Jonathan Mayhew posted a pretty good poem by Frank O'Hara, "MR. O'HARA'S SUNDAY MORNING SERVICE," as evidence of skill in line breaks. Most of them in this poem are quite well-handled—but look at the beginning of stanza 4: "I will walk about on the / heaving grass rather shakily." Are we really to believe that "heaving grass" is so important, clever, or striking an image, that it needs to be separated from its article? Why not just drop the "the"?
I want to answer his post earlier today, responding to my remarks about O'Hara's "Why I Am Not A Painter" (here and here). I haven't quoted the whole thing, so you should go read it there. In fact, you should read Jonathan regularly. I often disagree with him, but I just as often learn something. His remarks are indented.
The idea that O'Hara didn't know how to make non-arbitrary line breaks, that he somehow couldn't tell where the phrases should end, is absurd on the face of it.
I'm not the one who called them "conspicuously unmotivated." But I said nothing about O'Hara's line breaks in general, only about "Why I Am Not A Painter."
He has plenty of poems where short lines correspond to phrases: "Who'd have thought / that snow falls / it always circled / swirling / like a thought / in the glass bowl / around me and my bear."
Breaking at the phrase end is surely the least interesting way to end a line, especially in a free verse poem. It adds nothing rhythmically, since the voice naturally pauses there. It does nothing to enable a particular possible reading of the poem, for the same reason. In fact, it adds nothing at all but a ragged right margin.
He also has the other kind of long free verse lines that end pretty much in a logical fashion.
I'm not at all sure what you mean by "logical fashion." At a phrase end? Unremarkable for the same reasons as in a short line. To pull some unexpected meaning into focus by means of the separation? This is an interesting kind of line break, but there's no evidence of it in this poem.
So the odd, arbitrary seeming line-divisions in many of his poems are highly deliberative. They are artfully designed to SEEM casual and spontaneous. They are surprising, catching us off guard.
Mere assertion. That he sometimes breaks lines according to a system is no evidence he did anything deliberate here. What is the artful design? What is the difference between "casual and spontaneous" and "lazy," and what evidence is there in this poem to put them in the first category? What intrinsic value is there in surprising the reader at this level, the level of the line break? How can we be "caught off guard" so many lines in a row? Why isn't it just the boring expected after the first few?
They don't have a Williamsian or Creeleyesque theory to back them up. All the better! O'Hara hated pretentious theory.
Or was he just too lazy to think about what he was doing, and surrounded by sycophantic friends who thought his talent—which is undeniable—excused his every destructive excess?
6:10:42 PM 
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