Line-breaks and Layout: Striking a Balance Between the Written and Spoken Forms of a Poem

"Occasional poetry" - poetry composed to be read or performed at special events and ceremonies - is primarily a spoken form, with the author himself usually doing the reading. Because of this, the poet may be tempted not to pay much attention to written formatting because he already knows how he wants the piece to sound.

However, someone is certain to want to record the piece in print, and so, like other poetry, it really does need to work both on and off the page. That's where careful formatting (punctuation plus stanza and line-breaks) is needed to guide the reader and help him understand the pacing and pausing the writer intended.

Let's take Elizabeth Alexander's poem written for Obama's inauguration as an example. The delivery was fairly prosy, with deliberate - although not always very natural - pauses. Once the ceremony was over, then, people started looking for the text to read the poem for themselves, and it was soon available on-line. However, at this stage, nobody could be sure where the line-breaks should be: it's easy enough to transcribe words, but how could anyone be sure of punctuation and formatting?

Despite this, seeing it on the page, even as a simple text split into paragraphs, I found it began to make better sense as a poem. With the text in front of me, and reading it at my own pace, I could focus on the sounds and the rhythm of the words and begin to explore how they work together.

Now the poem is available in the layout Elizabeth Alexander intended, which should give us a better idea of how she envisaged it being read. A simple search for -- Elizabeth Alexander inauguration poem -- in Google will turn up many sites with the formatted text, showing that it was written in unrhyming, three-line stanzas, which appear as regular blocks on the page.

One problem with choosing a visual structure like this, however, is that there's a temptation to make the poem look more regular than meaning, grammar and phrasing demand; instead of using the format to help the reader, the poet may waste the potential of one of the most important of the poet's tools.

The first sentence (source CQ Transcriptions, via the LA Times online) - "Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each other's eyes or not, about to speak or speaking." - corresponds to the first stanza of the formatted poem:

Each day we go about our business,/ walking past each other, catching each other's/ eyes or not, about to speak or speaking./

The desire to have a neat little rectangle on the page seems to have resulted in an awkward second line-break that really doesn't help the reader.

Note how the first line is end-stopped - a complete phrase with a pause at the end - and how there's a comma to emphasise that end pause. Sometimes, a line-break can serve instead of punctuation, so when you find punctuation at the end of a line, it's worth looking to see if it's really necessary.

Here, the comma may not be essential but it certainly helps to separate off that first phrase. This is a good thing to do as the line pretty much defines the theme of the whole poem.

When we get to the second line, though, it's not a complete phrase.

In general, as a reader approaches a line-break, his expectations are being created of what will come next. Those expectations are then either contradicted or reinforced when he proceeds to the next line, allowing the poet to create interesting effects in the reader's mind by manipulating the breaks.

In the inaugural poem, the phrase "catching each other's" doesn't leave many possible options for the reader: there aren't very many things that we can catch like this, other than "eyes" or "attention". The line-break encourages a slight mental pause for the reader but doesn't allow him to do much within that pause.

If, instead, the phrase had continued one word further - "catching each other's eyes" - the reader would have ended the line with a strong image of a positive connection between people going about their business. When he reached the next line, the "or not," would have been a powerful contradiction, which would have also helped reinforce the hit-and-miss, unpredictable nature of jostling with strangers each day.

Of course, on the page, this would have created a very unbalanced - and much less visually-satisfying - triplet, with a far longer second line.

Layout and linebreaks allow poets to help readers understand their intentions of pausing and pace. It is vital, though, to balance the written and oral needs of a poem, especially one which is likely to be printed and re-printed for years to come.