Thinking about line in poetry

This past week at the Frost Place, one of the teachers demonstrated a method for focusing students on the richness of individual lines. Using Wislawa Symborska's poem "Rubens' Women," he had group members, one after another, read the lines of the poem. Of course, each reader took possession of his or her particular line (mine, I'm happy to say, had "cloudy piglets"), and the exercise was a great demonstration of the way in which poets can get drunk on language.

I've been thinking that Sylvia Plath poems would also respond well to this treatment. For instance, from "Lesbos":

Viciousness in the kitchen!

The potatoes hiss.

It is all Hollywood, windowless,

The fluorescent light wincing on and off like a terrible migraine,

Coy paper strips for doors--

Stage curtains, a widow's frizz.

A line-by-line reading would take group members away from the "oh, she's so messed up" distractions of Plath straight into the vigor and terror of the language, yet they could also participate in the procession of the drama, which is such an enormous part of Plath's writing.

When I'm teaching line, I often turn to a poet named Michael Casey. In 1972 Casey won the Yale Younger Poets Prize for his collection Obscenities, which is set in Vietnam, where Casey served as a military policeman during the war. Since that collection, however, he has more or less faded into obscurity. He returned to his home in Lowell, Massachusetts; spent time working in the textile mills in nearby Lawrence; and meanwhile kept writing.

Casey's tiny book Millrat, published in 1999 by Adastra Press, is, in my opinion, even better than Obscenities, though hardly anyone seems to know about it. Casey is a master of the line break, which he uses to exactly imitate the voice of his poem's speaker. Try reading one out loud, pausing at every line end, using every tab space within the lines, and you'll see what I mean.

Foreman

Michael Casey

Walter walked over to Alfred

and asked him

to mix up the soap

when he got the chance

and Alfred said

sure          he'd do it

when he got the chance

but he never did it

so Walter walked over to Ronald

and said

Ron          why don't ya make the soap up

when ya through what ya doin

and Ronald said

fuck you Walter

of course

Ronald went and mixed up the soap

when he got the chance

Walter noticed it too

they didn't make Walter

the boss for nothing

And now you see, of course, that you have to buy this book.