Book Review:

Year of the Snake by Lee Ann Roripaugh (Crab Orchard Review & Southern Illinois Press – Carbondale, 2004)

Back in the late 1970s I started hearing young poets say that they didn't know what a line of poetry was anymore. That is, they couldn't figure out why a line (lyric) should end where it does and another line begin. This is a problem young people beginning to write poems always struggle with.

Once upon a time—and this is still true of very young people, pre-college age—it was assumed a line ended where the rhyme occurred. Rhyming creates a pleasant sound—or not—depending on—well, depending on many things. And rhyming can easily overwhelm a lyric so that all anyone hears is the rhyme sound.

And anyway, who says the rhyme has to come at the end of lines. (Bet your high school teacher never tried to explain that one.) Some of the most interesting rhyme in contemporary poetry occurrs within lines, otherwise known as internal rhyming.

Beyond a pleasing sound, of course, rhyming has a long history as an important aid to memorization. So for millenia poets created end rhyme to help folks, including themselves, memorize their poems. Uh, nobody does that anymore.

And naturally there are other reasons to end lines, mostly having to do with speech patterns, but that's not quite reaching what I want to get at today.

I recently finished reading Lee Ann Roripaugh's Year of the Snake, and I was consistantly questioning the line breaks in this book of poems (which I enjoyed very much, thank you).

Let me illustrate by looking at a few lines of one of the poems, "Nanking Cherry Jam":

The robins squabbled over the berries
late in the summer
when they began to ferment—slick bruised

pulp intoxicating the birds into
a raucous frenzy.
Sometimes one would break into crooked flight,

become confused and crash into the clear,
shining expanse of
the porch-room window. Knocked out cold, toothpick

legs stabbing the air, its orange paunch was
incongruous among
the slender limbs of iris, who unfurled

their yellow-striped tongues and lifted their frilled
wrists up to assume
the statuesque poses of flamenco

dancers. Each time a robin was fallen,
my mother sat guard
on the back porch, poised with a garden hose,

waiting to spray any cat who came by
looking to snatch up
a non-confrontational meal. But wait.

Well, there does seem to be a pattern here, but for the fun of it, let's write this out as prose, in paragraph form, just for the fun of it:

The robins squabbled over the berries late in the summer when they began to ferment—slick bruised pulp intoxicating the birds into a raucous frenzy. Sometimes one would break into crooked flight, become confused and crash into the clear, shining expanse of the porch-room window. Knocked out cold, toothpick legs stabbing the air, its orange paunch was incongruous among the slender limbs of iris, who unfurled their yellow-striped tongues and lifted their frilled wrists up to assume the statuesque poses of flamenco dancers. Each time a robin was fallen, my mother sat guard on the back porch, poised with a garden hose, waiting to spray any cat who came by looking to snatch up a non-confrontational meal. But wait.

See what I mean? Take the line breaks out, and it just doesn't mean the same thing. Try reading your favorite Bob Dylan tune as if it were a piece of prose, say from a geography book. There is reason laguage needs lines to be lyrical.