Line Lengths #3: Long Lines
This article is for: Beginners and Intermediate
This is the third article in my series about line lengths.
The first article goes over general ideas about how line lengths work in a poem, and how you might choose them.
The second article dives deeper into what short lines can do for a poem.
In this article, I’m going to the other end of the scale, and looking at:
What long lines bring that shorter lines can’t!
And as in the last article, we’re going to do this by exploring several examples from different poets.
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First, a quick recap
In my earlier article, I explained that long lines almost always do a couple of things. They are:
Long lines tend to increase the pace of a poem, because line breaks (which slow things down) arrive less often.
There is usually something that will give richness of language, voice, or imagery in every long line, to keep readers engaged all through.
So you can take it for granted that these things are happening in all the poems I look at here.
Zaina Hashem Beck: the ghazal, and beyond
Beck is a poet who often uses the ghazal form, which usually has long lines.
Traditional ghazals consists of multiple couplets that are essentially separate from one another (though they are all linked together through a repeated word and rhyme at the end of each couplet). In effect, each stanza basically functions on its own as a distinct poem—which means that the poet has to pack a lot of work into those two lines!
So the ghazal’s long lines help the poet make each stanza have an impact by itself, and Beck is an excellent modern exponent of this art.
Here are two couplets (not in order) from her “Ghazal: In this City”.
Dear Lina, I still have balconies. I still have elevators—
they’re larger, they silver my reflection. I never take the stairs in this city.
The early trucks on Umm Suqueim. The folded fabrics in Satwa. The workers
on the gravel. The shoppers in the malls. The gallop of the night mare in this city.
Each of these couplets shows a different way that long lines can allow a single stanza to be satisfying as its own mini-poem.
In the first couplet, Beck has space for including three things that all have a relationship to height and space: balconies, elevators, and stairs. This allows for intriguing interactions to develop between them—like the unexpected way that the elevators being “larger” links them to balconies, even though one is an enclosed space and one is open. In addition, there is room for Beck to expand on the “elevators” by including a piece of description—“they silver my reflection”—that makes the elevators seem transformative and magical. Moreover, all this is wrapped within an address to “Lina,” which suggests that balconies/elevators/stairs have some special importance in the relationship between the poet and Lina.
That’s a lot of material to pack into two lines, and gives them a chance to resonate enough to make a memorable stanza-poem.
In the second couplet, she uses a different approach: the list of mini-scenes from Dubai paints a portrait of the city that feels surprisingly comprehensive, given its length. And then she still has space to enfold all those within an interpretive metaphor, making them all part of the “gallop of the night mare” of the city. Again, that’s a lot!
If you’re tempted to try a traditional ghazal, you’ll get a chance to see what you too can do to make a mini-poem in just two lines.
But more generally, perhaps we can learn from this that:
Long lines can make a dense and satisfying poem in a very short space.
Kazim Ali: tension within each line
I would argue that most good poems have some kind of tension within them that gets developed, explored, and maybe released as the poem progresses.
Generally, this tension occurs across the lines of a poem, and between its various stanzas or parts.
However, long lines allow the poet to explore more of that tension-and-release within a single line.
Here are two single lines from “Submission” by Kazim Ali:
Then the blue screech the lake bellowing my name over a crowd but I never felt found never knew that sharp peal of a bell
Only to win any cold fellowship governed by the thinnest laws of bondage every angel peering at the one who fell
Ali is not using a ghazal approach here: all nine lines of this poem connect up to make a single whole unified whole.
However, Ali does take the idea of the ghazal couplet further, so that each linenow is a bit like its own mini-poem, because each line has its own drama going on:
In the first line, there is a clear division at the word “but”, so that the first part of the line appears to speak of being called or wanted, and the second part expresses the disappointment of that never really happening. But even in the first half of the line, I see a tension between the “screech” that is “bellow[ed]” and the idea of being “found”—the screech and the bellow sound hostile, but the being “found” sounds desirable. And finally, the screech and the bellow transform into another sound, a “peal,” which moves the imagery forward in a way that typically happens across different lines or stanzas of a poem.
In the second line, there’s an interesting friction between “fellowship” and the way it’s described as “cold”—not what one expects from fellowship. And this pattern repeats in the description of “laws” as “thinnest”—an unusual way to think of laws. Also, the sentence appears to want us to yoke together “fellowship” and “bondage,” but these are usually opposites. And at the end does the speaker identify with the angel who fell and is cast out, or with the remaining angels who have some kind of “fellowship” in their combined staring?
All these moving parts strike sparks off each other, and make each line a compelling event by itself for the reader!
And you can only get effect this with long lines.
Rich Smith: telling a story and showing a character
A recent Poetry Parlor poem is “A Story Often Grunted Across The High Plateaus of Our Island,” by Rich Smith.
This is a narrative poem in which the persona, a young boar, describes his mission to save his village from a demon that may or may not exist.
