ARTICLES

A lesson in line breaks
by Anne Kellas

NOTES: This article first appeared at North of the Latte Line, a blog active from 2002 to 2012. A version is also online at Academia.

The written poem: Semiotic Conventions from Old to Modern English by Rosemary Huisman cites my poem, ‘For Z, under house arrest in Johannesburg 1988’ to exemplify what Huisman calls “graphic iconicity”.

I think I know now what that phrase might mean, through an error I made when amending the poem a decade after its first publication in Island Magazine (n.40, 1989).

The poem deals with the personal horror that I imagined someone might go through in political detention through house-arrest in the apartheid years. “Banning orders” were imposed on people to silence them and were one of the ways the then Afrikaner nationalist government sought to suppress the anti-apartheid movement within South Africa.

Here’s how the poem appears in both Huisman’s book – and how it first appeared in Island:

Z, under house arrest in Johannesburg, 1988.

I take
my prison with me
any
four walls

any old town will do.

You
may come to me
one at a time.
That's
the game.

I don't do crowd scenes.

No words
I write
may reach you.
And these
are banning orders

stripes of shadow across your path.

For reasons known only to an earlier version of myself, I changed the poem when collecting material for my second book, Isolated States. However I realise now that those changes undid the very thing that Rosemary Huisman had praised the poem for originally.

Poem for Z, under house arrest, Johannesburg, 1988 (version 2)

I take my prison with me.
Any four walls,

any old town
will do.

You may come to me
one at a time.

That's the game.
I don't do crowd scenes.

I define myself
endlessly.

I put my prison down and rest.
No words I write may reach you.

And these are what banning orders look like:
stripes of shadow across your path.

In this second version, I had aimed to echo the “stripes of shadow” with the series of couplets.

Looking at the two versions now, I believe the first version was right in its layout – and not just because an academic judged it to be so. I feel the weariness of someone in detention and something of the haphazard chaos that has befallen them are better captured in the original version with its broken lines and odd "shape".

This really makes me wonder at the difference between the "poet's mind" and the "editor's mind" and at the blindness that can come when one has worked at a poem for too long: how to keep to the original vision and not flinch from the logical corrections that spring to mind ...?

After reading the above on my blog, the South African writer and editor, Ivan Vladislavic, wrote to me saying:

“I was intrigued by your piece on ‘For Z, under house arrest’. The transformation brought about by the new line breaks is striking. Having worked as an editor for so many years, I’m fascinated by how a text settles into its final form, usually once it’s published, a form that then seems unbreakable. Many writers seem to feel that the provisional nature of the text is settled once it goes out into the world, so the freedom you feel to revise is interesting in itself. I wonder if poetry is more open to reworking than prose? In a way, one would imagine the opposite, in that poetry is regarded as the more exacting, distilled form. But perhaps it’s because prose is looser, freer that it’s easier to abandon to whatever shape it’s found, whereas poetry calls out to be refined further. Then again to recast is also to recant, to change the meaning fundamentally, which is what seems to have happened with your reworking of this poem. The two versions certainly have different effects, even visually. Because they look so different, they mean differently.”

Other online comments:

1. Thanks Anne - exactly what I needed to hear and understand while fiddling with older poems in my second ms. Fraught with danger! I think the first poem is stronger, too. (Comment by E. at the Tasmanian Writers’ Centre)

2. Yes, I like the first version too - so much more tense, anxious, as if ready to burst from the page. The second looks prosaic in comparison. Geez! How important are line breaks! (Comment by John F., no further details given.)

NOTES: Ivan Vladislavic is an award-winning novelist and editor, and has been described as one of South Africa’s most important writers.

ARTICLES

"Does writing help? Or not?"

I was asked this question by Arthur W. Frank*, a scholar I so admire. He specialises in dialogical narrative analysis and narrative therapy, and I had written to tell him how much his work had inspired and helped me when writing a very difficult thesis about the death of one of my sons.

In his reply to me, Frank said this question had been in his mind for many years as he wrote and researched his "illness narratives" – At the will of the body, The wounded storyteller.

Does writing help … or not? I found his question hard to answer in the way that writing a poem is hard: the answer runs away at the edge of the page, refuses to be pinned down in easy phrases. And yet like the question itself, writing a poem is soaringly liberating, and liberating to wrestle with.