Word: caesura
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Lerner’s dynamic use of punctuation gives an added shape to his sequences. His lines are almost always broken by a caesura, dramatically moderating the flow of his verse. “It cannot save us. But it can remind us / Survival is a butcher’s goal. All hands / To the pathos. Let the credits,” he writes. The poet explains that this is “a structure of feeling / Broken by hand.” Alternatively, Lerner also often leaves out punctuation, leaving sentences unfinished, imitating the rhythm of real conversations...
...demands of the world, I had the opportunity to be the aware sentient being I knew myself to be ... As they slowly built the igloo up on an ever-decreasing circumference, I watched with a sense of the anti-material oppositeness of the thing ... Without so much as the caesura of a drawn breath I was first shouting in joy, then screaming in shock ... I had discovered in myself the double personality engendered by school: the good attentive boy in class, the raucous, unsprung Dionysian in the schoolyard at recess...
...involve constant compromises between sense and sound, between the literal meanings of the original words and the unique music to which they were set. The Anglo-Saxon idiom of Beowulf sounds particularly alien to modern ears: four stresses per line, separated in the middle by a strong pause, or caesura, with the third stress in each line alliterating with one or both of the first two. Heaney follows these rules to the letter in such lines as "No one could miss their murderous feuding" or "The shepherd of people was sheared of his life." But he also regularly works supple...
...lose their edges in the diffused light that seeps through the windows like radiation and gives the picture its instant-nostalgia look. Important lines of dialogue will be muffled by heavy footsteps or a piano's plaint. The crucial event of the Robedaux family occurs offscreen, in a narrative caesura between the film's two "acts." Watching this film is like going on a diet: it is probably healthy for you but not very nourishing...
...imagination. She was a graceful colorist, seldom candied or sentimental, and never coarse. In those blue-gray distances of field and forest, punctuated by the silhouette of a horse (the creature's profile cut like a weather vane, as though by shears) or the bright red caesura of a barn, one sees the equivalent of perfect natural pitch in singers: an instinctive truth of tone, the mark of a born painter. At her best, she makes nearly every American "primitive" who has appeared since her death look postcardy; her own nostalgia, however tempered by cuteness now and then...