The Lyric Decision: How Poets Figure Out What Comes Next

The poet Andrew Weatherhead once tweeted, “The best way to read a poem is to pretend each line is the name of a horse; so the poem is just a list of horses.” This joke says something serious about poetry. It calls attention to the line as a fundamental unit, which in some sense always stands alone — the next line could always be anything.

When I’m writing a poem, and I get stuck, it’s often because I’ve forgotten this principle: The next line could always be anything. The poem has free will; the future in the poem is not beholden to its past. This is true for any piece of writing, but poetry seems to foreground those choices, those leaps outside logic or predictability, as if the possibilities of what comes next are more infinite in a poem.

I’ve started thinking of this moment, this chess move where the poet breaks a line and almost resets the game, as the lyric decision. How do poets decide what comes next? How do they make us want to read another line, and another? There has to be a system of coherence to the poem — even a list of random horses has coherence, via theme — but it can’t be unsurprising either. A series of lyric decisions is how we write something between order and chaos.

I’ve noticed a formal trend in poetry toward the double break, creating white space around each line, as though the line were its own stanza. You can see examples of this in Jackie Wang’s “The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void,” Sandra Lim’s “The Curious Thing” and Melissa Broder’s “Superdoom,” among other recent books. This treatment on the page makes the line more quantized. The poem can feel mosaic-like, an arrangement of lines with implied contingency — it might have been otherwise.

Take the poem “Qualm,” from A SYMMETRY (Norton, 97 pp., $26.95), by Ari Banias:

Patience. Rage and being told “be patient.”

The birds with orange heads and dust-colored bodies bob on the power lines.

The poet explains a patient is “one who suffers.”

Beneath the highway underpass, a chair overturned in the fenced-in weeds

toward which a misplaced tenderness arises.