Writing Poetry Tips, Part Three: The Found Poem and the Enjambed Line

Poetry isn’t just about the words you use. It’s also about how the words sound, how they look on the page and even how the feel. One of the areas where young and inexperienced poets often struggle is with word placement; especially among those poets who are opting against traditional iambic pentameter, dimeter, trimeter, etc. Like all poetry, free form poetry is an art form, but, more than other poems, the placement of the words is of utmost importance.

A line break is where the line breaks, or cuts off on the page, and the next line begins. It is sometimes used to change the meaning of a word or poem, to create suspense, to surprise the reader, or to affect or keep the rhythm of a poem. (As a brief aside, read the poem the way it's written. It was written that way for a reason and by breezing through it, you lose some effect and meaning of the poem.) There are many types of line breaks but, in free verse, the one’s you are going to see the most are endstopped lines and enjambed lines. Endstopped lines are those lines which end with traditional punctuation: periods, commas, semi colons, and even colons and dashes. An enjambed line is a line where the line ends in an unexpected place, sometimes with punctuation, but usually without. This is the type of line break that takes the most practice to master and revision to perfect.

My advice in writing a poem that you intend to turn into free verse or free form poetry is to write the poem in prose (paragraph) format and then begin to cut the lines. This enables you to write without concern about the line breaks, enjambed or endstopped. Read them out loud, cut them again, read them out loud, cut them again. Continue the process until the poem sounds the way you want it to sound. If the breaks sound choppy or unnatural and don’t give off the vibe or tone you want, consider revising them. Also, find a friend, critic, teacher and/or fellow poet and have them read your poem to you, with the line breaks as you've written them. Hearing your poem from someone else’s mouth will tell you if the tone you are trying to set as a poet has been set or if you need to go back and revise some more.

Found Poems are a great way to practice line breaks. A found poem is a poem where the text was written by another author but the form and structure of that poem is changed to make text into a poem. No words or punctuation are changed. The copyright issues associated with found poems vary but, they typically fall under the same category as parody and are therefore legal. What follows is the paragraph from an article in History Channel Magazine that I once read that had a lot of strong, descriptive, good looking words that I thought would make a great poem:

Engine Company 72, arriving from their house on West 12th Street seven blocks to the north, had to maneuver their horse drawn engines around the bodies that continued to hit the streets with sickening thumps. Using horse blankets as life nets, firemen and police officers yelled to the girls to aim for them, but as groups of women jumped together the blankets split in two under their weight and velocity. Worse, neither the fire engines' water jets nor their serial ladders could reach beyond the seventh floor of the building.

This is a pretty grizzly scene about a tragic event (the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire in 1911). But, as you’ll see below, it revises nicely into a poem. I wrote two of them. The first is mostly endstopped and lightly enjambed. The second is heavily enjambed. Notice how each one is read differently and has different meaning. Notice how the meaning of the words is represented physically in the way they’re laid out on the page (Especially notice the the word around in poem two.). Notice the varying line lengths and think about how they may add to the poems meaning as well. Also notice how no wording or punctuation was changed, only the placement of the words:

1. (Mostly endstopped, lightly enjambed)

Engine Company 72,
arriving from their house on West 12th Street seven blocks to the north,
had to maneuver their horse drawn engines
around the bodies that continued to hit the streets with sickening thumps.
Using horse blankets as life nets,
firemen and police officers yelled to the girls to aim for them,
but as groups of women jumped together the blankets split in two
under their weight and velocity. Worse,
neither the fire engines' water jets nor their serial ladders could reach beyond
the seventh floor of the building.

2. (Heavily enjmabed, very few endstops)

Engine Company
72, arriving from their house on
West 12th Street seven
blocks to the north,
had to maneuver
their horse drawn engines
around
the bodies that continued to hit the streets
with sickening thumps.
Using horse blankets
as life nets,
firemen and police officers yelled to the girls
to aim for them,
but as groups of women jumped
together
the blankets split
in two
under their weight and velocity. Worse,
neither the fire
engines' water jets nor their serial ladders could reach beyond
the seventh
floor of the building.

The gruesome article now reads like a free form poem! Here’s others I have written several others and have included three of them below, though with these, I will not be showing the originals, only the "poetic" versions. I took one from a newspaper article, one from a job description and one from a Wikipedia article:

Found Poem : Occupy

Hundreds of protesters

thronged intersections

around

the financial district, an area

of narrow,

crooked streets running

between stately sandstone

buildings housing

banks, brokerage

houses and the New York Stock Exchange.

Found Poem: Director

When evaluating potential

candidates the company

may exercise discretion

in waiving educational

or other requirements

if it is deemed

that the individual’s

experience makes

them uniquely qualified for

the Branch Director

position.​

Found Poem: Photosynthesis

Carbon dioxide is converted

into sugars

in a process called

carbon fixation. Carbon fixation

is a redox reaction, so

photosynthesis needs to supply

both a source

of energy to drive

this process, and

the electrons needed to convert

carbon dioxide into a carbohydrate,

which is a reduction reaction.

In general outline, photosynthesis

is the opposite of cellular

respiration, where glucose and other

compounds are oxidized to

produce carbon

dioxide,

water, and

release chemical energy. However,

the two processes take place through

a different sequence

of chemical

reactions and

in different cellular compartments.

These are just a few examples. Practice your line breaks with found poems and come up with some fun new poems that you can call your own. I look forward to seeing what creations you have to share!

Thanks for Reading.