Enjambment

CRAFT TERM

Nov 7

Enjambment is the running-over of a sentence or phrase from one poetic line to the next, without terminal punctuation; the opposite of end-stopped.

via Poetry Foundation

Example

Excerpt from “my mother says everyone has to learn how to swim” by Karo Ska:

but i can’t float. i fear the water
won’t hold me. no one else has.

In their poem, “my mother says everyone has to learn how to swim,” Karo Ska creates one meaning in the phrase “i fear the water” that gains new meaning when read with the following line “won’t hold me.”

Prompt

Take a poem you’ve written and erase all the line breaks until the piece is a block of text.

Rebreak the poem into lines using as many unique enjambments as you can find. Look for moments where the meaning of a phrase changes based on what other information sits on a line with it.

Resource written by:

Featured

Anne Marie Wells

is an award-winning, Queer poet, playwright, memoirist and storyteller navigating the world with a chronic illness. She is a faculty member of the Community Literature Initiative through the Sims Library of Poetry. She was the 2020 recipient of the Milestone Award presented by Wyoming Writers Inc., and the Rising Star Award presented by the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce. She was the 2021 recipient of the Peter K. Hixson Memorial Award in poetry and was nominated as a Wyoming Woman of Influence in the arts category for her work in amplifying the voices of the LGBTQ and disabled communities in Wyoming through her writing. Anne Marie uses she/her and they/them pronouns.

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