The Snap of a Mindful Line Break

A line break is the place where a poet decides to drop to the next line in a poem. It sounds like no big deal, but the poet who ignores line breaks misses a powerful opportunity. Line breaks guide a reader through a poem, signaling when to pause or run ahead, when to give prolonged attention to a single word, when to stop and look at the page instead of just listening to the words. To appreciate the power of line breaks, look at the poem, “Iris” by Prospect grad, Jackie Costella. Jackie wrote this poem during her senior year, just after a painful breakup.

If Jackie had written this poem without the creative line breaks, it might have looked something like this:

Not nearly as powerful, right? Another poem with mindful line breaks is Sharon Olds’s “The Race.” In this poem Olds describes her frantic race to get to her father’s bedside as he lay dying. She uses a technique called “enjambment,” avoiding commas or periods at the ends of her lines so that the words roll to the next line without pause, imitating the fact that she is running. She also uses deliberate run-on sentences.

Your assignment today is to take one of the poems you have written over the last couple days and rewrite it with entirely different line breaks. Be bold. Break rules. You will be amazed at your poem’s transformation.