A Broken Thing

Poets on the Line

Emily Rosko, Anton Vander Zee

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9781609380540
• eBook ISBN: 9781609380748
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

 In the arena of poetry and poetics over the past century, no idea has been more alive and contentious than the idea of form, and no aspect of form has more emphatically sponsored this marked formal concern than the line. But what, exactly, is the line? Emily Rosko and Anton Vander Zee's anthology gives seventy original answers that lead us deeper into the world of poetry, but also far out into the world at large: its people, its politics, its ecology. The authors included here, emerging and established alike, write from a range of perspectives, in terms of both aesthetics and identity. Together, they offer a dynamic hybrid collection that captures a broad spectrum of poetic practice in the twenty-first century.

 

Rosko and Vander Zee's introduction offers a generous overview of conversations about the line from the Romantics forward. We come to see how the line might be an engine for ideals of progress—political, ethical, or otherwise. For some poets, the line touches upon the most fundamental questions of knowledge and existence. More than ever, the line is the radical against which even alternate and emerging poetic forms that foreground the visual or the auditory, the page or the screen, can be distinguished and understood.

 

From the start, a singular lesson emerges: lines do not form meaning solely in their brevity or their length, in their becoming or their brokenness; lines live in and through the descriptions we give them. Indeed, the history of American poetry in the twentieth century could be told by the compounding, and often confounding, discussions of its lines. A Broken Thing both reflects upon and extends this history, charting a rich diffusion of theory and practice into the twenty-first century with the most diverse, wide-ranging and engaging set of essays to date on the line in poetry, revealing how poems work and why poetry continues to matter.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments and Permissions
• Introduction
• On the Line
• Reading Lines Linear How to Mean
• Who Is Flying This Plane? The Prose Poem and the Life of the Line
• Three Takes on the Line
• 3/4/5
• Two Lines
• The Summons of the Line
• Secret Life
• A Momentary Play against Concision
• Notes on the Point de Capital
• Forever Amber
• Remarks / on the Foundation / of the Line:A Personal History
• A Line Apart
• Furthermore: Some Lines about the Poetic Line
• The Graphic Line
• Shore Lines
• Scotch Tape Receptacle Scissors and a Poem
• In Praise of Line-Breaks
• Grails and Legacies: Thoughts on the Line
• Only the Broken Breathe
• As a Means, Shaped by Its Container
• A Line Is a Hesitation, Not a World
• Four Allegories of the Line
• The Hyperextension of the Line
• Slash
• The Line as Fetish and Fascist Reliquary
• A Personal Response to the Line
• The Uncompressing of the Line
• Line of Inquiry
• Out of Joint: An Ir/reverent Meditation on the Line
• The Virtues of Verse
• Case on the Line
• Lines and Spaces
• Lineation in the Land of the New Sentence
• The Invisible Tether: Some Thoughts on the Line
• “What I cannot say is / Is at the vertex”:Some Working Notes on Failure and the Line
• Where It Breaks: Drama, Silence, Speed,and Accrual
• This Is Just to Say That So Much Depends Upon
• The Line
• “And then a Plank in Reason, Broke”
• The Free-Verse Line: Rhythm and Voice
• Tiny Étude on the Poetic Line
• Dickinson’s Dashes and the Free-Verse Line
• Minding the Gaps
• Line / Break
• Rhyme and the Line
• Enter the Line
• Healing and the Poetic Line
• Some of What’s in a Line
• Harold and the Purple Crayon:The Line as a Generative Force
• On the Origin and Practice of a “Signature” Line
• Lines as Counterpoints
• Two Takes on Poetic Meaning and the Line
• The Line Is the Leaf
• Writing Against Temperament: The Line
• Some Thoughts on the Integrity of the Single Line in Poetry
• Comma Splice and Jump-Cut: On the Line
• Clarity and Mystery: Some Thoughts on the Line
• Captivated by Syllabics
• Croon: A Brief on the Line
• Breadthless Length
• A Few Lines on the Line
• Life / Line: (Freaked)
• A Few Attempts at Threading a Needle
• A Broken Thing?
• The Thin Line
• The Broken Line: Excess and Incommensurability
• Line: So We Go Away
• Some Notes on the Poetic Line inG. C. Waldrep and Lily Brown
• The Only Tool
• The Economy of the Line
• Contributor Notes
• Index