Carl Phillips, "Pleasure"

Long sentences in short lines creates a problem: what is the rhythmic integrity of the line going to be?

(And a grammatical problem for me: I know that "sentences" is plural, but the sentence sounds wrong as "Long sentences... create..." Why is this the case?)

If there is no integrity, the poem will sound like prose cut up into lines. Here's how the poem would start if written as a paragraph:

"This far in--where to say the sea and mean impossible makes sense, why not, you can almost forget what brought you here, the water it started with, a life that has sometimes (admit this much) seemed mostly an only half-wanted because finally unruly animal you'd once hoped to change by changing its name..."

It's undistinguished prose and 15 lines of undistinguished verse. Thumbs down.