Enjambment
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.
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