Le vers orphelin

Writing engenders writing, or so it seems.

I've been seriously writing my dissertation for a few weeks now, watching one page a day become three pages a day, then watching my productivity fall back down again. It seems to come in waves. I've even written a poem or two, in between pages, as a break, or as commentary. I thought of sharing them. Then I realized that I had many to share. So I'm starting here, with one, the first one:

Le vers orphelin

An orphaned line
sits all alone
without a rhyme,
he has no home.

No coupledom,
no sense complete,
no rhythmic fun,
no bowing feet.

An orphaned line
sits all alone
between two more;
one ends, begins,

but him begun,
that thought a rhyme,
could never be
a part of one.

An orphaned line:
A scribe forgot
to put its pair
there in its spot;

no space, no room
for an addition,
just sad, alone,
full of contrition.

On a more serious note, here is what Roman Jakobson has to say about orphaned lines, and I am rather partial to his opinion:

"The metaphoric image of 'orphan lines' is a contrivance of the detached onlooker to whom the verbal art of continuous correspondences remains aesthetically alien. Orphan lines in poetry of pervasive parallels are a contradiction in terms, since whatever the status of a line, all its structure and functions are indissolubly interlaced with the near and distant verbal environment, and the task of linguistic analysis is to disclose the levels of this coaction. When seen from the inside of the parallelistic system, the supposed orphanhood, like any other componential status, turns into a network of multifarious compelling affinities." 

From: "Grammatical Parallelism and its Russian Facet," Selected Writings : Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry, p. 135)

An orphaned line, there is no such thing!
Here's to growing a "network of multifarious compelling affinities."