AustLit

'From Stéphane Mallarmé onwards, the parameters of the line have been manipulated in diverse ways by poets from William Carlos Williams to Charles Olson, Susan Howe and Lyn Hejinian to Michele Leggott, Alan Loney and others. Whether concentrating on the concept of the breath as a defining unit, harnessing a particular speech rhythm or responding to visual prompts – some of which reflect the internet age and new media – the poetic line is neither static nor redundant in contemporary practice. An exploration of poetic structure via the line still offers vital alternatives to prose, as well as sometimes being influenced by it. The use of the line is synonymous with the use of page space and this relationship is commented on by our contributors in diverse and individual ways.' (Introduction)

'To develop a meandering poetics specific to a ‘gallery’ ekphrastic poem, this paper examines the performance of the poetic line to create indeterminacy in two ekphrastic works published in 2016; Paul Hetherington’s Gallery of Antique Art and Ken Bolton’s ‘Dark Heart’. Whilst Hetherington’s work traverses a sequence of prose-poetic ‘rooms’ through his notionally ekphrastic gallery, Bolton’s poem is a scattered collage of his gallery experience, evading the traditionally ekphrastic mode of detached contemplation. Both poets bring the timeless properties of artworks in a gallery into the temporal flow of language by allowing for ‘detours’ to rupture the stilled time of the art-objects. Instead of approaching the artwork directly, the poet’s lived experience in the gallery space produces the poem, as an after effect of the poet’s failure to provide a comprehensive translation of the artworks contained within a gallery. Ekphrasis is posited as a creative and interpretive drive experienced by the poet, lived in the presence of an artwork or artworks, performed through the meandering poetic line.'   (Introduction)

'Simon Patton, writing recently in the Sydney Review of Books encourages us to ‘…think of the line as a kind of gesture, a gesture which carries an expressive force’. He contrasts poems in which individual lines ‘achieve sufficient distinctness to make them memorable’ with poems of a more ‘fragmentary quality’ (such as those of Antigone Kefala, whose Fragments he is reviewing). Without valorising one over the other, I would agree that these are two possible approaches to the line. Many others are possible also — from prose poetry’s decision to dispense with the line entirely, to the opening up of gaps or caesurae within lines favoured by many contemporary poets, to formal poetry’s demand that the line contain a certain number of feet, syllables, and / or end rhymes.

'For myself, as a practitioner who writes in both constrained forms and free verse, the line takes on different qualities in different poems. In this brief piece I will consider my approaches to the free verse line, and to lines in poems working against some kind of self-imposed constraint. I will close with a case study of the treatment of the line in translation using an example from Japanese poet Kawaguchi Harumi.'  (Introduction)

'1. In 2016, for the ‘Noted’ and ‘You Are Here’ Festivals, glass artist Harriet Schwarzrock and I collaborated on a project called ‘Light Lines’. This involved turning my poetry into lines of light made from heat-worked neon — the process helped align my visual and literary practices… ​' (Introduction)

'To what extent does the poetic line bear the stamp of a particular poetic personality? Is that, in any case, a desirable thing? Do individual poets have their own rules about how the line behaves – the distance it travels, to what purpose, and when and how it breaks – or is it constantly adapted for purpose? Are poets even aware of their process and, if so, honest and open about it? In this paper I consider the various (and varying) uses of the line by poets who have influenced me most profoundly, with examples from my own work to demonstrate my learning and further experiments. Specific reference is made to the influence of cinematic editing, and the role of the line in a poem’s essential memorability. Also addressed are the different effects of the stretch and breaking of the line on the page and when orally delivered.'  (Introduction)