The following essays are selected from A Broken Thing: Poets on the Line, edited by Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee, a collection of 71 essays by poets writing about the poetic line, published by the University of Iowa Press.
Two Lines
by Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
"A line of poetry on a page exists in space, but I think of it as a kind of timing, a measured flow of poetic energy, a dynamic."
Shore Lines
by Camille Dungy
"The best poems deliver what I call the inevitable surprise."
Tiny Étude on the Poetic Line
by Heather McHugh
"The line is where the wish to go forth in words (along one axis of a journey) encounters the need to break off..."
Where It Breaks: Drama, Silence, Speed, and Accrual
by Dana Levin
"We are made silent by awe, shock, doubt, bliss, rage, fear, grief, shame, tristesse."
This Is Just To Say That So Much Depends Upon
by Timothy Liu
"It was Williams
who said that a poem is 'a little machine made out of words,' so it seems fitting to take his poem apart to see how it works."
The Line Is the Leaf
by Donald Revell
"Two books above all others have taught me to articulate (almost) exactly what I mean by a line of poetry..."
Some Thoughts on the Integrity of the Single Line in Poetry
by Alberto Ríos
"I am an advocate—or rather, an appreciator—of the long line in poems, though by that I do not at all mean lines with simply more words."
Croon: A Brief on the Line
by Tim Seibles
"If we think of lineation as one of the engines that drives tone, it's easy to make yet another connection between poems and songs."
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