"Poetry, U.S.A." - My latest Feature at Cheek Teeth

Please drop by Cheek Teeth, the mouthpiece of Trachodon magazine, for my latest blog feature, "Poetry U.S.A":

Someone actually had the nerve to say to me once “Poetry comes from a place: if you want to write poetry, go there.” This “Poet” was well-written, respected, and (more significantly) responsible for my grade, so I drove halfway across the States and back looking for “Poetry,” searching for it in the deep canyons of Utah, sacrificing my Celica for it with a deer in the Sierras, reading the deer hair stuck in my Celica’s grill for signs of a new direction. I drank forties of Mickey’s malt liquor on Mission Beach, hoping for a vision. Considering the advice of the “Poet” was metaphorical, I searched inward via Buddhist mysticism, solitude, veganism—each method as fruitless as the last. But all the while I was searching, I was writing and reading poems like my life depended on it, just as it depends on sex and breathing.

...continue reading "Poetry U.S.A" at Cheek Teeth.

Brilliance, Brick by Brick

In the latest issue of The Writer's Chronicle, while discussing with interviewer Heather Sappenfield the difficulty of recording her thoughts on the fly, Bonnie Jo Campbell comments, "Generally, though, I've trained my body and mind to bring me insights in the morning, when I'm sitting down and writing, seven days a week. Other people, poets especially, get brilliant ideas continually, and they write them into their lovely little Moleskines. Maybe that's the difference between poets and fiction writers. Maybe a lot of us fiction writers have our creative lives more regimented. Of course that's a gross generalization, and I disapprove of such a broad claim, even as I stand by it."

First and foremost, how wonderful to think of myself as receiving "brilliant ideas continually"—a truer statement there never was!

I say this in jest, of course. Certainly poets and fiction writers alike—arguably all people—receive brilliant ideas only to have them fall by the wayside. This occurs for folks while in the shower, perhaps, or on the treadmill, or while gazing longingly at the mountains while on their way to work at seven a.m. The mind is a terrible mishmash of thought, and for every million quotidian ideas passing through, there must be at least one cerebral stroke of brilliance. Maybe I'm an optimist. I don't know. As a poet, and per Ms. Campbell's comment, I'm probably biased.

Imaginary Toads, Real Gardens

Since I've been writing mostly prose for the last few months, it's a pleasure to have a few poems appear recently in the journals cant and The Potomac--the former a cool, slimline journal to which I was introduced last year and the latter a terrific web mag I’ve been reading for several year’s due to its keen sense of attitude. My poems in these journals' current issues (thanks again, editors!) are out of my Aphrodite's Son MS, which I hope to place here someday, pending the never ending series of revisions it undergoes--a process of intense scrutiny followed by weeks of looking away, looking away. I feel like wind slowly eroding a stone. Hopefully there’s something left when I’m all finished.

Be that as it may, it's been fun to be a prose writer for awhile, specifically a fiction writer, which is not my natural inclination. The thing about a story is that one typically has to pay attention to a certain physical reality in order to write it. That is to say, one must create through the legerdemain of language the illusion of a physical reality--you know, setting and stuff. Plot takes time, and time requires that things (characters) move through a physical space. So right there you've got the rudiments of fiction: plot, setting, character. A story isn't often as simple as that, but generally speaking each of these pieces has a role to play. It's sort of like building a house: the studs and insulation aren't what it's all about, but they are nevertheless important for holding the thing together with any kind of efficiency.

In a poem, however, at least as I write one, such components have very little to do with anything. While a story requires that aforementioned physical reality, a poem does not--much too lofty for such pedestrian items. It really could care less about time and space and the laws of physics. Those laws are irrelevant in poetry. Poems are spaceless, timeless aliens that place reality forcibly in the realm of the imagination. As Marianne Moore famously put it, they drop real toads into imaginary gardens. It is this contradictory, paradoxical nature that can make a good poem click--assuming, that is, the reader is willing to leap into such a vacuum.

