feeling for fragment

Our feeling for fragment as form is an explanation of free verse.

—J.V. Cunningham
(Quote comes from the class notes recorded by D.G. Myers in a "History of Literary Criticism" seminar taught by J.V. Cunninghan in 1976.)

advertencies of verse

All poetry is fragment: it is shaped by its breakages, at every turn. It is the very art of turnings, toward the white frame of the page, toward the unsung, toward the vacancy made visible, that wordlessness in which our words are couched. Its lines insistently defy their own medium by averting themselves from the space available, affording the absent its say, not only at the poem’s outset and end by at each line’s outset and end. Richard Howard’s deft maxim (“prose proceeds, verse reverses”) catches the shifts in directionality implicit in the advertencies of verse. It means to aim at (as its means are) the untoward.

A composed verse is a record of the meeting of the line and sentence, the advertent and the inadvertent: a succession of good turns done. The poem is not only a piece, like other pieces of art; it is a piece full of pieces.

Heather McHugh, Broken English: Poetry and Partiality (Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1993)

fragment, fragmentary

The fragment is doubtless a disappointing genre, but the only honest one.

—E.M. Cioran