I think a lot about the line in poetry, for the line is one of the key elements distinguishing poetry from prose. The best lines are both lovely and right. The line is always more about how it sounds than how it counts. The poet's job is somehow to draw parallels or patterns from line to line, or as close to that as you can get. Admittedly, scanning a line of poetry is probably the worst way to know it, yet when we talk about the line, we must think about its measure. Poetry is called verse because the line turns, as the farmer plowing turns at the end of the field. With plowing, the length of the line is measured by the size of the field. In metrical poetry, iambic pentameter, say, the length of the line is measured by counting five iambic feet. Poetry is not necessarily metrical, however, but I would suggest that it is always (or should be) in some fashion measured, line length determined by how you count whatever you count. So when considering the line, we want to attend to "measure" in its many possibilities. To a large extent, I think a poet's line is established by his or her internal drummer; we all have a drummer who says, "That's enough, it's full." Our drummer is trained by our experience with language, hearing common speech; our experience with music; our experience with the work of other poets. You want your lines as regular as waves coming in on a beach; you want your line to be your walking gait. The lines together should sound like a pump running. They should support the movement of the poem. The Psalms laid out parallel notions from line to line, e.g. from Psalm 60 "You have made your people feel hardships; / you have given us stupefying wine." And, while a poet such as Allen Ginsberg talked about "breath" as the unit of measure for his lines, one can find many comparisons between what he is doing in his poems and what has been done in the Psalms; the same might be said of Walt Whitman. Such parallel lines will be similar in the size of their meanings, whether or not they are equivalent in any other measure. The Greeks and the Romans measured their lines by counting the number of wide vowels, e.g. "Arma virumque cano." In our language, how wide the vowels are can help establish how long the line will be; the size of their sound can determine the line length. The old Chinese masters typically used five or seven ideograms per line — that is, essentially, five or seven nouns, verbs, or adjectives, etc., e.g. "Bright moon shines through the pines." Some poets count the number of stresses per line, without regard for the number of unstressed syllables. In Anglo-Saxon poetry, for instance, we see a line measured by two stresses, a caesura, and two more stresses, e.g. "A tree must shed leaves, | its branches be barren; the traveler must embark | on the start of travels; all mortals must | meet their fate" This is related to the rhythm of common speech, the American idiom, as Dr. Williams would want, lines that are consistent with our speech patterns; Hopkins too said that his sprung rhythm is the rhythm of common speech, which has the recurrent pattern of strong stress meter. The stress meter often shows two stresses on either side of the caesura, in homage to the Anglo-Saxon line, e.g. from Ezra Pound's, Canto I: "HEAVy with WEEPing, | and WINDS from STERNward...." Others count the number of syllables per line, regardless of the number of stresses. Marianne Moore's poetry was most often syllabic, with regular repeated patterns from stanza to stanza. The haiku is sometimes thought to consist of three lines with five syllables in the first line, seven in the second, and five again in the final line, but in English the count of syllables is more flexible these days. We might say that Emily Dickinson's line was shaped by the hymns she knew, with a pattern of four stresses | three stresses | four stresses | three stresses in a stanza. In T.S. Eliot's "Coriolan," we also find musical measure: "Stone, bronze, / stone, steel, / stone, oakleaves / horses' heels," that is, half-note half-note / half-note half-note / half-note quarter-note quarter-note / quarter-note quarter-note half-note. What of the prose-poem, that bastard form? I like to joke that in prose-poetry the length of the line is established by where the margins of the page are found; the line turns where it meets the margin. The line is a unit of composition for the poet. Sometimes, as in the Psalms, the line is related to the pattern of meaning being said, each line being somehow equal in the weight of its meaning with the other lines. In other poems, however, the line may be related to a pattern of sound, as when I sometimes end four lines in a row with the same consonant, say a "d" or a "t," regardless of how many feet or stresses or syllables there may be. Similarly, the line might be determined by a specific pattern of stress and rest. Whatever the pattern, we want to see repetition from line to line, yet we also want to see difference. The ending of James Wright's "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" shows us, I think, lines of apparently different length but with equal weight in their meaning: I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on. A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home. I have wasted my life. Wright's lines from the opening of "Beginning" also show lines of apparently different length but somewhat equal weight in the size of what is being said: The moon drops one or two feathers into the field. The dark wheat listens. An end-stopped line turns at the end of a thought or at a syntactical pause; the James Wright lines quoted above are examples of end-stopped lines. The enjambed line throws you forward to finish the thought, as these lines from Jane Kenyon's "Let Evening Come" illustrate, where we have to leap from "moving" to "up": Let the light of late afternoon shine through chinks in the barn, moving up the bales as the sun moves down. The enjambments in her poem "In the Nursing Home" are even more powerful: She is like a horse grazing a hill pasture that someone makes smaller by coming every night to pull the fences in and in. She has stopped running wide loops, stopped even the tight circles. She drops her head to feed; grass is dust, and the creekbed's dry. Master, come with your light harness. Come and bring her in. Robert Creeley, too, is a master of the poetry of common speech, enjambing lines and stresses and ideas, as with his poem "I Know a Man" clearly shows: As I sd to my friend, because I am always talking, --John, I sd, which was not his name, the darkness sur- rounds us, what can we do against it, or else, shall we & why not, buy a goddamn big car, drive, he sd, for christ's sake, look out where yr going. In my own writing, looking back, I have discovered a pattern I call the "2:2:1," a form for three lines which rises out of common speech to establish line lengths; it can expand to 4:4:2; 6:6:3; 8:8:4; or 10:10:5; and beyond. These four examples are from my "Old Monk" series: 4:4:2 Some nights I'm gone before I say good-bye, the old monk admitted. 4:4:2 The trick is to make it sound like wisdom, the old monk said. 6:6:3 Sometimes it comes apart and you can't put it back together, Sh-wee warned. 6:6:3 Most of us will be dead before anyone reads my notebooks, the old monk told the poet. The poem changes and becomes somewhat more prosaic if we break the lines differently, e.g. Most of us will be dead before anyone reads my notebooks. I remember my daughter Jenifer asking, at age 5 or 6, "Dad, why do they call it free verse if you have to tap your foot?" Jenifer, the poetic line has to have a beat. You don't necessarily have to dance to it, but you want to feel it. I would say this: the purpose of the line is to help us see how many tricks we can do in the poem; the purpose of the line is to be the pump propelling us through the poem; the purpose of the line is to help us choose our words more carefully. Once you have written enough, I think you will know how to measure your lines and you will know where to tap your foot. When your line comes, finally, as natural as breath, one hopes it will be both lovely and right, well-measured by whichever yardstick you choose to use.