Matthew W. Baker: Poetry and the Kink • Craft Essays

A Poetry Craft Essay by Matthew W. Baker
Poetry and the Kink: The Inherent Queerness of the Poetic Line

Poetry and the Kink: The Inherent Queerness of the Poetic Line

It is 2015, and I am walking back to my apartment after a midday seminar. Sweat beads on my forehead as hot wind swirls construction dust into a mist. I swap the tote bag on my shoulder to the other side to give myself some relief, but the weight of the sun keeps stinging my arms, neck, thighs—any exposed skin I have. This is the first semester of my MFA in a new city on the opposite side of the country. Reno, what I will come to consider a geode shining despite its dirt and imperfectly cut, high-desert edges, is my first city by myself as an adult—no family, no friends, no prospects other than what I will make for myself in the years to come. I have almost reached my apartment when a pickup truck starts to pass by me. Normally, I wouldn’t think about the vehicles on the road, but as it nears me, the truck’s window lowers, and the man sitting in the passenger seat throws something toward me. He also yells what I think is a slur. I don’t understand what word at first because whatever he throws at me cracks against the rock wall to my left. Like a fault line splitting the earth above it, the sound opens up in me more than just fear; instead, my senses become laser-focused. As the truck speeds away, I notice the cement of the sidewalk and its dust-darkened beigeness, the red paint on the curb ahead of me marking the no-park fire zone, and the distant instruments of the university band playing in the intramural fields. I realize then that I stick out: some queer thing, that, to the men in the truck, shouldn’t be there. I am a line in the desert they do not recognize called into question by a word and a rock, the sounds breaking the experience into discrete parts.

Since this encounter, I have become a professor and have written countless bad poems (and some good) about my queerness (and mountains and driving and, like most poets, my mother). The poem has been my translation device, a way to pluck my feelings from the stream of undifferentiated thought and give them form. But why poems and not prose?

I used to turn to poems specifically because I was enamored with metaphor and the universe-spawning possibilities of the image, but over time, I’ve become more obsessed with the poetic line and what it does. Historically, lines have been used either mathematically to fit a meter and a specific form (think sonnet) or more freely (as in the ever-shortening or -lengthening lines of a Jorie Graham piece). In a freeverse poem, we use enjambment as a tool to cut up language as it moves with or against syntax:

I touch his cheek

with the back of my hand

I touch his

cheek with the

back of my hand.

In the first two-line example, the sentence feels “normal,” predictable in how its language moves. “I touch his cheek” is an independent clause then spliced into the prepositional phrase on the following line that completes the sentence. But in the latter, the breaks separate constituent parts of language even further to create tension while also upending the brain’s normal sentence logic. “I touch his”—what? The mind races through the emptiness at the end of the first line to piece the words together, but when it does, it is destabilized again by the nothing following “cheek with the” and so must again jump forward to complete the thought. James Longenbach calls these parsing and annotative linebreaks, respectively, and suggests that the “more radically enjambed lines” provided by an annotative linebreak offer the poem a “drama of discovery” the former does not (16). This sense of discovery a line can offer enthralls me in a way a metaphor or an image alone does not anymore; the way a paragraph, however lovely its language, doesn’t move me quite the same way as a sharp cut and fall into space does. I want to be destabilized by the line, brought to the brink of knowing only to have the known snatched away.

While I agree with Longenbach about the radicality of annotative linebreaks, I want to move one step further to suggest that any kind of enjambment, and even end-stopped lineation in a poem, is radical because it queers language. In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed writes that people are oriented by following “lines,” and it is by taking these lines that our bodies are molded into different shapes and “find [their] way” (14). Let us consider the paragraph of prose a normalized way to structure written language (at least in a Western context), so it would be a “straight” line that leads us one way. Ahmed then suggests that something queer is “oblique,” by which she means a queer thing calls into question the normalcy of a space (174). In other words, we imagine our daily lives are filled with “normal” routines, but when something unexpected, something out-of-line, appears, it queers, or kinks, our sense of orientation. We could also think of language as something routine—we are taught by conventions of grammar that language flows a certain way, and when we write it down in that paragraph, we emphasize the information that language conveys, not necessarily its shape. A poem is lined, is comprised of language, but when a line breaks, the orientation of that language is broken and reconstituted on the following line. If to be oriented is to be directed toward something via a straight line, to disorient is to not have a straight line, or to have a kinked line. This kinked line suggests difference or roughness; a surface thought to be smooth instead features divots that give it a more nuanced texture.

In other words, the kink asks us to pay closer attention to the contours of spaces through which we would otherwise unthinkingly move. Take, for instance, the way Mag Gabbert reshapes our imagination of a romantic encounter in a hotel room in her poem, “Sapphic Dream.” The speaker and her lover have taken a shower together that has steamed up the room, but the first stanza immediately kinks our image of that experience:

we’ve made the hot

-el room hum

-id from

our show

-er. (Gabbert)

Radical, annotative enjambments in the middle of words, what some poets call lexical linebreaks, splice and spice-up the picture of the steamy room. In the first line, the “hotel” has become a “hot” thing, whereas the humidity in line two transforms into a “hum” that infuses the otherwise mundane image of sticky heat into an effervescence that infuses the space, which ultimately transforms the shower into a “show” as the words break across the final lines of the stanza. As the poem moves forward, these kinked lines don’t simply highlight nuances of the images, they also emphasize the speaker’s actions with her lover: “on / -ce again again / -st our sin / -k // in my heave / n” (Gabbert). We see the speaker calling for more intensity (“again, again”) and then showcasing her enjoyment of the act (this “heave” that feels like “heaven”). To call this poem queer means more than just understanding this poem as a sexual encounter between two women; instead, what turns this poem into a truly kinky piece is how it calls its own language into question and reshapes it through careful (and playful) enjambment.

