break felt

Let the line break where it may, where it wants to break.

makes a noise

You should hear a snap when you break a line.

three polish aphorisms

I had so much joy in my creations that there cannot be a question of merit.
—Jozef Pilsudski (1867-1935)

Tell me what books you have at home; I’ll tell you who you are.
—Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz (1894-1980)

Beyond each corner a number of new directions lie in wait.
—Stanislaw Jerzy Lec (1909-1966)

[Beyond each line-break a number of new directions lie in wait.]

A Treasury of Polish Aphorisms (Polish Heritage Publications, 1997) compiled and translated by Jacek Galazka

feel it

Enjambment: There is no rule other than feel.

against whiplash

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

not the breaking point

For all its effects, the only thing important about the linebreak is that it shouldn’t be where the reader stops reading.

unbreakable

All good sentences naturally resist enjambment.

point on the horizon

The linebreak as a vanishing point you can’t quite see beyond.

anachronistic turn

The kind of line break so fashionable back in the day, you thought you could hear the faint echo of a carriage return bell at the turn.

the breaks

A linebreak as a means to semantic attention or syntactic surprise.

frail reasoning

Much of the poetics one hears about ‘the line’ amounts to grasping at straw.

horizonline

A linebreak like the horizon is a visual illusion, yet becomes important aurally.

years of mystical thinking

So much mysticism surrounds ‘the linebreak’ in free verse poetics.

linebreak ache

Linebreak ache: experiencing a poet execute one of those overly clever linebreaks meant to call maximum attention to syntactic meaning or a word within a word.