"The written poem" by Rosemary Huisman (Cassell, 1998)

On the back cover is "How do we recognise 'a poem' (including apparent contraventions, such as the 'prose poem')? Once a poem has been recognized, what are the interpretative conventions brought into play for reading it? And especially, how has the spatial arrangement on the page become 'meaningful' in its own right ... What is the origin of the line as the primary generic sign of poetry?" which is promising. I also like the way the author explains a term (e.g. semiotics) the first time she uses it.

What is a poem? Basically, if you don't use line-breaks you have to exaggerate some other indicator of poetry (which change through the years). Or get the text published in a reputable poetry magazine.

She sees the layouts as borrowing ideas from Art/Music, the Body (breath, pleasing the eye) and other Language uses

Reader expectations

She agrees with the idea that there were 3 main changes in reading from 1500s to 1700 - oral to visual, intensive to extensive (i.e. reading many books rather than one book carefully), communal to private reading. Readers lag behind writers, "so it is not until the late nineteenth century that 'Romantic' assumptions are the norm of reading" (p.143). The popularity of prose fiction pushed poetry back until the old (pre mass media) reading practises became useful again - "separated by a thousand years of 'Romantic imperialism' in which English poetry was usually written in syllabic metres, contemporary poetry (for the most part) and Old English poetry both based their versification on the rhythm of conversational English, a rhythm based on the regularity of stress not syllable" (p.1)

The purposes of lineation

• "to reduce the information load in lines, and hence to facilitate semantic concentration ... William Carlos Williams is usually credited with developing the very short printed line ... Given the tradition of [the line as] a unit of information ... [it's] likely to receive, per word, more than the usual amount of interpretive attention" (p.76)
• "to promote syntactic ambiguities ... Hand in hand with the reduction in length of lines went the reduction of punctuation (This has become the norm in modern French poetry but is still less standard in English practise)" (p.77)
• "to produce a counterpoint between syntax and semantics through enjambment ... With the shorter line, the traditional relation between line length ... and grammatical unit ... could more readily be manipulated" (p.77)
• [using] horizontal and vertical display, so as to realize semantic choices directly. She points out that we look for meanings in indentations. Traditionally, lines indented by the same amount have the same end-rhyme. It was also fairly common to have the main voice non-indented, and a contrasting/answering voice indented. This tradition continues, the non-indented lines being the lyrical "I", or more authoritative.
  The thematic connection between lines that are equally indented may only be temporary. Later in the poem the indentation rules might be different.
  Gaps between words can denote hesitation. Random indentation can denote confusion. A new line is begun when renewal is mentioned.

Miscellaneous

• "Bernstein asks 'what preserves the insulation?' [of one category from another] and answers 'power'" (p.13)
• "If the classification changes from strong to weak, there are two basic questions we should always ask: which group is responsible for initiating the change? Is the change initiated by a dominant group or a dominated group?", Bernstein, Pedagogy, p.30
• "the prose poets went in two directions: some ... wrote narratives, fables and metafictions; others associated with the budding language poetry scene" - "A Norton Anthology of Post-Modern American Poetry", Paul Hoover
• "visual poetry has appeared four times in Occidental art history as an extensive movement - during the Alexandrine period, the Carolingian renaissance, the Baroque and our own day", Geoffrey Cook, Visual Poetry
• "the visual poetry of the twentieth century falls into two distinct periods ... 1920s ... futurist/dada and 1950s ... concrete" (p.154)
• "no English pattern poems are known from the entire eighteenth century", Geoffrey Cook, Visual Poetry
• "Change in twentieth-century English poetry most commonly has been associated with changes in French art and French poetry" (p.38)
• "[Bohn] suggests a new association emerged of the verbal genre with painting, displacing the stronger association of the genre with music (which had been dominant for the Symbolists)" p.46
• "Why did a (literary) genre which was still assumed to be essentially oral by many of its practitioners and critics come to be primarily signified by a literate device? What were the social origins of this line?" (p.61)
• "'language poetry' is the logical end point of print poetry" (p.76)
• "lineation in English poetry ... is clearly not established for late Old English poetry in the mid-eleventh century and that it is well establish ... by the end of the fourteenth century" (p.101)
• "This conventional identification of virtuous writer and good ploughman is no doubt widespread by the late fourteenth century" (p.109)
• "the principal effect of print, up until, say, 1640, was not to make poems fixed printed texts, but rather to 'privatize' handwriting" (p.129)
• "John Masefield, at the beginning of the twentieth century, felt that, with Romantic, individualistic assumptions now the 'natural' mode of interpretation, poetry had lost its appeal to a wider audience" (p.152)