Asymmetrical Lines
I started thinking about asymmetrical lines in poetry around the same time I started thinking about having a child. Let’s call it most of 2023, because after having a large and rare uterine fibroid removed around my birthday that February, I felt I must consider, somewhat abruptly, how and if I wanted to be a parent. At thirty-five, I gave myself the year to sort out my desires. I was not partnered and tired of trying to meet someone on the apps. I was also heartbroken from a four year on-and-off lover who could not commit. My mom raised me without a partner. I could do it. Did I want to?
The final jagged stanza of Louise Glück’s “A Sharply Worded Silence” reads:
so I assumed there would be, at some point,
a door with a glittering knob,
but when this would happen and where I had no idea.¹
I was interested in an irregularity of line length, asymmetry as a mode of reaching back and forth across the page. Picture a cantilevered line: a long line hanging over a short one. That truncated line bearing the heft of many long lines signals a kind of burden. Take the prose-ish stanzas of Paisley Rekdal’s poem “Nightengale: A Gloss,” which places Ovid’s myth of Philomela alongside theoretical work, Shakespeare, and Keats to get at how sexual violence undoes language. Many of these stanzas suspend over a final short line, under which a reference also hunkers, so that both the final line and the reference appear as short lines holding up the mass of a paragraph:
There is no scream after the tongue is cut, but would we hear a cry?
Philomela screams only in the text, thus in our minds: in that, her body
and our own do not communicate. We cannot hear it. We want to,
but she exists only in our imagination: an absent body that exists in the
past or an unforeseeable future. She begs for help we can never give. It is
absurd to suggest we could. In that sense, she never needed a tongue to
scream for help. She never had one.
K. Frances Lieder, “Lights Out and an Ethics of Spectatorship: Or, Can the
Subaltern Scream?”²
I do not imagine Rekdal rendering these lines as sentences that simply spilled over. For me, they exist in some sphere of both/and. The lines spill over and, when they can no longer move out, no longer stretch, the reader is met with a quickening—which is to say, Rekdal found a visual form that gestures toward the emotional gravity of her subject matter.
Between the time this poem first appeared in The American Poetry Review in 2017 and then in Nightingale published in 2019, Rekdal made edits. In the 2017 version, the phrase “We want to” isn’t there. That version of the line reads:
body and our own do not communicate. We cannot hear it. She exists³
I go somewhere else. My mind’s eye conjures an image of my youngest brother as a toddler. I am ten years old feeding him chicken and dumplings at my stepmom’s round wooden table. Big window beside him. I think I can hear his voice.
In an interview on the Ologies podcast Dr. Adrian Johns, author of the book The Science of Reading, says, “English is written left to right, top to bottom and that is called sinistrodextral. Languages that run the opposite way, like Arabic-alphabet languages, are dextrosinistral. But there are, of course, other forms of reading that go top to bottom in vertical rows, like Mongolian, Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. And there are some theories of why languages tend to literally go one way or the other, like left to right if you were chiseling in stone versus top to bottom if maybe there was a factor of ink strokes drying on bamboo.”
Seeing the asymmetry in poems I’d read many times before felt like a summons. I had privileged symmetrical, shorter lines: tightly wound couplets of similar lengths, blocks of quatrains, squares of sonnets, tercets with an indented middle line that didn’t stray too far from its top and bottom keepers. I had valued visual control and evenness—some imaginary vertical axis preventing me from stretching too far to the right side of the page. Now I was somewhere else and wanted something else. Writing a line that reached toward the right margin was an attempt to touch a void space in my mind, and perhaps in any English poetry reader’s mind. Writing a shorter line might interrupt or anchor me.
The choreographer Ohad Naharin known for creating the dance language Gaga grounds his work in the idea of asymmetry. In the Netflix documentary Move, he says, “Symmetry is an illusion. [...] Even when I do the most similar movement with my hands [...] it’s not symmetric, it’s for sure different. So, when you know it, it’s a great release for the dancer.”
Part of my maybe-a-baby year was filled with dance, a thing I do to get away from the two-dimensional space of the page, to move in other directions, to know differently. The director of the dance program at the university where I work had become a friend, and she’d asked if I wanted to co-choreograph a piece to one of my poems for their annual showcase—an opportunity that would push me out of my element and allow me to further my thinking about dance and poetry as kin. We chose “A Woman in the Drum Forest,” a prose poem about a sister trying to afford an apartment in a strange forest after her brother has been banished to the underworld. Looking at the poem during rehearsals, I wondered why I’d landed on such stout blocks of text. Like Rekdal, I had attempted prose-ish stanzas to counter the tighter choices I was making in other poems about my brother, but ultimately, I felt it lacked visible breath.
