Foreword by Adrienne Rich
Line Break is the major work on poetry as social practice, and a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary criticism or poetry. For many years, James Scully, along with others, quietly radicalized American poetry—in theory and in practice, in how it is lived as well as in how it is written. In eight provocative essays, he argues for artistic and cultural practice that actively opposes structures of power too often reinforced by intellectual activities. Line Break was originally published by Bay Press in 1988.
As poet and critic Robert Bagg commented:
Scully offers in Line Break a way of reading and writing poetry that is literally revolutionary. He revokes entrenched complacencies right and left, revealing through his patient, practical study of the work our language actually does––not what it pretends to do, or what our teachers told us it does. He shows that language is irrevocably politicized, as is our entire culture. There’s no place to hide, no verbal high ground, no American exceptionalism, on which to repose. Scully’s scope is refreshingly global, but it’s not a globalization the World Bank will appreciate. And to immerse in the perspectives Scully lights up is an exhilaration like no other, one that becomes a revelation. That all poetry is political, whether or not its author is conscious of that fact, Scully conclusively demonstrates within every essay in the book. To this end he quotes several great unknown poets, most thrillingly Roque Dalton, the assassinated Salvadoran patriot, whose poems are no less works of art for being acts of moral illumination during an era of violent political turmoil. Scully’s most brilliant insight into poetic technique is that the “line break,”––aka enjambment, a French term suggestive of a surefooted balletic “jump” from the end of one line to the start of the next––is most truly a keen weapon for unearthing and jacklighting buried truths, buried lies, buried bodies. Scully sees line breaks as muscular fulcra on which all poetic discourse hinges. Used bravely, line breaks can decode, implode, explode everything a manipulated language wants to hide. It is Scully’s weapon of choice for radical literary insurgents committed to shaking things up. But this book does much more than arm rebels for verbal combat. It is a powerful and internally consistent argument that literature, that poetry in particular, can and must fulfill its ancient duty to register and judge the conduct of human beings. Line Break extrapolates and updates Plato: a poem that does not examine life critically is not worth writing.