Fiction seems to me to work in the opposite manner, placing imaginary toads in very real gardens. This is the trick that allows readers to identify with fictional characters (imaginary toads) and to imagine themselves in whatever environments through which the action moves, be it NYC or the Starship Enterprise, which flies according to the laws of physics, not the imagination. That sense of grounding is important. Not only does it allow readers to invest in characters, it allows characters to do unbelievable things readers notwithstandingly will find believeable via their suspension of disbelief. It's quite a remarkable achievement when you think about it.

On the other hand, because poetry's setting is the imagination, readers are left to connect the pieces on their own. Real toads, yes. We all know what a toad is, how it feels, how it's shaped, the fact it's likely to pee in your palm if you pick it up. But where to put the thing? It's your imagination, after all, as well as the poet's. The poet just gives you some odds and ends bought at a garage sale and asks that you, the reader, ultimately organize the poetic diorama.

I don’t really know where this is going save to say it’s nice to be thinking poetry in these times of fiction. Check out the above journals—they are, regardless of my work's inclusion in them, worth the read.

A.E. Stallings' "Epic Simile"

It’s been months since I last blogged about a poem, save for an article at Cheekteeth and a few tidbits here-and-there right here at Present Everywhere. Been busy.... But, between projects, I happily return with a bit about A.E. Stallings’ “Epic Simile,” which appeared in the January 2012 issue of Poetry magazine. Stallings is one of our foremost contemporary poets and without question one of our stellar formal—er, ah—ists. Recently she won a MacArthur fellowship due to said stellarness.

“Epic Simile” is a 22 line, largely narrative piece whose overt subject is the classical hero--someone akin to Achilles or to Russell Crowe’s Maximus in Gladiator comes to mind. The story is straightforward: our hero has been battling it out all day and, out of exhaustion perhaps, he spaces out, momentarily escaping into the outer and inner distances where he observes his death in the image of a deer. Upon the deer’s exit, our hero is suddenly back in scene, returned from that out-of-body, lyrical moment into his story.

From beginning to end, Stallings’ battle imagery is pretty clear. I like it best in the middle of the poem when she writes “of the wind / Brushing through stands of spears like conifers” (10-11). Seems the obvious image would be the other way around—conifers like spears—and I appreciate this reversal right down to its very mix-up of “stands of spears” instead of stands of conifers (I’d be curious to know how that image was originally drafted, if “stands of spears” was the first to come). Similar uses of battle imagery appear lines later when the deer’s “gaze / Beads on him like a sniper’s sites” and at the end in which blood isn’t clouding the hero’s eyes but such is “streaming into your eyes” (17-18, 22). Such use of imagery keeps this poem all of a concise piece—thus, the narrative in its little box—while simultaneously layering it, thereby asking readers to view the hero’s battle in a series of planes: the literal field, that of the deer/dream that Stallings refers to as “A blankness [that] swoons upon him,” and that of the present, of the reader’s present, whenever and wherever she may be (9).

Stallings’ diction is nice, too, for its visuals and acoustics. Consider the first line of “Epic Simile”: “Right shoulder aching with day-long butchery”. How can you go wrong with that? It’s precise and provocative, and I love the visual and aural play of the sh in shoulder with the ch in aching and butchery. I like ending the line with “butchery” for that matter. The image it provokes isn’t pleasant, but I love how the word falls out of my mouth: butchery. Yeah. The abundance of stresses in this line, falling in nature, adds to the punch of that last word. The second line is equally gifted in that it parallels the nature of the first. Now it’s the “Left shoulder numb with dints clanged on the shield”; the syntax mirrors the opening rhythm right down to the spondee at “dints clanged.”

Of particular interest to me are the gestures "Epic Simile" makes to poetry and to form. Sure, there’s that stereotype that poets write poems about poems for other poets to read, but I think that notion fits here, as evidenced immediately by the title. Much of the piece, right down to the warrior’s daydreaming, parallels the writing process and the trials and tribulations one undergoes when working with form and formlessness.

