Flow Chart: A Poem

for David

Publisher’s Note

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About the Author

Long before they were ever written down, poems were organized in lines. Since the invention of the printing press, readers have become increasingly conscious of looking at poems, rather than hearing them, but the function of the poetic line remains primarily sonic. Whether a poem is written in meter or in free verse, the lines introduce some kind of pattern into the ongoing syntax of the poem’s sentences; the lines make us experience those sentences differently. Reading a prose poem, we feel the strategic absence of line.

But precisely because we’ve become so used to looking at poems, the function of line can be hard to describe. As James Longenbach writes in
The Art of the Poetic Line
, “Line has no identity except in relation to other elements in the poem, especially the syntax of the poem’s sentences. It is not an abstract concept, and its qualities cannot be described generally or schematically. It cannot be associated reliably with the way we speak or breathe. Nor can its function be understood merely from its visual appearance on the page.” Printed books altered our relationship to poetry by allowing us to see the lines more readily. What new challenges do electronic reading devices pose?

In a printed book, the width of the page and the size of the type are fixed. Usually, because the page is wide enough and the type small enough, a line of poetry fits comfortably on the page: What you see is what you’re supposed to hear as a unit of sound. Sometimes, however, a long line may exceed the width of the page; the line continues, indented just below the beginning of the line. Readers of printed books have become accustomed to this convention, even if it may on some occasions seem ambiguous—particularly when some of the lines of a poem are already indented from the left-hand margin of the page.

But unlike a printed book, which is stable, an ebook is a shape-shifter. Electronic type may be reflowed across a galaxy of applications and interfaces, across a variety of screens, from phone to tablet to computer. And because the reader of an ebook is empowered to change the size of the type, a poem’s original lineation may seem to be altered in many different ways. As the size of the type increases, the likelihood of any given line running over increases.

Our typesetting standard for poetry is designed to register that when a line of poetry exceeds the width of the screen, the resulting run-over line should be indented, as it might be in a printed book. Take a look at John Ashbery’s “Disclaimer” as it appears in two different type sizes.

Each of these versions of the poem has the same number of lines: the number that Ashbery intended. But if you look at the second, third, and fifth lines of the second stanza in the right-hand version of “Disclaimer,” you’ll see the automatic indent; in the fifth line, for instance, the word
ahead
drops down and is indented. The automatic indent not only makes poems easier to read electronically; it also helps to retain the rhythmic shape of the line—the unit of sound—as the poet intended it. And to preserve the integrity of the line, words are never broken or hyphenated when the line must run over. Reading “Disclaimer” on the screen, you can be sure that the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn ahead” is a complete line, while the phrase “you pause before the little bridge, sigh, and turn” is not.

Open Road has adopted an electronic typesetting standard for poetry that ensures the clearest possible marking of both line breaks and stanza breaks, while at the same time handling the built-in function for resizing and reflowing text that all ereading devices possess. The first step is the appropriate semantic markup of the text, in which the formal elements distinguishing a poem, including lines, stanzas, and degrees of indentation, are tagged. Next, a style sheet that reads these tags must be designed, so that the formal elements of the poems are always displayed consistently. For instance, the style sheet reads the tags marking lines that the author himself has indented; should that indented line exceed the character capacity of a screen, the run-over part of the line will be indented further, and all such runovers will look the same. This combination of appropriate coding choices and style sheets makes it easy to display poems with complex indentations, no matter if the lines are metered or free, end-stopped or enjambed.

Ultimately, there may be no way to account for every single variation in the way in which the lines of a poem are disposed visually on an electronic reading device, just as rare variations may challenge the conventions of the printed page, but with rigorous quality assessment and scrupulous proofreading, nearly every poem can be set electronically in accordance with its author’s intention. And in some regards, electronic typesetting increases our capacity to transcribe a poem accurately: In a printed book, there may be no way to distinguish a stanza break from a page break, but with an ereader, one has only to resize the text in question to discover if a break at the bottom of a page is intentional or accidental.

Our goal in bringing out poetry in fully reflowable digital editions is to honor the sanctity of line and stanza as meticulously as possible—to allow readers to feel assured that the way the lines appear on the screen is an accurate embodiment of the way the author wants the lines to sound. Ever since poems began to be written down, the manner in which they ought to be written down has seemed equivocal; ambiguities have always resulted. By taking advantage of the technologies available in our time, our goal is to deliver the most satisfying reading experience possible.

Still in the published city but not yet

overtaken by a new form of despair, I ask

the diagram: is it the foretaste of pain

it might easily be? Or an emptiness

so sudden it leaves the girders

whanging in the absence of wind,

the sky milk-blue and astringent? We know life is so busy,

but a larger activity shrouds it, and this is something

we can never feel, except occasionally, in small signs

put up to warn us and as soon expunged, in part

or wholly.

Sad grows the river god as he oars past us

downstream without our knowing him: for if, he reasons,

he can be overlooked, then to know him would be to eat him,

ingest the name he carries through time to set down

finally, on a strand of rotted hulks. And those who sense something

squeamish in his arrival know enough not to look up

from the page they are reading, the plaited lines that extend

like a bronze chain into eternity.

It seems I was reading something;

I have forgotten the sense of it or what the small

role of the central poem made me want to feel. No matter.

The words, distant now, and mitred, glint. Yet not one

ever escapes the forest of agony and pleasure that keeps them

in a solution that has become permanent through inertia. The force

of meaning never extrudes. And the insects,

of course, don’t mind. I think it was at that moment he

knowingly and in my own interests took back from me

the slow-flowing idea of flight, now

too firmly channeled, its omnipresent reminders etched

too deeply into my forehead, its crass grievances and greetings

a class apart from the wonders every man feels,

whether alone in bed, or with a lover, or beached

with the shells on some atoll (and if solitude

swallow us up betimes, it is only later that

the idea of its permanence sifts into view, yea

later and perhaps only occasionally, and only much later

stands from dawn to dusk, just as the plaintive sound

of the harp of the waves is always there as a backdrop

to conversation and conversion, even when

most forgotten) and cannot make sense of them, but he knows

the familiar, unmistakable thing, and that gives him courage

as day expires and evening marshals its hosts, in preparation

for the long night to come.

And the horoscopes flung back

all we had meant to keep there:
our
meaning, for us, yet

how different the sense when another speaks it!

How cold the afterthought that takes us out of time

for a few moments (just as we were beginning to go with the fragile

penchants mother-love taught us) and transports us to a stepping-stone

far out at sea.

So no matter what the restrictions, admonitions,

premonitions that trellised us early, supporting this

artificial espaliered thing we have become, by the same token no

subsequent learning shall deprive us, it seems, no holy

sophistication loosen the bands

of blessed decorum, our present salvation, our hope for years to come.

Only let that river not beseech its banks too closely,

abrade and swamp its levees, for though the flood is always terrible,

much worse are the painted monsters born later

out of the swift-flowing alluvial mud.

And when the time for the breaking

of the law is here, be sure it is to take place in the matrix

of our everyday thoughts and fantasies, our wonderment

at how we got from there to here. In the unlashed eye of noon

these and other terrible things are written, yet it seems

at the time as mild as soughing of wavelets in a reservoir.

Only the belated certainty comes to matter much,

I suppose, and, when it does, comes to seem as immutable as roses.

Meanwhile a god has bungled it again.

Early on

was a time of seeming: golden eggs that hatched

into regrets, a snowflake whose kiss burned like an enchanter’s

poison; yet it all seemed good in the growing dawn.

The breeze that always nurtures us (no matter how dry,