To leave the underworld and secure a place in the brick building of the Drum Forest,
the woman needed two months’ rent and a decent job. Before her departure, her brother,
who could not leave the underworld ever again, fastened a necklace he made from
his own ashes around her neck.
The dance studio is not unlike the page. To practice leaps and turns, dancers move across the floor in lines. They move from one side of the room to the other and then back again. Sometimes, depending on the room, the dancers do this at a diagonal to lengthen the distance they have to travel. Form negotiating space. After my fibroid surgery, I felt especially heavy moving across the dance floor. During exercises at the ballet barre, a wooden support sometimes fastened directly to dance mirrors, I could more easily avert my eyes from the way my waist had changed because the barre—the line—hid my waist in the mirror. During exercises across the floor, I was in open space. My lines felt arduous. When I glanced in the mirror, I saw a body I must learn to love anew. I sucked in my stomach and pushed down my shoulders. I longed for a sharper chin and thought of my noncommittal lover kissing the incision scar lining my soft lower belly. My boobs had swelled. Why? I wasn’t even pregnant. I pushed myself to the other side of the room. My scar had healed quickly but my stomach muscles continued, for most of the year, to skulk their way back to normalcy. Sometimes after a long day, one side of my lower abdomen seemed to pulse all on its own.
Another part of my maybe-a-baby year meant asking my friends with children about their lives. I talked to Stacey and Brie who had made two kids with one of their close friend’s sperm. Brie had birthed their babies. Listening on their couch past midnight, I dreamed of my body changing. I wanted this kind of transformation. I wanted to know who I might become there. I wanted to know a child as its mother. Brie did not like the idea of me doing it alone. They would, of course, be aunties. Tearing up at their care, I understood that aunties did not mean partners.
Of course, in a certain sense, I was not empty-handed:
I had my colored pencils.⁴
Or:
Feeling has departed—it occurs to me
this would make a fine headstone.⁵
Or:
The night progressed. Fog ⁶
Glück with the kind of humor I love. Her asymmetry lies not only in the length of her lines but also in the way she strikes a whole serious poem off balance with a comedic moment.
I thought of my non-committal lover states away. He did not want a child. I tried to communicate that perhaps I could be happy with him even if we did not have a kid. Perhaps. He saw it as a forgone conclusion: I would eventually be unhappy. He thought he knew better. I thought he was afraid, that he wasn’t giving us a chance. We had gotten into our relationship in haste; he had been grieving the death of his long-time girlfriend who died just a month before my youngest brother passed of a fentanyl overdose. He knew that I knew this kind of grief—when the young die—is its own form of forever. I sometimes thought that if he loved me at all, it was because of this shared knowing. Would I ever forgive us for the haste? For our desire to be comforted and touched? Now, popping cherry tomatoes into my mouth on Brie’s couch, I pictured him scrambling eggs for me in his well-worn cast-iron skillet and the line of little plants on his windowsill, which he watered on Saturdays. He would not be handling a child with me. He had not come for my surgery, though he could have. He was on year three of the grueling academic job market. He might move anywhere, and it would probably be without me. I saw myself crawling into his bed to watch cartoons while he teetered my full bowl of ramen in the doorway—his home was a space I’d loved, and a space wherein I disappeared.
Girmay, in “luam mending clothes,” writes as someone she could have been:
The life of my thread
as I pull it through the clothes I mend,
is long.
Despite its reputation as a red state, Nebraska, where I’ve lived for nearly a decade, has a decent healthcare system and my insurance with the university is fine. Dr. Constance, the surgeon who removed my fibroid, runs a fertility clinic and is active in her support of non-traditional families and abortion rights. I pictured some little triangle wherein two longer sides hold up a shorter side. My desire for romantic love and a baby felt at odds with each other. Despite divorce rates and the reality of blended families, two people and a baby are privileged as "symmetrical,” as “typical.” How might asymmetry serve my ability to envision other forms of family? I imagined Dr. Constance recutting my scar open to pull a baby out. Who would hold the baby after me? Or if I couldn’t? Because of scar tissue I was told I should not carry to full term. Should I get pregnant, it would be in my best interest to have a cesarean at 36-37 weeks.
Dr. Constance holding my hand—
I woke up fine,
my uterus fine,
some hospitable space still inside.
I loved my dance classes, my ill-paying job, my flexible teaching schedule, my community, my neighborhood grocery story, my doctors. I joked about my affordable “Brooklyn” apartment, a brownstone in middle America just blocks from my office. Even though I could not afford to own a home, some semi-prerequisite to becoming a parent in my mother’s mind, she could imagine me having a child here. It was cute. And maybe even safe. Safe enough, anyway.
