The Line Break Conundrum

There was an open mic last night in Youngstown, with Steve Reese as the featured reader. Nice crowd, some good poetry, some bad poetry (as always with open mics). I wasn't nervous prior to reading, since I've read in front of this crowd a couple times before, but when I got up to the podium--rather, the music stand stolen from the YSU Music department--my heart started pounding. I hate that! You think you're prepared and ready to go, and then your body decides something else entirely.

Well, getting to the line break conundrum. After I read, my friend Jay (whose opinion I trust quite a bit) told me that my poems have a much greater impact when read out loud than when he reads them on paper. The only possible reason for this is that I don't read my line breaks. I spend a lot of time revising my line breaks, looking for good enjambment potential and natural pauses, and I even practice reading the poem how it looks on the page. But when it is time to read for an audience, I just read the sentences, and line breaks be damned.

This goes back to tenth grade English, when Mr. Bordine told us that if a line ended without punctuation, there was no pause. So I learned to read poems without pauses. Which is fine, except that those editors out there that I'm trying to impress don't get to hear me read out loud, and are therefore forced to read the line breaks I type in. And what if they aren't working?