flip-turn

A prose poet should meet the margin with same energy as a competitive swimmer’s flip-turn, pushing off the pool wall.

too narrow a margin

I have a truly marvelous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Fermat’s Last Theorem

I have a truly marvelous draft of this poem which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Fermat’s Last Poem

come up for air

In poetry the right margin is not like in a swimming pool, where the swimmer must make a turn against a wall. The line ends where the swimmer in open water comes up for air.

margin width

All poets are marginalized, but some have wider margins to write/work in.

bridges in space

The lines were bridges over
the emptiness on each side.

space beyond the words

If no white space cushioned the poem its language would have to brush up against the language of the world. The world where language buys sausages and fills insurance forms. Where it writes rejections and makes empty promises. Where it speaks in parliaments and fudges truth and sells cosmetic surgery and guns. And if there were no white space to mark it off, how would we know the difference? They are only little words. Even the innocent ones amongst them look like repeat offenders, like the lying sort.

‘Don’t play what’s there,’ Miles Davis said, ‘play what’s not there.’ Play the void. Play the white space. Play outside the frame.

If only there were ways of framing off the worst of our lives. Of containing it. Forbidding it to leak into the rest of our well-lived days.

—Vona Groarke, Four Sides Full (The Gallery Press, 2016)

line limit

If this line keeps going on, ranging forward, loping along, it will soon reach the limit of the margin and become prose.

carriage return

Old enough to remember the manual typewriter and the sound of the carriage return bar, throwing the line back against the wall of the left margin, where it would once more have to fight its way forward.

step back

The poet talks the prose line back from the edge.

on the down low

Let’s keep poetry our secret. Otherwise the culture will only ruin it for us.

rough edge

The right margin of line endings competing with the deckle edge of the page.

word borders

The margins of the page: invisible fence?

basic formal constraint

The basic formal constraint in contemporary poetry is the width (8.5’’) and length (11”) of a standard-size sheet of paper, along with its typical margin widths.