tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422112066790651313.post7478914860302711948..comments2024-03-14T08:34:34.769+00:00Comments on litrefs: Promises to keepTim Lovehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00578925224900533603noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422112066790651313.post-75061785318647796762020-03-26T16:35:13.053+00:002020-03-26T16:35:13.053+00:00I've known people to get grumpy when challenge...I've known people to get grumpy when challenged at workshops about their line-breaks. Of course, they can't explain them.<br /><br />And yes, the framing effect is certainly an issue. By chance I was looking through my notebook this morning and found a fragment that could have become a Murdochian short poem but ended up being inserted into a short story a la Murdoch.Tim Lovehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00578925224900533603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2422112066790651313.post-25321081640180815652020-03-26T12:01:30.118+00:002020-03-26T12:01:30.118+00:00Line breaks have long puzzled me. For the longest ...Line breaks have long puzzled me. For the longest time—452 poems long to be precise—I pretty much laid out my poems as the mood took me and, as you noted in your example, a lot of the time I was more concerned with a poem looking pretty on the page that anything else. I think part of the reason for that was, as you say, because readers tend to ignore the formatting anyway. So why bother with it? When a poet reads his poem aloud no one even sees the structure and yet most people wouldn’t say anything’s lost in the reading. I say most because I consider the reading aloud of a poem a different beast to a poem on a page and I’ve never read my poetry before an audience although I do, on occasion, read it aloud for my own benefit. Perverse, no? I’ll be honest, even with my own poems, I rarely find the structure <i>adds</i> to the content. It’s there like a musical score.<br /><br />Is poetry more significant than prose though? I’m not wholly convinced it is. I think it mostly comes down to brevity. And framing. You can be standing outside in the enormity that is nature and be handed a photograph taken a few moment earlier of a part of landscape you’re in and there’s so much less to focus on and, because it has a white border round it, it becomes arty. We also associate longer texts with a narrative and take less of an interest in the words themselves; we’re more interested in where they’re leading us. A poem is not a journey, it’s a destination. Maybe. I have no axe to grind. People will do what they do and call it poetry and get royally miffed if anyone has the audacity to question them. So let them.Jim Murdochhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12786388638146471193noreply@blogger.com