Poeming

When I see a poem coming down to around, say, 24 lines,
I begin to consider whether I’ll compose it as a single stanza,
or break the draft into more for specific purposes.

I’m often seeing stanzas either as single sentences,
or as what could be considered “old school” paragraphs.
That is, they contain a single idea advancing and/or enhancing
story, argument, metaphor, image, and so on.
In this particular poem, as you see, I’m seeing multiple stanzas.

Another aspect of composition looms as I decide how to handle line-breaks.
Line breaks are always tricky, crafty, mind-bending considerations,
different effects being achieved depending on break determinations.
Do you follow punctuation, each line ending with a comma, say,
a period, a dash, a semicolon, or a question mark?
Or do you break lines depending on a particular word choice,
for tension, suspense, perhaps a dual focus reference to the word before
and the word after? For instance breaking here
makes for a backward glance at “breaking” and a forward glance at “makes,”
giving me a soft underlying make or break reference,
as in this is good or it’s not, this break, this faint reference, this poem as a whole.

There’s much more to consider, elements such as rhyme,
happening sometimes either at the end of lines
or internally, assonance, consonance, alliteration,
and all the techniques that bring pleasure, hopefully, to the eye and ear,
but this is a good beginning at explaining the way I work at composing poems.