Lineation is overrated. Take Juan Ramón Jiménez. Please, take him.

No, seriously. At the the end of his life, he compiled a huge anthology of his work entitled Leyenda. It's not his whole work, just what he wanted to save, about 1,300 poems. Anyway, he wrote out all his free-verse poems as prose. In fact, anything without rhyme, became prose. It's rather shocking, because, much as I'm ambivalent about JRJ, I would never question his ear. He practically invented free verse in Spanish, or at least one variant of it. So is this a huge blunder of an aged poet? That was my first reaction, many years ago when I first noted this. You wouldn't want to have an edition of Creeley with poems like

"As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, John, I sd. which was not his name, the darkness surrounds us, what can we do against, or else, shall we, and why not, buy a goddamned big car, drive, he sd, for Christ's sake look out what your doing."

It seems to ruin the effect! However, the presumption that we cannot pay attention to rhythm if something is written out without lines is absurd. Any poem with a powerful rhythm will have the same rhythm without the division into lines. I wouldn't mind even reading The Prelude that way. I would still know where the line breaks were. I'd lose a few specific effects due to enjambment, but the effect would be similar to having it read aloud to me. John Hollander [The Untuning of the Skies] points out that many people have always found it difficult to discern line-breaks when hearing blank verse. This complaint was often directed at Milton: his line-divisions were more for the eye than the ear.

JRJ's poems work perfectly well in prose format. They aren't less rhythmical. Whatever rhythms exist in them do not disappear. It's like taking the training wheels off a bike: you know longer have that assurance of knowing where the metrical divisions are, as opposed to the syntactical ones. If there wasn't much enjambment in the first place, if the line had syntactic unity, then you still have those same syntactic units in the prose poem. It's only when enjambment is a major technique, as in Creeley, that you lose very much.

Sometimes, when listening to Ornette, I lose track of where the "one" is. There is a bar line, implicitly there, but it isn't written down anywhere. Isn't the whole point not to mark the bar divisions so rigidly, to have a greater flow? Poems in my memory, curiously, do not have line breaks, unless written by Creeley or Williams. I might know where the line breaks are, but they don't have much weight, compared to the importance they seem to have on the page: "I AM A POEM."

I read an early article by Borges, in which he outlines all the arguments against rhyme, starting with Milton. (Of course Borges' own poetry later rhymed more often than not.) At the end, he says that it's more interesting to outline the arguments against rhyme, because they are less frequently heard. I feel the same way about lineation. I feel, yes, it's very significant for most people writing poetry--otherwise they would write prose poems. But at the same time, lineation is boring and overrated most of the time. Anyone with any sense, who's been writing for more than a few years already, would run away from such a topic. Even this post is boring, since it is about this topic.

It's like fiction-writers discussing things like how to get characters in and out of rooms. It's easier just to stipulate that if a character is found in a room, he or she got there somehow, and leave it at that.