So, the hero battles his enemy; the poet battles the poem. Grrrr! Clash! Clang! Crackle goes the paper wadded and tossed into the trash as the fierce, persistent poet begins anew. It’s all kind of over the top and silly when considered so literally like this. I don’t think any among us really feels like a hero after all, at least not admittedly. And I think it a stretch to make such a direct comparison throughout such that the “hero’s death, / The prize, elusive quarry of his life” is like this POEM the poet is trying to accomplish, some grandiose, epic poem-of-all-poems, she writes toward all her life (13-14). But who knows? There is something to be said about the artist and the restless seeking of some truth or who-knows-what as pursued through the war one wages with his or her art. There is an “elusive quarry” out there, and art is one indicative way by which humans seek it.

“Epic Simile” instigates such meditations as this. For me, it speaks specifically to battles with poetic form, formal poetry, and the conversations poems/poets have with the poetic tradition. It’s hard not to think of epic anything, for example, without thinking of Homer. That first word of Stallings' title sets the alleged magnitude of the poem itself, evokes The Iliad, and nods to tradition pre- and post-Homer all in a single swoop.

Another nod toward tradition is the poem's blank verse. The third line is Stallings' first solid go at iambic pentameter: “The hero is fouled with blood, his own and others’ ”. It’s not perfectly metrical, and it need not be. In fact, I’d argue half the lines or fewer are written particularly strictly in verse, but that’s nevertheless enough for me to consider the poem as such overall, some of it definitely so, the ghost of blank verse ultimately present everywhere. I read blood here, too, as in—“his own and others’ ”—as a subtler nod to the past—and the present, for that matter. Contemporary poets write in the here and now, but every word we employ is steeped in history, poetic or otherwise. If the poet is a traditionalist or an experimentalist—so what? The conversation with history is no less quiet from either perspective.

An old complaint against traditional form is that form is dead, its possibilities expended. This is as old an idea as the epic is and a hindrance, quite frankly, to innovation; to the poet it’s “deadweight all around him,” as Stallings writes of her hero, as she writes of form itself. And it's true: form can kill you—but only the weakest among us. Any poet with a developed form-consciousness will tell you giving yourself over properly to convention—even by polarizing against it—is a liberating experience, not a retarding one. The sluggish, dead-weight of meter and rhyme can open windows to “glimpses [of] the mountains, the distant snow,” and it’s in these moments that the poet enters the zone, that blankness into which Stallings’ hero falls (8). It’s in this moment of release that the hero/poet hears, as though simultaneously aware and unaware: “A blankness swoons upon him, and he hears / Nothing but the white vowels of the wind” (9-10). Ahh, my favorite line of the poem-, what with its lovely Ws…”Nothing but the white vowels of the wind”… its v/f echoing, its th repetition, each one evocative of wind. Perhaps our hero/poet is hearing with his Zen-like third eye.

This moment, then, is the poem’s turn: the hero imaginatively wanders into the mountains, and the poet finally frees herself from the alleged confines of formal writing. In either case, a stepping-out-of-oneself occurs, a relinquishing of consciousness that takes hero, poet, and reader someplace other than the present. This the eureka moment: the poet officially gives herself over to the poem, and the self no longer exists. “What happens is a continual surrender of [the poet] as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality," as Eliot claimed. This may be only for the moment, but it’s nevertheless Nirvana.

In the poem, this moment is short-lived. And with what does this leave our hero? Where does it leave him? Where the poet? In the arms of the reader—you—of course, who presently remains snapped into it, viewing the scene with “sweat or blood streaming into your eyes” (22). The story ends with you, with me, those of us who can only conjecture about the hero’s death and are left to do the same with the poem's. Like the hero who may or may not have come back to reality, whose future lies at the arms of his enemies, the poem lies at the mercy of its readers. As Kunitz observed, once the poem leaves the poet's desk, it’s yours. Something like that.

Janice Harrington's "The Divider"

Janice Harrington's "The Divider," poem of the day at Verse Daily, is an accessible, easy to follow poem about the clean-up process following the death of an elderly person (I assume) in a nursing person. It's not really about the clean-up process, but that's the content anyway, the literal subject matter. What I like about the piece is that it is relatively transparent yet not at the expense of craft. I think it would be an effective poem for a beginning poetry class in this regard.

