Taking all this into consideration I still, like you, see the line break as the one thing that separates poetry from prose if we take the line break to be an enforced segmentivity that does not follow the laws of grammar and syntax. Thus the new sentence would be poetic in the same way that a pentameter would be; both should not end where they do and how they do within the normative rules of rational grammar and rational syntax. With nonrational poetry being defined by what it has that’s extra, what it holds over in remainder, the semantic break at its heart. Lyn [Hejinian] at the Exmouth conference suggested that absence within nonrational poetics was a dead end, but in this way absence is the very thing in excess of presence that sets poetry free from rationality while retaining materiality. A gap is as much of a mark, as much of a thing, within the segment, as the mark.
more from William Watkin and Rachel Blau DuPlessis in the new Jacket
