slalom pole

A line break for a poet is like a slalom pole—you have to hit the turn without plowing over it.

from the belan deck

Naming things can feel impossible, but when it’s done well, it’s as if that thing could never be called something else.
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I'd browse anything vaguely literary, looking for phrases that stood out as titles. Found poems.
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If you don’t play around with the form, you’re not meant to be taken seriously.
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I do believe a bulleted list can be art, poetry.
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Give me artificial creativity—is there such a thing? Kenneth Goldsmith?
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Books are made out of books.
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Language is always an abbreviation.
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The proper work of the critic is praise, and that which cannot be praised should be surrounded with a tasteful, well-thought-out silence.
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When we buy a book, we think we are buying the time to read.
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Walt Whitman would sit on a bench at the South Street Seaport and watch waves of people come and go, swaying masses of humanity, individual points of light on each.

Our poets sit at the California Pizza Kitchen bar inside Terminal 1 at LAX, the crowds before them larger, more diverse than ever, teeming.
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Change the line breaks and call it a poem.
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The role of “poet” can only be filled by a human being.
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A poem is just a shape.
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The title is part of the text.

Matt Bucher, The Belan Deck (Sideshow Media Group Press, 2023)

runover words

He had a funny habit of placing a line break so that the words starting the next line would be shown to be superfluous.

on two wheels

Should one hesitate at the end of the line or make the turn on two wheels.

winking at you

One of those linebreaks that’s winking at you…knows it’s oh so clever.

edge of the void

…often poetic forms, even non-rhyming ones, are about end words. I don’t like to think of end words as the point of the line—the break is not more central to the line than the rest of the unit—but there is, yes, something significant about those ultimate words. They need a little more courage, hanging out right at the edge of the void.

—Elisa Gabbert, “Cross-talk,” The New York Times Book Review, Oct. 15, 2023

cut that alters

A line break that preempts the full thought and thus alters it.

against whiplash

Perhaps a prose poet gets tired of being jerked around by linebreaks.

not feeling it

As with the illusive ‘cold fusion’, more energy is imputed to the line break than can actually be measured.

field awareness

He was deft with line breaks, like a wide receiver who knows how to test the edge of the field but always keeps two feet in bounds.

unseen it hits you

A line break should be like a glass door you don’t see and just walk into.

[Paraphrase of what poet Bruce Cohen said at our workshop group tonight.]

extra punctuation

Poetry, as opposed to prose, has two additional means of punctuation: the line break and the space.

yet unbroken

The integral lines that broke just the same.

no brakes

Blew right through that line break.

wave building

Feel the line build, a wave about to break.

arbitrary & capricious linebreak

A casual survey of contemporary poetry would lead one to believe that the decision of how/where to break the poetic line is either arbitrary or idiosyncratic. There is much workshop talk but little real theory or even practical guidelines to rely on when considering the linebreak. One could say that the linebreak is arbitrary and capricious as they put it in the law.

no rung below you

Sometimes when you come to the end of a line, you have that sensation of stepping down a ladder and feeling for a moment that there is no other rung below, that you’ll be left to dangle in space.