The scene is this: we're in a nursing home, and it appears as though a person--an elderly person or someone resigned at an early age to such a place--has just died. We're bedside, removing "the cuff. . . .the gauze and alcohol. / . . . the stethoscope" and so on, item after item taken away, or cleaned and taken away, from the room. By the poem's end, we're still doing this, told to "Strip the mattress pad / and sheets. Sterilize the bed frame's metal / skeleton" and finally to "draw the divider, leave." The 16 line poem is rich with images, close-up details really, and although the language flirts with medical jargon, it remains common for the most part. The only oddball is "emesis" in line 6, and a quick search in my Oxford American Dictionary tells me that's the action or process of vomiting. Clear enough.

Most of these details are nursing home and caretaker related. They are rather impersonal (especially words like "emesis"), which is noteworthy since we're talking about a human being (and we're presumably being spoken to by a human being). Yet, few of the images bear a sense of the human. They don't personalize the poem's speaker nor its human subject. Only "the Christmas card" does this and briefly, hinting at human contact, yes, but also illustrating the lack of it. Where are the family photos? The other cards for birthdays and such, the items that would give to this person a sense of belonging, if not more specifically of family and friendship? Harrington goes on to write, "Later, take the personal belongings away or / give them to someone." But where are these personal items? Their absence in the poem, coupled with the litany of sterile image-laden commands, effectively removes the personal from the piece.

Harrington's use of an anonymous third-person speaker further illustrates this removal. Every sentence is an atonal command. Most are short: "Undo the cuff. Remove the gauze and alcohol." Those that do stretch across lines are lengthened only by more commands or by more images. There's nothing extra. No commentary. No existential blathering. No simile. No metaphor. Just a list of to-do items, as though the poem is being read from a manual--like one for how to put furniture together or, in this case, take it apart. There are no people in the poem, either. We have the speaker, and we have the deceased, but neither of them are mentioned. There are no names, and there are no personal pronouns. The personal, human element is gone.

This absence is superficial, of course. In fact, there's a great deal of humanity in the poem, and in some ways the poem's overt lack of it only draws a greater attention to what lies beneath, that we are dealing with people here, not just a body, not just a nurse or caretaker who turns impersonal in order to get the job done—removing the deceased, preparing the room for the next person for whom death is but a matter of time. So, the distance in the poem--this division between between feeling and unfeeling--comes into question, then. Does such a stance illustrate the speaker's habitual use of necessary distance? Is it strictly a defense mechanism? Is it simply part of the job? Or does it speak more specifically to human nature and one of the ways we instinctively deal with death?

To this end, Harrington closes the poem with "Do all this—but for now just close / its scrim around the bed, draw the divider, leave." But why must we leave? Are we—is the speaker—emotionally overwhelmed or risking it and, therefore, risking the ability to effectively get the ensuing job done? Is it because we're too busy with other jobs in the home to pay attention to the deceased even now? Is this—is the whole poem—an issue of neglect?

For such a seemingly easy poem, I appreciate the fact "The Divider" leaves me hanging. If the poem closed down, instead of opening up, I fear it would be less successful. Ending with ambivalence, however, offers the poem possibilities and reason for discussion—one of the reasons I think the piece apropos for a beginning poetry class. "The Divider" is not intimidating in any way, yet it's not as easy to grasp as it first appears. There's more to it, a multiplicity that is necessary for its success—arguably for any poem's success. The title itself—"The Divider"—illustrates this multiplicity. The divider can be the literal curtain referred to in the last line of the poem. It can be death. It can be the wall the speaker uses to separate herself from the situation. It can be any of these simultaneously, which is the poem's true power. In the physical world (although quantum physics may disagree with this . . . ), something cannot exist in two or more places at once. In artful poetry, this is the norm: an image, a word, a phrase, a line existing in multiple, valid layers of meaning simultaneously.

