Learning to break

I'm trying to learn how to break
a line and how long to let a line be 

one of poetry's puzzles
enjambment
along with assonance
consonant consonance
stanza length
meter 

I'm on the outside of a cabin
built of rough-hewn slats
looking in through the gaps
catching glimpses of fire

and sometimes a word
a line
an image
takes over 

and I believe the poem has its own way to be 

the learning is learning
how to follow

I wrote most of this poem yesterday while walking past the fields near my home. My phone battery was nearly dead, or I might have voice-recorded or typed the phrases that came to mind. Instead, I saved my last 3% for a possible incredible photo. I checked in my mind. The opening lines stayed with me. Aha! I thought. Perhaps that's one way to know I'm building a poem. I wrote the lines in a notebook when I got home and made small changes today.

Harvested field with hay bales, July 2015

Harvested field with geese, July 2015

In 2008 I enrolled in my first semester-long writing course at the University of Utah: Intro to Creative Writing (English 2500). The instructor was Timothy O'Keefe, a PhD student at the time and now on faculty at Piedmont College in Athens, Georgia. Tim is a poet, and although we read and wrote fiction as well, our class got a solid dose of poetry writing. When you hear me say fiction, you have to  assume my prose was usually memoir/nonfiction instead. Interestingly, we don't hold poetry to the same split between fiction and non.

Tim was the person speaking to my adult ears about poetic devices like "enjambment", which I would have sworn I had never heard of before. In fact, when I cleared out my high school notebooks from my parents' attic last year (class of 1981), I found plenty of proof that poetry had been taught to me previously. Still, I often think of Tim when I wonder about how and when to break a line. I've just thumbed through my binder from his class, impressively well organized by both Tim and me. I was looking for the notes I'd taken the day he put a poem on the board to help us comprehend what a good line break can do.

I can't find the note. I see how I marked the margins for "pity" and "tragedy" in Nabakov. How we analyzed Jack Gilbert and Luise Glück. How I wrote my first ekphrastic poem about Warhol's silkscreen of Mao. But apparently I wrote nothing down about the line break on the board that made me gasp and finally "get" something about the possibilities of meaning through breakage.

Fortunately, I have remembered the lines well enough to locate the poem. It's James Wright's "A Blessing". I expect the particular moment will be clear to you if you follow this link and read it.