Break It Up! (cont.)

The Look: Another thing I think about is how the poem looks on the page. Sometimes I'm trying to bring to mind (even if it's in a subconscious way) some shape or form on the page, and I'll break a line in a certain place to help reinforce that shape.

First and Last Words: One last thing to look at is all your first words and all your last words in your lines. You don't want a string of weak words in either position, usually.

Again, there's no right or wrong answer. These are just the things I think about. Here's a short poem I wrote, rewritten in paragraph form:

Polar bears’ white velvet spreads until it becomes snow and the polar bears become the Arctic

There are lots of ways I could break this poem up.

Polar bears’ white velvet spreads
until it becomes snow
and the polar bears become the Arctic

<<previous pagenext page>>