I have a good deal to say about Harrington's acoustic texture in "The Divider" as well. It's a percussive poem with what feels like a conscious attention to the noise it makes, another reason I think it useful to beginning poets. It is not musical per se, nor rhythmic, but nearly every line evokes a solid sense of sound via alliteration, consonance in particular, as well as via Harrington's repetitive use of short, imperative clauses. I can't help but wonder if Harrington's awareness of language is what helped her arrive at words like "emesis" and "Kleenex" a few lines later—said awareness being what drove the arrival of the language here more than the poem's topical matter did. I'm conjecturing, of course.

And I'll leave others—perhaps in that intro course—to find further examples of assonance and consonance, slant rhyme and so on.

Damon McLaughlin @ Best New Poetry--Runnin' Down a Dream

. . . is it possible such habits—such things as routine exercise, diet, routine sleep patterns, and so on—can affect not only our ability to imagine but also our ability to write? They must, but—I mean—what if there’s a recipe for good poetry, and it includes things like—50 sit-ups and push-ups daily, preferably before breakfast, which should be comprised of 1 mango and a cup of Greek yogurt, preferably with a drop of honey, and one 8 oz. cup of medium roast coffee, preferably a single-origin bean from Latin America, all of which should be consumed within 12-15 minutes for optimal imaginative prowess, and so on, and so on throughout the day, each ingredient and the ingredients in tandem resulting in a specific mental effect. What if—worse—that recipe is like a baking recipe, which can’t really be fiddled with or you’ll the ruin the cheesecake, the custard, what-have-you. I know there’s a growing science on creativity and on how genes and the environment interact and on how such interaction affects the brain. What if these researchers discover a formula for the muse? The diet-exercise plan for sonnets? The Shakespeare diet? The Billy Collins Diet? The Ashbery Plan? What if the success of your craft was as dependent on the other mental processes as it was on those related to poetry?

Read the rest @ Best American Poetry.

Damon McLaughlin @ Best American Poetry--Form for Thought

In his initial discussion of tone languages in Music, Language, and the Brain, Aniriddh D. Patel writes briefly of the Chinantec, an indigenous people of southern Mexico, who utilize a whistled speech in addition to their tonal, spoken word. They use whistle combinations “of tone and stress distinctions to communicate messages with minimal ambiguity.” And he’s not talking about a hey! or an over here! or some ridiculous catcall. He’s suggesting they actually have a whistle language. . .

Read the rest @ Best American Poetry.

Damon McLaughlin @ Best American Poetry--Thank You, Brenda Hillman

I was listening to a lecture at the Poetry Foundation the other day when I jotted down this little Brenda Hillman tidbit: “For the lover of poetry, there is a disequilibrium between himself and the world that nothing satisfies but poetry.” For one of my posts here, I was going to write about the manic state, itself an imbalance, into which poetry can thrust me, the effects of such a state, and to discuss that state in terms of writer’s process. Then I heard Hillman and was like—that’s it, that’s what I was hoping to say. My wife, who is not a lover of poetry, agrees with Hillman’s declaration—at least for the strange case of her husband. At her gentlest, she says I’m in my head; at her most honest, she says I’m not living in reality. But I doubt that’s the case, right?

Read more @ the Best American Poetry blog, where I am the guest blogger this week. Look forward to posts about the "self," oysters, the mind-body connection, and Emily Dickinson -- that's the plan anyway. On any given morning, who knows what will happen?

Burn, Baby, Burn: On Shivani's thoughts of Graham, Olds, Levine, and Gluck

I had the pleasure of hearing Jorie Graham read in Iowa City back in…1998 I believe. My favorite part was turning around mid-reading to witness Donald Justice fast asleep—two rows behind me. But, you know—he was an older gentleman by then, and I figured he’s allowed.

Truth be told—I enjoyed the reading. Graham’s words spoke to me on a different level than they did on the page. I suppose I was more easily caught up in the airy, ephemeralness of her speech than I was of her written language, which for me was then largely as it is now: intriguing, intelligent, layered, occasionally an imbroglio, not terribly pleasurable but enjoyable for its leaps in thought as well structure, for its difficulty. I'm not a lover of her work, but I was honestly taken by her reading of it. And, I would contend that despite my lack of pleasure with her poems in writing, not to be confused with a lack of appreciation, she is absolutely worth reading because of her style, influence, success, and longevity—not necessarily in that order.