How would I afford childcare by myself? What if I miscarried? Or worse? Who would be available to drive me to the ER? I had no relatives nearby. My doctors had worked to secure a ballot measure for this year’s election that would protect the right to abortion up to fetal viability as determined by the patient’s medical team alone and not by politicians, but Governor Pillen had already signed a 12-week abortion ban that made the legal waters murky for doctors trying to care for pregnant people in extreme cases. What if my case became extreme under this law? What if it didn’t and suddenly, in pregnancy, I decided I did not want a child? What if my desires only forecasted catastrophe? What if my life, and my imagined child’s life, would simply evidence my ability to create disaster? Panic and control played old tricks on me: I didn’t deserve anything. I had learned to recognize the signpost just beyond these tricks: INSERT TENDERNESS TOWARD SELF. Could I have a baby alone? Could I even make that decision alone? At night, staring at the dappled light from the hanging lamp my great-grandmother had given me, a lamp that felt like my only permanent object, I ached with loneliness and a deep sense of unresolve.
I loved the name June. And Ellis.
And Samuel Ellis.
Would I name a baby after my brother who suffered so much in this life?
I wasn’t sure. Maybe I would
start trying to get pregnant when the semester ended.
You know that adage some people say:
There is never a perfect time.
Before even trying to get pregnant, I was inventing accusations. In “the lost baby poem,” Lucille Clifton wrote:
what did I know about waters rushing back
what did I know about drowning
or being drowned
Those are the final three lines of the first stanza. The whole first half of the poem is in fact a blocky thing, three squat stanzas long. What follows, however, is a sparser second section with more apparent asymmetry:
later i’ll say
i spent my life
loving a great man
later
my life will accuse me
of various treasons
not black enough
too black
eyes closed when they should have been open
eyes open when they should have been closed
will accuse me for unborn babies
and dead trees
later
when i defend again and again
with this love
my life will keep silent
listening to
my body breaking⁷
Because the third and fourth lines in the third stanza jut so far out from the rest of this section, their symmetry bewilders me. The lines appear like a couplet. And despite their parallelism, despite seeming to reflect each other, what exists here are two lines of three trisyllabic feet each. Beneath their visuality, these lines have asymmetry at their core. By switching the placement of closed and open, the stress pattern shifts the rhythm of the last two feet entirely. I might feel a sense of closure but there is none.
/ / x x / x x / x
eyes closed when | they should have | been open
/ / x x x / x x /
eyes open | when they should | have been closed⁸
On a jog—
for a minute I sprint and see my brother’s long legs, his stark white thighs
compared to his tan knees, his quad muscles I thought
would survive anything.
The sky clear at dusk. Summer around the corner. Spring came too early.
I make up what my brother might say to me had he lived longer—
Be done with that man who doesn’t love you.
You’ll be a great mom.
There is a video of my brother dancing on a dock at Lake Lanier in Georgia—the place we came from—shortly before he died. No, in the video he is dancing beside the pool in his apartment complex. There is, in my mind, my brother running and jumping off a long dock into the lake. I have already jumped. I am waiting for him in the water.
My thinking about asymmetry was pressed between lesson planning, job applications, frying eggs, administrative tasks. Then a friend read a draft of this essay and said there was a certain shattered quality to it. That is something, I thought.
There is a certain shattered quality to what comes together through asymmetry. Part of the politics of asymmetry is a kind of tension in connection, a rejection of balance and closure, a refusal of the complete, some unending motion. I saw, in the poems by women I’d been reading for years, forms that beget more space for grief, anger, and uncertainty.
I know now that my initial considerations of asymmetry began with Aracelis Girmay’s collection the black maria. The book issues from her experience of Eritrean diaspora, from mothering, from a multilingual relationship to poetry, and from the connection between the transatlantic slave trade and police violence in the US. I first read this book shortly after it was published and Philando Castile (1983-2016) was murdered by police in Saint Paul, when his death—and his young daughter witnessing his death—filled our screens. It felt wrong to watch. It felt wrong to turn away. In 2016, I was starting a doctoral program and still three years away from losing my brother. Girmay’s book is an invitation to grieve. I keep reading it for that and for its formal feats in asymmetry.
In the book’s second half, titled in lowercase “the black maria,” Girmay begins with a block of text justified to both margins. The block contains names of people who have experienced state-sanctioned violence. The formatting feels protective and loving. Below this, in the center of the page, a definition for the book’s concept appears with only a left-justified margin. It feels slightly looser than the block of names because of its placement and its open right margin:
[maria, plural of mare: any of several mostly flat dark areas
of considerable extent on the surface of the moon or mars… though mare means “sea” in latin, they lack water.
