Line-Wrestling or How to Tame the Alligator

golf course in snow
piercing the white softness
deer antlers

In every kind of poem, the line is central to the poem's structure and movement. And because there are so few lines in haiku, the line becomes even more important scaffolding than it does in longer poems. Recently, I read an essay in the December 2011 Poetry where Dan Beachy-Quick said the following about the line:

My thinking about the nature of the line has been for many years guided by Emerson’s suggestion that every line of a poem must be a poem. I find in that claim some sense of poetic truth I have never been wholly able to comprehend, an intuitive trust that never clarifies itself into certainty. What I mean...is that the line is anything but a unifying force in the poem. There seems to be a curious way in which the line as a singular unit of poetic perception resists being tamed into the poem’s entire structure...

Beachy-Quick goes on to say that he thinks that the line often overwhelms or tries to destroy the unity of the poem of which it is a part. An interesting theory. I love what he says next:

As strange as it is to say, I wanted each line to discover within itself some intent I couldn’t discover for it, or without it. I thought of each line as some sort of antenna that ventures forth to see what ground there is to be crossed, and then the poem comes groping bodily after it…The lines bring the poem wildly forth and then succumb mysteriously to the poem’s unifying power.

I think anyone who writes poetry (or anything else for that matter) finds some difficulty in having all the parts of the piece flow smoothly. I love how he talks about the line as a kind of antenna roaming over the ground, exploring, then leading the poem after it.

Haiku require a kind of antennae too, waving for sound, for the right word meaning, the right juxtaposition, for some connection to the world of the seasons, antennae that the reader can feel too resonating after reading.

In haiku, I think, it's the individual words, that I wrestle more with: uncooperative, unmelodious, stubborn heifers of vocabulary refusing to be roped in. Each word requiring its own special lasso, cowgirl wrangling.