The Writing Experiment by Hazel Smith

because of the way Williams arranges the words on the page, and because
of its strong visual focus on a single object (Williams 1976, p. 57). So I will
take a sentence and look at the way we can draw out its poetic and seman-
tic qualities by rearranging the words, or turning them into a metaphor, or
by playing with the syntax. This does not mean when you create your
poem that you have to be restricted to a sentence, it is just a means of
laying the techniques bare. What these strategies do is to defamiliarise that
particular sentence, make us look at it with fresh eyes. Defamiliarisation,
compression and the polysemic play of language are all ways that we can
distinguish poetry from prose. However, it cannot be said too often that
poetry and prose sometimes share the same characteristics, and that we
may often find ourselves writing poetic prose or prose poems.

Lineation

One of the possibilities that poetry presents is to write in lines (this is only
a possibility because prose poems are not lineated). The unit of the line
can perform many functions. For example, if you put a single word on a
line it tends to give it a certain emphasis. Similarly, the line can act as
a form of punctuation: many contemporary poets hardly punctuate their
poems, instead they use the line ends for that purpose. The meaning of the
words can be radically altered by the way you lineate the poem, creating
ambiguities which make the poem richer. However, it is also possible to
carry the sense across the line, and this can be a way of making the poem
move relentlessly forwards. Many inexperienced writers do not consider
lineation very carefully, but it can be a very potent means of both control-
ling and freeing up the meaning in poetry.
How can you experiment with lineation? Let us take a sentence and see
if it can be turned into a poem by breaking it up into lines. The sentence
is ‘she stood in front of the door, wondering whether to open it’.

Example 2.13

she stood

in

front of

the door

wondering whether

to open

it

Here the lineation opens up possibilities that might not have seemed
present in the original sentence: ‘she stood in’ becomes an independent

38 The Writing Experiment