SPOTLIGHT: Enjambment (Line Breaks)

Enjambment occurs when the sense of one line runs over into the next. It makes the reader more conscious of words, phrases, lines and rhythms, and increases emotional / rhetorical / psychological / thematic emphasis. Use line breaks:

·        where natural pauses occur between phrases or punctuation (cluster according to LOGIC) –

Who are you in the lighted window,

shadowed now by the flickering leaves…

                        (Gluck, “The White Rose”)

·        in the middle of a natural phrase to facilitate tension (DISRUPT reader’s sense of order or time) –

sd, which was not his

name, the darkness sur-

rounds us, what

                        (Creeley, “I Know a Man”)

·        at a point of suspense, leaving the matter unresolved until the next line or stanza (DELAY to heighten DRAMA)

and for a while I was pleased

to admire the intensity – or was it the coldness? –

of each photographer’s good eye.

For years I’d taken pride in resisting

the obvious – sunsets, snowy peaks,

a starlet’s face – yet had come to realize…

                        (Dunn, “The Insistence of Beauty”)

OR

but yesterday I saw the mind was a squirrel caught crossing

Route 80 between the wheels of a giant truck…

                        (Stern, “I Remember Galileo”)

·        make a phrase work doubly as part of its original sentence AND part of the line it shares with another unit of speech (MULTIPLE MEANINGS / DEGREES OF EMPHASIS)

The cop found no suicide note. The cop found

no I.D. The gun could not be traced.

                                                                        (Hugo, “Death in the Aquarium”)

1.      The cop found no I.D.

2.      No I.D., the gun could not be traced.

OR

                                                                                                                        …It fell,

                                                and they, laughing, ran up and kicked it, jumped away,

                                                ran off, ran back and kicked it, till they could stand beside it,

                                                kicking. They cheered when one of them pried loose

                                                a broken fence post. They fought for the fence post

                                                                        (Hudgins, “One Threw a Dirt Clod and It Ran”)

1.          It fell and they, laughing, ran up and kicked it, jumped away, ran off, ran back and kicked it, till they could stand beside it, kicking.

2.          Kicking. They cheered when one of them pried loose

3.          A broken fence post. They fought for the fence post

OR

She cannot be not beautiful, but she is

starving. Each day she grows thinner…

                        (Olds, “Photograph of the Girl”)

1.          She cannot be not beautiful, but she is

2.     Starving. Each day she grows thinner…