Thread by @CarolineBirdUK

A friend just messaged to say my poem ‘mid-air’ may have sparked a conversation about line-breaks in free verse and whether they’re deliberate/ important? I welcome this because I’m a line-break geek,I could bore a stranger at a bus-stop for hours :) Here’s my very subjective 🧵

There isn’t one answer as as line-break can have multiple functions. When I write a first draft it’s totally shapeless, no line-breaks just a big block of untamed spirit (forgive the lofty word.) And then I think to myself, okay, what kind of body/form should this spirit inhabit?

For me, they’re never random, it’s about trying to capture the state of mind of the poem. For example, i once wrote a poem called Bipolar Purgatory and spent ages making the line-breaks fevered, never finishing a thought, breathing in the ‘wrong places’, never collecting itself…

The same applies for poems about current distress (not reflected-upon past distress,) I want the form to fit the content… like if someone is begging a lover not to leave they’re gonna be breathing after the ‘ands’ and the ‘but I’m trying to’s’ and the ‘what abouts.’

If I write a poem like ‘Rookie’ full of naivety and confusion I deliberately break the line in naive/confused places (and that wasn’t a book that was/ a taco stuffed with daisies) because the I want the form to fit the content. “Hey, this poem is a total rookie!”

So that’s ‘’intentionally unintentional line-breaks,”… these, bizarrely, often take me the longest because it takes hours and hours to make a poem sound natural like you’ve just scribbled it on the back of an beermat during a panic attack. Okay. The other sorts of line-breaks…

With a poem like ‘mid-air’ I get to do my favourite sort, where the poem’s spirit is troubled but still alert enough be intentional. So I can geek out and 1) create extra pockets of meaning (because wherever you break the line, for a split second, that *is* the whole line,) …

….so you can make a poem full of parallel universes. ‘Where the air is.’ 2) you can literally act out the action like ‘the orchestra tightens, the ‘And’/ before the ‘one two three.’3) you can lean out of the window of a page and snatch a single word in your fist like ‘caught’ or

or ‘locked’ and make it accountable for itself, by itself…before releasing it back into the flock of its line… and this, in a poem about time stopping, an illicit kiss, felt true-or as close as i could come-to the content. What is the right body for the spirit, you know? Oh AND

Sometimes a calm poem comes along (rare for me) that’s got it’s shit together. Then I can let it breath regularly, finish its image uninterrupted or break a line to create two distinct meanings that marry one another. But I *particularly* love misdirection line-breaks

….when, for a moment, the opposite is true. Like ‘we are the laughing lovers/ in the reconstruction/ just moments before the attack.’ Because, you see, for that one line, that one suspended moment in time, the lovers are still laughing. And always will be- just in that half line

Because poems, like lives, seem linear but aren’t, our lives are built on line-breaks that begin one way and end another, but it does make the first half any less real. One more thing (is this a thread or have a knitted a whole jumper?)….

Prose poems! Yay. Okay so you know that famous Leonard Cohen line ‘there’s a crack in everything that’s where the light gets in,’ that’s a line break. And a good prose poem is like a dark fairytale forest where you enter as one person and leave another. No cracks, no light. UNTIL

…After surviving the strange glory of a prose poem you emerge, changed, blinking, into the light of an enormous line break. The biggest line break of all. The silence that follows. Which is my cue to thoroughly shut up now because my tea’s gone cold :) Have a gorgeous day. Xx