Ciaran Carson

[Endymion]

Hi All,

I'd been browsing the March 2003 issue of Poetry Magazine when I came across this poem in an ad introducing the poet's new book Breaking News.


Home

hurtling from
the airport down
the mountain road

past barbed wire
snagged with
plastic bags

fields of scrap
and thistle
farmyards

from the edge
of the platea
my eye zooms

into the clarity
of Belfast
streets

shipyards
domes
theatres

British Army
helicopter
poised

motionless
at last

I see everything

Let me start by saying that it's the reading of pieces such as this one that has had me on the wrong track syntactically. What I mean to say is beginners such as myself read poems such as this one and attempt the same kind of approach in our first few writings. Now, not that I don't necessarily like this particular piece. On the first few reads I rather liked it. I appreciated the clarity, the imagery. However, I need to question the poet's syntactical approach in this piece. Do the one word strophes, line breaks, and lack of punctuation truly work in this piece? Reading it again and again, aloud, I now have a different opinion. Just reading it aloud without the line breaks gave me a better vision of what he saw during his ride home. I'll leave it at that because I'd like to hear what others have to say about the piece. I'd appreciate any helpful insight about pieces like this. Thanks very much indeed.

By the way, forgive me if this is not the place for this.

Best,
Endymion

[Kaltica]

Do the one word strophes, line breaks, and lack of punctuation truly work in this piece?
No.

[Andrea345]

The line breaks don't work for me. Sometimes I can read the shorter lines & it doesn't read as chopped up & slowed down. The "speed" of the line can be pushed, for me, when there's two stressed syllables, if the piece is metrical or loosely rhythmic, or when full or slant rhyme are used. Otherwise, it slows the read down for me, chops it up. I read the linebreaks as a slight pause (caesura). So, two word lines can read more slowly that ten or twelve word lines & they can read as chopped up as coleslaw.

That bit about "my eye zooms ... into the clarity // of Belfast // streets." ick triple ick. No wonder it was only in an ad. I mean, streets have "clarity"? The article "the" indicates the streets have possession of the "clarity" (whatever the hell that means.) I really also hate "snagged" showing up as the first word on that lazy line. That and the word "poised" are the only interesting words in the piece. I did like the image with the helicopter, but it took me four attempts to read down the piece (I have an aversion to painful poetry) before I could get there.

The lack of punctuation didn't help in this case either. Because he's used his line breaks for I don't know what, there was no logical "pause" between "farmyards" and "from the edge." It muddied the reading. I had to go back & parse out what the heck was happening & it was not a joyous experience.

This is an example of a good idea poorly executed. The writer would never go for longer lines b/c then the piece would be a fourth of the length it is now (awww). I find it a bit outrageous that a writer would cripple a piece so with such a mis-handling of line breaks & punctuation.

-a

[Rachel Lindley]

To expand on what Andrea said, the writer has fallen for the typical misunderstanding about linebreaks in poetry in that they are used in a purely visual fashion. The first line gives away what the writer thinks they're doing:

hurtling from

When you read poetry, aloud, it soon becomes clear that short linebreaks do not, in fact, speed a poem up, but slow it down. Only when a person reads silently do short linebreaks appear to speed a poem up, because the eye can quickly scan vertically and absorb most of the text. Therefore, if a writer has written a poem involving speed and all the linebreaks are ridiculously short, they have not taken sound into account, which is a sign of a poor writer. Although there are exceptions via the sound of words and punctuation, generally you can count on this:

Short linebreaks - slow
Long linebreaks - fast

Rachel