I would say the same for Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, and Phil Levine—three poets I’ve enjoyed immensely. So, naturally, I felt annoyed when I read Anis Shivani’s recent article in the Huffington Post: “Philip Levine and Other Mediocrities: What it takes to ascend to the Poet Laureateship.” He claims these poets—including Graham—have let their poetries fall into severe tedium and disrepair with which, mind you, they have waddled among the muck of unwarranted success for decades, their prizes and reputations riding largely on poetry-guild nepotism, which Shivani discusses a bit in “Beautiful and Pointless: New York Times Poetry Critic Says Poetry Isn’t Relevant,” an earlier post of his in the Huffington.

Actually, a fair amount of his observations, stripped of their pejorative décor, are accurate. I agree with him that Olds writes of the body and birth, Graham of material in a thought-world, Glück of the personal and its various sensitive hats, and Levine of the humdrum working life he may or may not have lived. But that’s all subject matter, and I don’t see how someone can be against subject matter. Lack of craft, lack of tempered skill—yes. But content? I mean—so what if these poets choose to write about these things? When I’m dead and famous—preferably not in that order—people may complain that my poems are obsessed with fish and birds, but I hope they don’t consider them trash as a result. This is America, dammit. Isn’t everything fair game?

Ted Kooser, an ex-Laureate himself, has a few nice things to say about content in an interview he did with Grace Cavalieri on her stellar radio show Poet and The Poem. He mentions that one of his ambitions was to be able to write a poem about anything, anything, and so he recounts the brief backstory of his “The Washing of Hands,” a completely mundane and—in the context of the poem—domestic task. The piece is terrific. But the content is banal. I mean—a poem about a woman washing her hands? Oh, yawn. But it’s what happens inside the poem as a reading experience that really kicks. That’s the poetry, not the theme or whatever.

My point is that content and its extensions just don’t really matter that much. They’re beside the point. And this is the truth for so many aspects of life—isn’t life not about what we fill our time with but how we fill it—why should poetry be any different? I got into a similar argument a long time ago with Kathleen Peirce over a Bukowski poem, “The Apple,” which I claimed was about meaninglessness and, therefore, was itself meaningless, and that that was the most beautiful thing about it—that what the poet (and for me, the reader) walked away with was that he walked away with nothing.

This is the self-defeating portion of my argument, of course. Poems must mean something after all. I’m just saying that’s not the point. Poems should not be judged by subject matter or theme but by their artistic risks and successes. The wrong question is always asked: What does it mean? That’s the scourge of poetry’s disfavor in high schools around the world—god forbid it ever be asked of children in the lower grades! The question should be—is it artful? If we asked that, maybe our kids would actually learn something about poetry other than that they don’t care for it. I contend they would learn a great deal, in fact, by wondering about the answer to that question.

Unfortunately, like so much talk about poetry and so many of its critics—both for and against—Shivani more or less avoids such an inquiry other than by blanket statement, degrading the work of some terrific poets—if not the poets themselves. As early as his essay’s second paragraph, Shivani writes of Graham, Olds, Glück and Levine, “Their very project is to participate. . .in the annihilation of common decency at all levels.” Seriously. I mean—seriously? We once burned witches over similar claims. I hope we don’t start burning poets.

 

 

 

This Writing Life... an excellent new post at the Cheek Teeth blog

Cam Scott has posted yet another stellar essay at Cheek Teeth -- about the joys and displeasures of living as a writer in these times.  It's a read lush with images and craftsmanship--readers of pulp/pop fiction beware!

"What It Takes to Make a (Writing) Life"

Lisa Williams' "Wing"

Lisa Williams' "Wing," originally published in The Cincinnati Review and which I found at Verse Daily, is a tight, little poem most anyone—if not everyone—can relate to. Although I read the title and thought, hmmm...about birds, 'tis not so.  "Wing" is about relationships, specifically that abrupt moment when the other person is out of love, and the lover has just become keenly aware of the fact.  And you—assuming that unfortunate role—know it. You look into the other's eyes and see the door is closed. Whatever rooms and halls previously open for you are no longer so. As Williams writes, you receive "A different glance" and a new "wing / we never noticed suddenly swing[s] / open." And, well, the relationship is over. Just like that. As Williams concludes, "Affection is grace, after all, / and we are at its mercy." Nice. Tragic.

