The Yea Nay Creeping Jesus:
"I know too well that a great majority of Englishmen are fond of The Indefinite which they Measure by Newtons Doctrine of the Fluxions of an Atom. A Thing that does not Exist. These are Politicians & think that Republican Art is Inimical to their Atom. For a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision[s] Strait or Crooked It is Itself & Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else Such is Job but since the French Revolution Englishmen are all Intermeasurable One by Another Certainly a happy state of Agreement to which I for One do not Agree. God keep me from the Divinity of Yes & No too The Yea Nay Creeping Jesus from supposing Up & Down to be the same Thing as all Experimentalists must suppose." --William Blake
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As for line: ("For a Line or Lineament is not formed by Chance a Line is a Line in its Minutest Subdivision[s] Strait or Crooked It is Itself & Not Intermeasurable with or by any Thing Else") not a categorical thing in my mind--the least interesting above all is to call it "a unit of thought" or "a breath," which are static isolated weary descriptions that make for static weary lonesome lines--but a fluid moment of potential tension between syntax, caesura, punctuation, cadence, tone of voice, sentencing, rhyme, repetition, the old ghosts walking about in the machine--iambs, trochees, anapests, dactyls, etc.--and The Break. The Break. In which there is the epiphanic tinkling of glass, all at once so many new things forged in suspension, but not like a bridge. More like the springing of a tightly coiled spring. More like falling out of a window. There is pleasure in that, yes. My teacher said "every line is a poem." And so a prose poem is one line long. The line ends where the window ends. On the other side of the pane (pain?).
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