Marianne Boruch: Line and Room (July 1996)

Marianne Boruch examines the poetic line, seeking its source as a deeply private, embodied and mysterious phenomenon. Drawing on sources as diverse as biographical materials of Thomas Edison, the oeuvre of Roethke and Jorie Graham, and the theories of Charles Olson, Boruch explores the line, and the movement from one line to the next, as an enactment of thought unfolding, showing how the “deepest architecture” of our poems depends on the line, and on the “private room” out of which a line emerges.