But I didn't choose to write about "Wing" because of its content.  I chose to write about it because of a recent blip of a blog written by Cameron Scott at Cheekteeth, the blog for Trachodon Magazine. In his "Line Breaks and Broken Transmissions," Scott writes that "for the most part line breaks are arbitrary; if you are writing a poem you have to do it, and you don't have to think about it most of the time." This follows a sentence that briefly describes how lines and line breaks can be determined by breathing, which does comes naturally and does not require thought, but nevertheless—as a poet who cares a great deal more about his line breaks than his content, I couldn't help but think "arbitrary" a bit off. (for an interesting article on the relevance and irrelevance of line breaks, check this out: "The End of the Line for Modern Poetry")

Thus, "Wing," in which Williams appears to use line breaks for at least two distinct purposes—to ease readers through the familiar, to enjamb us into the uncomfortable—becomes a useful tool for demonstrating the purposeful use of line breaks.

In "Wing," Williams writes about two distinct types of experience.  The first is the reliable and familiar, the factual if you will; the second is the suddenly new and, therefore, unfamiliar.  For the former she uses an endstopped line, the latter an enjambed one. By line 2 of the poem, she's used both:

People can remove themselves from us.
I don't mean death. I mean another
undeniable turning, like a wing
we never noticed suddenly swinging
open, visible in ways only we see:

Although a bit enigmatic for me at first, line 1 is pretty straight forward: people can get up from the table, they can return to their cubicle, to their barstool.  They can move away, and they can die, which is what Williams writes in line 2, though her speaker (whom it's fair to say is the poet) says that isn't what she's talking about. She's talking about "another / undeniable turning."  That period at the end of line 1, and that after "death," kick off the poem with something readers can rely on, that they already know is true.  Thus, an endstopped line, which reads like a sentence and poses no threat to our eye nor to our mind: we're given single, easily digested thoughts that end with what we expect, a period: "People can remove themselves from us. / I don't mean death." Okay. No problem.

That first enjambment on "another," however, is not so digestible because it breaks the clause where we don't expect.  It wrecks the complete thought by breaking the clause—"I mean another / undeniable turning"—in half. She's talking about something else, and this else is not a comfortable other to consider, seeing as how the relationship has gone bust. Had the first two sentences not been consistent with their language and pattern, perhaps this enjambment wouldn't have such an effect, but they are consistent.

The language shift here reiterates this change and enforces the effect of the enjamment. The first two sentences are comprised of arrhythmic mono- and bi-syllabic words.  The sentences are short, over and done with in one line or less. The third sentence, in which that first enjambment occurs, stretches across four lines of the poem—five if we include what follows the colon. It quickly makes use of multi-syllabic words, "another" and "undeniable," and so its feel is different not only in the eye and brain but in the ear.  The pace is slowed and musical for a moment. This is echoed at the end of line 4 with "suddenly swinging," a nice rhyme with the internal "turning" and, to my mind, a clear signal about the prominence of this other type of removal a lover, swiftly removed, feels. So, Williams uses several tools to emphasize the fact that change is coming, line break being but one of them and the first to do so.

In the middle of the poem, Williams uses a trio of endstopped lines that coincide with what we, the lover, think we can count on as "once included ones":

the mute, familiar angles of a face,
its histories we thought transparent,
its banks of flesh. A different glance
charged with some fresh need or ancient

But as soon as the lover encounters the shift from loved to unloved—"A different glance"—we're back to enjambment. It's sort of a. . .classic case of form meeting content and vice versa.

In contemporary poetry, the uses of line breaks run the gamut, and poets use them at great length to achieve desired effects—or not.  The fact is that as long as poets are using lines, then line breaks are integral to the moves and meanings of their poems.  Even arbitrary line breaks have an effect, so it seems to me that, for a poet, an examined poem is the one worth writing.