–merriam webster • astronomers thought the lunar features
were seas when they first saw them through telescopes.
These dark basins were referred to as “black maria.” Basins
and craters misidentified as seas.]⁹
And on the page following this setup, the poem titled in uppercase “THE BLACK MARIA” appears. Here are the final three stanzas:
Naming, however kind, is always an act of estrangement. (To put
into language that which can’t be
put.) & someone who does not love you cannot name you right, &
even “moon” can’t carry the moon.¹⁰
If this poem is about estrangement & waters made dark with millions
of names & bodies—the Atlantic
Ocean, the Mediterranean & Caribbean Sea, the Mississippi, then these
are also the names of the black maria.
For days, the beautiful child Emmett swells into Tallahatchie. Even
now, the moon paints its face
with Emmett’s in petition. Open casket of the night, somebody’s
child, our much more than the moon.
Dana Levin, writing about her relationship to the line, says, “the real task, for [the poet], [is] not to chronicle the development of knowing but to enact, via enjambment, the struggle of seeing—and so to find [herself] asking the reader to participate in that struggle too [...].” True enjambment is incomplete syntax at the end of a line that “requires continued reading” (Voigt). My life since my brother’s death had come to feel incomplete. I was/am working out how to get that to show up in my poems on a formal level. Girmay enacts a kind of enjambment that feels both true, meaning one must continue reading, and sometimes nearly syntactically complete: “For days, the beautiful child Emmett swells into Tallahatchie. Even”—the word even evokes symmetry, evokes an anger-grief in me so big where there is no evenness, no symmetry that could make it right. By tracing the asymmetry in these poems I loved, I returned to poetry as refuge, as metaphysical space wherein I might show up fully to the middle of my life without having to put grief aside.
Girmay’s asymmetrical handling of form represented a necessary unsettledness. It invited me to consider freedom as perpetual interdependence. Constant arrangement of a whole that will never be whole. I could see, through her negotiation of line and sentence, through her parataxis and her recursive use of image, through her tedious choices of layout, through her couplets spilled over, the page and its margins as space for my unending state of mourning and celebration. I needed all this whether I became a mother or not. I needed this asymmetrical handling of grief to reconcile myself to the idea that “justice may only exist as rhetoric.”¹¹ It’s not that I can hear my little brother, now dead nearly five years. It’s that I see in my mind’s eye some kind of line undulating out toward the right. Is this the wavelength of his voice or the contour of his shoulder? I am still imagining the child I might have one day, their cadence and shape, the asymmetry of their body moving in space.
Footnotes
Glück, 21
Rekdal, 41
Glück, 17; I stitched together this little triptych from her book Faithful and Virtuous Night (2014), the same book “A Sharply Worded Silence” comes from.
Glück, 49
Glück, 27
Clifton, 60
Third line feet: antibacchius, amphibrach, amphibrach. Fourth line feet: antibacchius, anapest, anapest.
Girmay, 71
Girmay, 74
Jordan, 151
Bibliography
Clifton, Lucille. Good Woman: Poems and a Memoir, 1969-1980. Brockport, BOA Editions, 1987.
Girmay, Aracelis. the black maria. Rochester, BOA Editions, 2016.
Glück, Louise. Faithful and Virtuous Night. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.
Jordan, June. “Nobody Mean More to You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan.” We’re On: A June Jordan Reader, Cambridge,
Alice James Books, 2017.
Levin, Dana. “Lessons of the Line: Charles Simic and Me.” The Yale Review, 4 March 2024,
https://yalereview.org/article/dana-levin-charles-simic.
Rekdal, Paisley. Nightingale. Port Townsend, Copper Canyon, 2019.
Rekdal, Paisley. “Nightingale: A Gloss.” The American Poetry Review, 46.5, 2017, https://aprweb.org/poems/nightingale-a-gloss.
Ward, Alie. Ologies. “Anagnosology (READING) with Dr. Adrian Johns, 29 May 2024,
https://www.alieward.com/ologies/anagnosology.
Voigt, Ellen Bryant. The Art of Syntax: Rhythm of Thought, Rhythm of Song. Minneapolis Graywolf Press, 2009.
Katie Marya is a writer and translator from Atlanta, Georgia. Her debut poetry collection Sugar Work was the Editor's Choice for the 2020 Alice James Book Award. Marya lives in Nebraska where she teaches writing at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.