One of the first tasks I've given neophyte writers is to free associate for ten minutes and then lineate the last ten lines of their writing so it “looks” like poetry. I'm trusting that the mind automatically writes poetry versus prose, and that the unconscious seeks heightened language to make sense of emotion. Because the writer has by the ten minute mark usually run out of things to conceal and is onto more subconscious material, the lines are always looser and more interesting than if he had just begun to arduously write “a poem” in iambic pentameter, line by line. Chopping up the prose after the fact is easier for beginners than envisioning how those lines should look while composing them. The lesson for them is that the line breaks are decisions of the eye and the ear that aren't so difficult after the material has arrived, and the poet can more easily determine what to emphasize.
What about the reverse? Taking the line breaks out of a poem and turning it into prose? I'm reading The Book of Asa (Eyewear) by C.P. Mangel, a very smoothly done 635 page narrative poem about a black intellectual family transplanted to the South. Compelling characters, fabulous food-and-place descriptions, the Klu Klux Klan waiting to pounce, and coming-of-age momentum – but in rough blank verse. Why the but? The formal constraint strengthens the piece and nowhere does it feel forced – rather, it's a tour de force. But I think in this instance, the formal limits the audience, and an important work needs its audience. Okay, so not everybody will like the bacon kidney pie, pumpkin parsnip soup, liver custard, dove dumplings. I'm not sure being published in England (Eyewear's headquarters is London), gives the book the exposure it deserves, given its timeliness, but I do know getting such a big book published would be very difficult, perhaps even as fiction. Still, I keep imagining it without line breaks. Mangel, a lawyer with an MFA from the University of British Columbia, lives, according to google, in North Carolina. Her chapbook Laundry concerns hate crimes within the prison system.
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