think you see your own brother ahead of you, maybe ten places. You rub your glasses with your fingers, and of course it's someone else's brother, narrower across the shoulders than yours but with the same sad slouch, the grin that does not hide the stubbornness, the sad refusal to give in to rain, to the hours wasted waiting, to the knowledge that somewhere ahead a man is waiting who will say, "No, we're not hiring today," for any reason he wants. You love your brother, now suddenly you can hardly stand the love flooding you for your brother, who's not beside you or behind or ahead because he's home trying to sleep off a miserable night shift at Cadillac so he can get up before noon to study his German. Works eight hours a night so he can sing Wagner, the opera you hate most, the worst music ever invented. How long has it been since you told him you loved him, held his wide shoulders, opened your eyes wide and said those words, and maybe kissed his cheek? You've never done something so simple, so obvious,

not because you're too young or too dumb, not because you're jealous or even mean or incapable of crying in the presence of another man, no, just because you don't know what work is.

5/1/2014 I Walked in the House by Catherine Wagner : The Poetry Foundation

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/241518 1/3

I Walked in the HouseBY CATHERINE WAGNER

I walked in the house

on the flat aspect of the wood

I took rectangular instruction of the wood

when I walked I turned at the wall

and on the flat I moved steadily

unimpeded, not tumbling, climbing or short of breath.

I walked in ease on the flat.

Something electric charged into our account

and zinged out of it, pre-instructed

and paid for the house. I felt

house on my heel then instep and toe.

I had a bad foot and I paid

to get it fixed so I could walk here.

I paid for the house and I paid for the

foot that touches it. I paid to be

directed rectangularly and down a hall.

I curved my body to direct

my waste through a hole. I am helped

and paying for it.

all of me exchanged,

housing exchange.

I saw us standing

up in the world.

And we sank into

exchange

vibrating transparency

like a sea nettle

afloat in the night sea

the edges of the sea-veil

tensed slapping above, visible

when the wind crevassed and doilied

If there is a ceiling to exchange

Home > Poems & Poets > I Walked in the House



and above it sky

I don’t can’t see it and I don’t know why

I want it

above my house which is crystalline gel edges

because the whole world’s disappeared

viewed as exchange

I broke my arm and the window

integrally to exchange.

I paid someone to fix me and improve

the window, triple-glazing it, and warmer

I rebounded knit in knit up.

All parties to the event’s aftermath

were paid.

Suppose I did not go in pain

to hospital, did not visit and revisit

for x-rays, left the window smashed

and sat here by it,

stuck up

among the crystalline

and cold.

I was painful and determined

not to play, and with the other unemployed

weighed —

the ghostship

sagged with holes.

—So you want to be a thing outside exchange?

Drain out the dying bath

see what color you are?

The coin changed hands



identical with a will

to transact.

Catherine Wagner, “I walked in the house” from Macular Hole, published by Fence Books. Copyright © 2004 by Catherine Wagner. Reprinted by permission of

Catherine Wagner.

Source: Macular Hole (Fence Books, 2004)

4 Poetry London | Autumn 2013

Matthew Dickman

Control

I’m reading some thingsCharlie wrote about cancerand Colette because I can’t sleep and because what he wrote is beautiful and it’s cold outside because it’s Novemberand my body is not what I wantit to be it’s not a Frenchkiss or piece of goldleaf, it’s not even a threadof saffron or a hard-on,all day it was not a puddlewith a stick in it, it was nota car alarm or a strip club,it never became a canoe with a wooden Indian insideit, his war paint chippingbecause of all the tinglingoxidation going onin this motherfucker, in thisroom where my bodyis. Where my body is notlike anything I have ever dreamed about. The handslook like somethingsomeone painted in thirdgrade, which feels like starsfloating above a maple treewhich is the idea of controlif the idea of controlhad no blood in it, had noConquistadors, in which caseit would have no ideaabout me and what a goodjob I do at not runningmy arms throughwith a grapefruit spoonor swallowing my tonguewhen you say nice thingswhich reminds me of wormsand the worms are likesubway cars and those carsare full of people and the bodies of the people, sittingor standing, reading and talking,trying not to fall over, notto crash into each other and thenwhat, all while a worm speedsthrough a tunnelbuilt beneath a city of light

