Are you supposed to pause at the end of an enjambed line, or continue until there is punctuation? I think the former sounds rather awkward, but the latter seems to make the enjambment completely pointless.
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Are you supposed to pause at the end of an enjambed line, or continue until there is punctuation? I think the former sounds rather awkward, but the latter seems to make the enjambment completely pointless.
An enjambed line continues to the next line without a pause signaled by a comma, period, or other textual formatting. I don't see why one would pause at the end when reading such a line. That would sound awkward. In a metrical poem the line break does not signal that a pause should take place, but rather it allows the reader to see the rhythmic pattern in the whole line. For example, an enjambed iambic pentameter line would show the reader that the five iambs in the line are complete. The reader is not expected to make a pause at the end of the line unless there is some other formatting there such as a period or comma.
I am no expert on this. It is just how I would approach the problem you present. I see no point in line breaks in poetry except to make the underlying metrical structure of the poem clear to the reader. If the poem has no metrical structure a line break might represent a pause the author intends the reader to make or it might represent nothing at all. In such a situation the line break is pointless as you suggest. The poem might as well be formatted as prose.
Line breaks serve a global function. They tell the reader that they are reading "poetry" and not "prose". If the poem happens to sound like gibberish, the line breaks tell the reader that it is not really gibberish. Rather, it is a "poem" and should be respected as adult communication even when it is does not appear to be any thing a sane adult would say to another sane adult.
Sometimes we forget there is a listener to every poem read. That listener may be the same person as the reader who translates a visual text into an internalized sound in order to understand the text. That listener, internalized or outside us hearing the poem via sound waves and ears, doesn't care how the lines are broken any more than a listener of a concert cares how the score looks to the conductor of the orchestra.
I´m not a specialist in poetry, that´s why I resorted to old wiki, Besides the effects Yes/No mentioned already there is the matter of the delayed meaning:
"In poetry, enjambment (/ɛnˈdʒæmbmənt/; from the French enjambement)[1] is incomplete syntax at the end of a line;[2] the meaning runs over from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation. Lines without enjambment are end-stopped.
In reading, the delay of meaning creates a tension that is released when the word or phrase that completes the syntax is encountered (called the rejet);[1] the tension arises from the "mixed message" produced both by the pause of the line-end, and the suggestion to continue provided by the incomplete meaning.[3] In spite of the apparent contradiction between rhyme, which heightens closure, and enjambment, which delays it, the technique is compatible with rhymed verse.[3] Even in couplets, the closed or heroic couplet was a late development; older is the open couplet, where rhyme and enjambed lines co-exist.[3]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enjambment
Not quite. Whilst it is true that all poems can be read aloud, the visual presentation of the poem can also influence the meaning when read off the page.Quote:
Originally Posted by YesNo
Concrete poetry and much of the 80's and 90's, how the poem looked on the page was important. In some cases, the sound of a poem was almost forgotten. Then Slam poetry came onto the scene and the sound of the poem became more important again.
The problem is now that there is a tension between poetry on the page, and poetry for the stage as it were. Page poems cut out every unnecessary word and the poem is pared back to some form of pure language, which isn't a problem when the reader has the page in front of them and can read and re-read as much as they like. On the stage, some redundancy (or repetition) is almost necessary to help the listener. If your poem is a minimalist poem from the page, and someone coughs or sneezes - the meaning of the poem is lost to the audience because a key line was not heard.
Enjambment does not necessarily mean a pause, but could show a change of emphasis.
In looking at the link Danik provided, it seems to me that emjambment makes sense only if one has a "line" of poetry that is expected to end-stop, but doesn't. If that line marks out a rhythmic pattern then enjambment makes sense. One should be able to hear the pattern without seeing the line breaks in the text dividing the string of words into lines if there is any metrical pattern in the poem.
When sandy14 brings up concrete poetry, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concrete_poetry, the text of the poem includes a visual display even if just a choice of font to use. Many people who post poetry on their blogs add images to the page to enhance the display so seeing the page is part of the experience one gets when reading the poem. This brings up other issues besides enjambment, but then I did hint at it when saying that there is always a listener when a poem is read.
Is there really always a listener? That listener would be the reader silently hearing the poem as it is read (unless it is read out-loud to someone else). Such listening would be done without actual sound waves hitting the ear although I would expect one could detect neural changes in the brain when one's mind tries to make sense of the words which changes how those neurons fire.
I wonder if someone deaf from birth hears language the way I do? From my perspective, sound gives language meaning, but that may just be the way I experience it. There are synaesthetic people who experience things differently than I do. One I have mentioned elsewhere can visualize digits of pi. I don't experience numbers in that way. I haven't looked at any fMRI studies on this, but that would be one way to try to look for what this silent listening is and how it differs from what someone deaf from birth or synaesthetic experiences. Admittedly, it is not the subjective experience of language, but just a projection of it onto a map of the brain.
When I experience something purely visual as a photograph, the chatter in my brain starts working that describes or adds meaning to that photograph. I think what I am sensing would be the same from a neural perspective as if I heard an external sound which provided the meaning of the words contained in that chatter. There is no actual sound, since I am just talking to myself, but I would make sense out of the chatter as if there were sounds that I heard. That would be the listener I am referring to. It is basically "my" mind, or some part of my reality that I have some choice over, firing neurons in my brain so I can become aware of the meaning of words I associate with that image. If others experience meaning in the same way, then I would claim there is always a listener, otherwise only some of us have this listener when we read a poem.