But even a quieter, less annotatively enjambed poem can disrupt a normative sense of language. William Stafford’s “Traveling Through the Dark” is a poem I learned as an MFA student mainly for its arresting enjambment in the first two lines: “Traveling through the dark I found a deer / dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.” As Longenbach might say, the enjambment between lines one and two feels annotative precisely because it disrupts our sense of this animal; a deer, a relatively harmless thing, becomes a grim totem when we learn it lies dead along the road. While that enjambment disorients me, over the years I have returned to this poem because of how carefully most of the remaining end-stopped lines demand that I slow down to appreciate how they frame what I experience in the poem. After we learn the deer has been recently struck by another vehicle, the speaker, “by glow of the tail-light…stumble[s] back of the car / and [stands] by the heap,” an action that then introduces the poem’s pivotal, arguably most emotional, image:

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason—

her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,

alive, still, never to be born.

Beside that mountain road I hesitated. (Stafford)

Though not as radical an enjambment as the very first lines of the poem, when the speaker “stumbles” to the back of the car, the linebreak creates a brief stasis wherein we see the man struggling with his footing as he approaches the animal’s body. The em-dash at the end of the following line cuts through that darkness to usher in the slow unfolding of the speaker’s discovery: the animal is pregnant and her child lies there waiting for potential salvation, a situation that pulls on the speaker’s heart and gives him pause. The almost torturous lingering the poem creates here because of its line endings and amount of punctuation demands my attention. See these words, the poem (and by extension Stafford) orders, and through them the drama and urgency of this otherwise quotidian roadkill experience.

What both Gabbert and Stafford’s poems exemplify is that whether the poem’s enjambment is extreme or more mundane, both remove language from its everyday use and ask us to think about how it means, not just what it means. And while Longenbach sees a parsing line as potentially demure and therefore not kinky, the mere fact that poetic lines break language into its constituent parts suggests that any kind of enjambment has a queering, kinky effect. Remember that poetic language is not meant simply to transmit information—its essence is aesthetic. Heather Yeung reminds us that poetic language “operates on a figurative level,” which makes techniques like enjambment “[animators of] the potential linguistic monotony of the poem” (Yeung 40). She also states that the “figurative level [in poetry] is often spatial and embodied” so that when enjambment occurs, it is linked and simultaneously distanced from the “‘real,’ ‘phenomenal’ world”; furthermore, these spatial ruptures can be “metapoetic: a means through which the poem becomes painfully or playfully self-conscious of its construction” (Yeung 40). Put another way, Yeung claims that poetic language is inherently not the language we use in everyday speech or the language we think normally in our minds. Instead, when it appears on the page in lines, language becomes extraordinary because its sound and look are altered and purposely highlighted for the reader to engage. Thought of with Yeung’s stance in mind, the poetic line and its effects are quintessentially queer in that their extraordinariness asks us to reimagine what it really is that language does.

When I first started writing poetry, I was convinced I had to create deeply philosophical works, that poetry was a thing purely of the mind. I obsessed over what message I could send, but I didn’t pay close attention to how I put my thoughts together, only what the result could be. It wasn’t until I had to teach students how a poem worked that I started to consider what a poem really is. More than just a thought device, a poem embellishes, explodes, and reimagines what we feel—I felt the desert wind tugging on my skin, the dust from that truck’s tires irritating my eyes as it sped away, the odd shiver in my chest as I realized what could have happened had those men stopped to chase me instead. Really, though, the most significant thing a poem can do beyond eliciting thought and feeling is shape experience by giving it a form we can view and enter. By learning to imagine lines as shaping devices we might start to more clearly see the kinds of real-world lines we use to direct ourselves and others.

Those men in that truck didn’t spontaneously know to act the way they acted—they were moved to do so by the shape the world provided for them. Whenever we are in a precarious situation, we say “we put our bodies on the line,” but maybe my body broke the line that day, maybe my presence kinked that scorched, Nevadan shape into a question. And in our poems, we reconstruct those moments and offer them up, each with our own queer pause.

Works Cited:

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology. Duke University Press, 2006.

Gabbert, Mag. “Sapphic Dream.” Poetry Daily, 4 May 2025, https://poems.com/poem/sapphic-dream/.

Longenbach, James. The Resistance to Poetry. The University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Stafford, William E. “Traveling through the Dark.” Poetry Foundation, accessed 8 July 2025, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42775/traveling-through-the-dark.

Yeung, Heather. “Toeing and Breaking the Line: On Enjambment and Caesura.” An Introduction to Poetic Form (1^st ed.), ed. Patrick Gill. Routledge, 2022, pp. 38-50, doi:10.4342/9781003244004-5.

Matthew W. Baker is a poet and professor currently living in Texas, where he is a lecturer of Creative Writing at the University of Texas at Dallas. His research focuses on aesthetics and contemporary U.S. poetry. He is also the author of the chapbook Undoing the Hide’s Taut Musculature (FLP 2019), and other work appears in Muzzle Magazine, The Southern Review, The Atlanta Review, and Booth Journal, among others.