Teaching Enjambment to Engage Students in Poetry

Lesson #14

The door’s open, and the coffee’s spiced with pumpkin! 🎃 Come on in, pull up a chair, and let’s chat.

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Word of the Week

enjambment

(noun): a technique where a poet continues a sentence beyond the line of a poem without including any punctuation at the end of the line.

Bonus fact: It’s a French word that means, “runs or steps over.”

Example: Keep reading to see some excellent poems with enjambment!

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Photo by John Schnobrich on Unsplash

You might be surprised to know that not all English teachers enjoy, or even like, poetry. It seems like it would be a prerequisite, but it’s not. I never disliked it, but I definitely avoided it because I didn’t feel like I always “got it.” Poetry felt superior and so I shied away from it.

It wasn’t until I started teaching AP Literature and Composition with my best friend that I began to not only like poetry but love it. Kathy has a passion for poetry and that passion (and her skill at teaching it) is contagious. I began to realize that analyzing poetry is like trying to solve a puzzle. When I started to understand the wordplay poets were engaging with, it became fun for me and my students to “crack the code” of a poem together.

One of the many new poetic terms I learned was enjambment. Here’s an example from Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken:”

Notice there is no punctuation at the ends of lines 2-4. Why? Why not end the lines at a natural punctuation break, like this?

The language is exactly the same, but the emphasis on particular words shifts with the structural change. In the original version, the repetition of “And” is more obvious (Remember the term for that? Polysyndeton! Well done!). When you read it aloud, the rhythm changes. Visually, when you read silently, your eyes are drawn to different words and phrases.

Why does Frost choose to structure the poem in this way? This is the kind of question that gets students thinking about how form affects meaning. It’s a challenging question, and since there is no “right” answer, it allows students to take risks in their thinking and offer all sorts of inferences. As long as students can support their thinking with evidence from the text, only Frost himself can say their answer is “wrong.”

Enjambment is a poetic technique that is accessible for students: easy to spot and easy to try out in their own writing. And it’s the gateway to more challenging questions about the choices writers make to evoke meaning. Why does a writer choose poetry over prose? Why does a writer choose to employ enjambment, rather than write a traditional sentence?

While typically defined as a sentence that continues on beyond a line, I introduced my students to another way of looking at the technique. I think of enjambment as the “slicing” of a sentence. When you chop it up, where does the new emphasis arise? Here’s an excellent example from the beginning of the poem “On the Subway” by Sharon Olds.

The boy and I face each other.
His feet are huge, in black sneakers
laced with white in a complex pattern like a
set of intentional scars. We are stuck on
opposite sides of the car, a couple of
molecules stuck in a rod of light
rapidly moving through darkness. He has the
casual cold look of a mugger,

The language in this poem is conversational. It could be written as a traditional paragraph. Instead, Sharon Olds chooses to give it a unique structure, each line short, allowing the images to stand out more clearly, like “black sneakers” and “molecules” and “casual cold look of a mugger.” The enjambment also creates unexpected relationships between clauses such as the following:

The “unintentional scars” are in reference to the man’s tied sneakers, but in this context, the “set” of scars could also be seen as a way of describing the narrator and this man “stuck” together in this space.

There’s lots more to discover in this poem (I highly recommend you read it in its entirety!). What’s so exciting is that once you learn the techniques poets use, you start to see the hidden layers of meaning. And when your students realize they have access to these hidden layers too, class discussions become vibrant and engaging: a teacher’s dream.

So I encourage you to devour poetry, rather than abstain from it. If you love language, you’ll soon love it more when you discover the unique and clever ways poets play with words (and perhaps it will inspire you to pen some poems of your own!).

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Writing Activity

Take a flash fiction piece you’ve already written and “slice the sentences. ”

Which words get heavier with the intentional line breaks? Which ones lose weight? How does the overall meaning of your story change?

Have fun playing with your words, and be open to unexpected meanings to emerge.

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Love this Line

"Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history."

~Plato

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Literary Trivia

Did you know…

A poetry slam is a competitive event where people perform their poetry before a live audience. Marc Kelly Smith started the concept in the 1980s in Chicago, Illinois. It is still very popular today.

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Exit Ticket

As always, please complete your exit ticket before you leave the lounge!

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Lucky loves the crisp, fall weather.