This next work is called Of Time and the Line,
and addresses a perennial and difficult question for poets
about the use of the line in contemporary work.
And I think it really resolves it in many ways, as you'll see.
Of Time and the Line.
George Burns likes to insist that he always
takes the straight lines.
The cigar in his mouth is a way of leaving space
between the lines for a laugh.
He weaves lines together by means
of a picaresque narrative.
Not so Henny Youngman, whose lines are strictly paratactic.
My father pushed a line of ladies' dresses--
not down the street in a pushcart, but upstairs
in a factory office.
My mother has been more concerned with her hemline.
Chairman Mao put forward Maoist lines,
but that has been abandoned mostly
for the East-West line of malarkey so
popular in these parts.
The prestige of the iambic line has recently suffered decline,
since it's no longer so clear who "I" am, much less
who you are.
When making a line, better be sure what you're lining in
and what you're lining out, and which side of the line
you're on--
the world is made up so.
Adam didn't so much name as delineate.
Every poem's got a prosodic lining, some of which
will unzip for summer wear.
The lines of an imaginary are inscribed on the social flesh
by the knife point of history.
Nowadays, you can often spot a work of poetry
by whether it's in lines or no.
If it's in prose, there's a good chance it's a poem.
While there is no lesson in the line
more useful than that of the picket line,
the line that has caused the most adversity
is the bloodline.
In Russia, everybody is worried about long lines.
Back in the USA, it's strictly soup lines.
Take a chisel to write.
But for an actor, a line's got to be cued.
Or, as they say in math, it takes two lines
to make an angle, but only one lime to make a margarita.