One of the most notable formal aspects of William Carlos Williams's poetry is his use of enjambment. He often relies on short lines, unbroken by punctuation, that tumble into each other. They force the reader to keep reading in order to complete the thought, while processing each image separately. Like many poets before him, Williams used enjambment to build both line-to-line momentum and careful division of details. This technique also suits the unadorned voice that Williams often relied upon in his verse. This brevity and fragmentation allowed him to more accurately follow the rhythms and patterns of everyday speech. Unsurprisingly, many of the poets who commonly use this technique try to achieve a similar plainspokenness in their style.
Take, for example, Tony Hoagland's famous poem, "Jet," an ode to space travel and hometown reminiscence:
Sometimes I wish I were still out
on the back porch, drinking jet fuel
with the boys, getting louder and louder
as the empty cans drop out of our paws
like booster rockets falling back to Earth
The enjambment used here both effectively keeps the reader pulled along in the rhythm of the lines and isolates each abstract image. The metaphor ("jet fuel") and simile ("booster rockets") are more effective because they are given space to resonate with the reader, instead of being cluttered into single lines together. Similarly, the way in which the lines fall into each other better suits the poem's back-porch storytelling tone. While the details are precise, the short lines give the overall feeling of a casual speaker.
Jennifer O'Grady also employs enjambment in her poem, "Moths," although with a slightly different calibration of voice.
Adrift in the liberating, late light
of August, delicate, frivolous,
they make their way to my front porch
and flutter near the glassed-in bulb,
translucent as a thought suddenly
wondered aloud, illumining the air
that’s thick with honeysuckle and dusk.
Here, while the language is more richly descriptive, and two of the lines are end-stopped with commas, the cumulative impact is very similar to that of Hoagland's poem. The lines connect elegantly, requiring the reader to follow the progression of imagery (moths fluttering by a lightbulb). The enjambment of the lines allows O'Grady to render this scene carefully, building an accumulation of details that sticks firmly in the reader's mind. By linking these lines, O'Grady blocks off this section as an individual scene while showing the interdependence of each detail.
Famed American poet Billy Collins is extremely well known for his use of enjambment. In his poem, "Snow Day," the reader finds a similarly colloquial voice at work:
In a while, I will put on some boots
and step out like someone walking in water,
and the dog will porpoise through the drifts,
and I will shake a laden branch
sending a cold shower down on us both.
Collins's tone makes the forward motion of enjambment more visible in his continual use of the conjunction "and." Still, he gets many of the same effects as Hoagland and O'Grady. The reader is drawn into the storytelling of the stanza and sees each image ("boots," "dog," "branch") in its own space. The effect is both casual and careful. The reader follows the thread of a voice while envisioning this snowy morning in distinct pieces.
Williams, like all of the aforementioned poets, sought to use enjambment to keep his reader engaged while controlling their perception of his imagery. The seeming familiarity of his unique style was actually the result of a rigorous analysis of method. As is apparent in all of these examples, enjambment, in the hands of a masterful poet, can be utilized to draw the reader into an elegantly constructed image.