While it’s fascinating to puzzle through what the boar might stand for (Politicians who believe they are the only saviors of their country? The self-confidence and idealism of the young?), the poem is also just a rollickingly good story with a clearly-defined central character. And one of the ways that Smith makes the story engaging is by using long lines.
For example, here’s a stanza (four lines):
Even at night when I snarfed and snuffled at the mites in my reed bed,
when I whimpered for a sweeter locust song or a sow to muss my tuft
I thought, I am the chiefest beast in the trembling brush
and fell to sleep.
In this stanza, Smith uses the three long lines to give depth to his persona , as he shows us the boar’s uncomfortable living conditions (the mites in his bed), something about his emotions (how he longs for beauty and affection), and the ways he talks to himself. He also throws in some colorful facts that are likely to get the reader more involved in the story, such as the bed being made of reeds, or the exact way in which he longs to be touched (“to muss my tuft.”). And this is in addition to some lively alliteration (snarfed/snuffled) and assonance (muss/tuft).
And vitally, he does all this in just three lines—thus keeping up the pace of the tale and making sure readers don’t tune out.
So if you have a long story to tell, long lines let you get through it faster, to keep your reader interested.
In addition, the long lines in this particular poem also tells us more about the personality of the speaker—they help to convey a creature who is full of confidence and full of himself, and feels great self-assurance in speaking of his mission.
C. K. Williams: Thinking, thinking, thinking again
I couldn’t do a survey of long lines without including C. K. Williams, who was famous for using them.
Long lines became his primary poetic vehicle, the one that best suited his cast of mind and voice, the way that short lines suited Charles Simic.
Of course Williams used long lines in lots of different ways. But one approach of his that I like a lot is using the long line to show a mind churning back and forth over a topic.
Here are the opening two lines of “The Gaffe”:
If that someone who’s me yet not me yet who judges me is always with me,
as he is, shouldn’t he have been there when I said so long ago that thing I said?
As you read through these lines, they enact the tortuous (and even tortured) meditations of someone who is desperate to understand something that’s complex and hard.
First, there’s the sheer amount of thought contained in two lines. This in itself suggests someone with a huge amount on their mind, more than could be contained in short lines.
Then there’s the lack of pauses—there are no line breaks to stop the flow of ideas, and so the sensation of an overflowing mind that simply must release all it contains becomes more powerful (aided by the minimal use of punctuation within each line).
And on top of both these things, the speaker keeps on adding little clauses that revise his previous statements: “yet not me,” “yet who judges me,” “as he is,” “so long ago.” This gives the sense of the speaker thinking as the poem happens—not giving us a pre-decided opinion or experience, but weighing things up, there and then. And it also shows a struggle to get his thought exactly accurate, by making sure he’s giving precise information.
Used this way, the long line becomes a tool to show a questing, probing consciousness at work.
Don Paterson: taking long to an extreme!
Lastly, I want to quickly mention the fabulous poem “Song for Natalie ‘Tusja’ Beridze” by Scottish poet Don Paterson.
In this poem, which won the Forward prize for best individual poem in 2008, Paterson stretches the line to extraordinary lengths. Here is a couplet:
however, I feel sure that by the time this poem sees the light of day Wire magazine will have honoured you with a far more extensive profile than you last merited when mention of that wonderful Pharrell remix
was sandwiched between longer pieces on the notorious Kyoto-based noise guitarist Idiot O’Clock, and a woman called Sonic Pleasure who plays the housebricks.
Yes, those are just two lines, and they are not even the longest ones in the poem!
Paterson is playing a joyful game here, extending line lengths to see how far he can take them. He even has the cheek to rhyme them all in couplets, as if they were neat 10-syllable lines like a classical versifier! The poem is a sheer delight.
So I guess the last lesson of long lines is that they can be simply playful and fun.
Next Steps: Writing long lines
It can be hard to start using long lines: most poets are attuned to cutting words, not adding them! This exercise breaks it down to make it easier.
Think of an activity that you do often, and that is routine and dull.
For example, brushing your teeth, washing dishes, or travelling to work.Write a plain description of doing this activity.
Make it prose, not poetry.Convert this prose description into lines—but keep the lines on the shorter side.
Try to make each line add something to the description, but don’t work hard on making it sound like poetry!Make the first line longer—maybe much longer—by adding new ideas.
Your challenge here is to dig deep into that dull activity, and unexpectedly find something worthy of attention and thought within it.
Then add those new thoughts into a new version of the line.Can you make the new, longer line sound dense and packed, either with thinking or with internal tension?
Maybe you can show your mind going back and forth as you do the activity, as in C. K. Williams’ poem above.
Or perhaps you can introduce contrasting adjectives or images and conflict in different parts of the line, as Kazim Ali does.Repeat for the other lines in the original version!
This way, I hope you’ll have a taste of what it takes to make a long line work—and how long lines can add pizzazz even to boring topics!
