Kevin McIlvoy: Reflections on the Sentence and Poetic Line (January 2011)

Kevin McIlvoy considers differences and similarities between the prose sentence and the poetic line. If a sentence functions as “a train to a destination,” he argues that the poetic line is often a kind of “pedestrian” whose guidance of the reader “invites discovery, not destination.” McIlvoy goes on to consider writing that creates points of intersections between the sentence and the line, drawing on poetry by Denise Levertov, Thom Gunn, and Jean Valentine; fiction by Angela Carter, Jim Crace, and Herta Müller; and critical studies including The Art of Syntax by Ellen Bryant Voigt and The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach.