I remember someone saying in a Warren Wilson class that the line has trouble sustaining itself upwards of sixteen syllables, which I found to be a curious observation at the time but which I have come to believe as fairly correct; if the line is representative of a unit of breath, one which can be subdivided with pause and caesura, the lungs get tighter and tighter after about sixteen syllables.

But not every syllable is equal; the tongue and brain have more work to do with “floral embroidered” than “I ate six whole eggs” for several reasons: the imagistic but not perfectly concrete nature, the concordance of sounds, the multi-syllabic words. Essentially, you might see most of the words in the latter in a five-year-old’s vocabulary, while the words in the former are more complex.

Most of my recent reading has involved long, long lines, either through whole poems (Lynda Hull’s Star Ledger, T.R. Hummer’s Walt Whitman in Hell) or interspersed with short lines in compact spaces (Christine Garren’s The Piercing), so I thought I would give long lines another whirl. Previous experiments with them had turned out poorly.

So, for today’s grind poem, I wrote in exceptionally long lines. Or, so I thought, but when I went back and did some counting, I found I was still nowhere near, say, C.K. Williams’s average line length.

But the lines were long for me, and I could feel them buckling even as they were being written. They look like prose on the page and I found myself fighting against a normative urge to make them sound like prose. Prose communicates meaning and, by and large, doesn’t care where the breath of the words occurs– I think that’s true for even most literary prose, which manages tone, diction, and syntax the way poems do but fails to compensate for the aural. I found myself wanting to resort to that convention in ways that I manage to avoid even working with prose poems– looking for the line break for so long, and denying it to myself, was uncomfortable and bizarre, which probably means that I should try it again, continue trying it until I can get it to click. But for now, I’ll simply say, “No sir, I don’t like it.”