and leather jackets. My bodyis not a kind of musicor a certainty, it’s not a pin-wheelor a touch screen, it’s nota lamp or a trumpet or basaltor milk or a band-aidleft on the kitchen counterwhich earlier had beenplaced over a small cut a kidhad made in the backseatof the car while his motherwas in the market buyingbread and cigarettes, a cuthe made on purpose, withsomething he found in herpurse, but when it began to bleedhe begins to cry and sayssomeone else did it, becausehe’s afraid, and so he does, he invents another body, a strongbody to do the things he needs done.

Crossing Guard

I’m walking with Hamzathe year we were friends, the year he turned five,the same yearhis five-year-old friend died in a car accident, sittingin the back seat, wrappedin a seatbelt, the black strap across his little chestthe way the older kids willwear those yellowcrossing guard uniforms, and his neck snapping quicklylike a light switch, in a hurry and fast but forever. I’m walking in my grown up bodyand Hamza is walking in his little kid body and we are bothhuman beings at the sametime. In front of ussomeone has dragged the furrycorpse of a squirreloff the road and then abandonedit on the sidewalkthe way we do sometimeswhen things scare us or make us

5/1/2014 Butchers by C. K. Williams : Poetry Magazine

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poem/241560 1/1

Letter to the EditorBY PETER PITZELE

RondeauBY LAURA KASISCHKE

1979BY RODDY LUMSDEN

ButchersBY C. K. WILLIAMS

1Thank goodness we were able to wipe the Neanderthals out, beastly things,from our mountains, our tundra—that way we had all the meat we might need.

Thus the butcher can display under our very eyes his hands on the block,and never refer to the rooms hidden behind where dissections are effected,

where flesh is reduced to its shivering atoms and remade for our delectationas cubes, cylinders, barely material puddles of admixtured horror and blood.

Rembrandt knew of all this—isn’t his flayed beef carcass really a caveman?It’s Christ also, of course, but much more a troglodyte such as we no longer are.

Vanished those species—begone!—those tribes, those peoples, those nations—Myrmidon, Ottoman, Olmec, Huron, and Kush: gone, gone, and goodbye.

2But back to the chamber of torture, to Rembrandt, who was telling us surelythat hoisted with such cables and hung from such hooks we too would reveal

within us intricate layerings of color and pain: alive the brush is with pain,aglow with the cruelties of crimson, the cooled, oblivious ivory of our innards.

Fling out the hooves of your hands! Open your breast, pluck out like an Aztecyour heart howling its Cro-Magnon cries that compel to battles of riddance!

Our own planet at last, where purged of wilderness, homesickness, prowling,we’re no longer compelled to devour our enemies’ brains, thanks to our butcher,

who inhabits this palace, this senate, this sentried, barbed-wire enclosurewhere dare enter none but subservient breeze; bent, broken blossom; dry rain.

Source: Poetry (April 2011).

MORE FROM THIS ISSUEThis poem originally appeared in the April 2011 issue of Poetry magazine

Home > Poetry Magazine > Butchers

Poetry London | Autumn 2013 1

poems

Christopher Middleton

Çanakkale

All but a centurygone. By the thousand, pinned downon slopes, on beachheadsshot to death, and rawboned,ours and theirs, blownto pieces.

Two-faced anthropos,late again, stirs to condemnthe bad plan, but snatches a caress:

Now, unmarked,that fishonce on this opposite shorefor who knows who to remember,scales glistening in a shellof late sunlight, a savageto the last gasp,the writhing amorous, beheaded,gutted, eaten.

Go With Isaac Rosenberg

Afternoon moves onair now so warm

Among the thin greenpipes of the bamboo

those twitters comefrom the chick sparrows

It is tentative, a touchof air all over the skin

Bless, the word for itbecomes the thing

Go with Isaac Rosenbergscavenging on the Somme

‘Sometimes I find a biblein a dead man’s clothes

‘I tear out pages that I want,and carry them around with me’.

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