in answering Laura Carter's plea about lineation I surprised myself in boldness and presumption. sure that we all have our ways and aims, and my prosiness won't necessarily serve another poet's needs. it is good to see such a question raised tho. one sees enough poetry the lines of which are just the product of wider margins (ie everything in Poetry Chicago). I have wondered why James Merrill bothered with the trick of metre in his ouija board poem, for the import of that work did not seem to be in how he managed metre. I got sick of his slickness, would have preferred prose looping the story out than his precise cleverness within a dull form. Amy Clampitt is my favourite bad poet for she writes a stultifying prose but soups it up by making it look like poetry. in truth her poetry consists of run on sentences and every punctuation mark she could find. the lines are convention, like capitalizing the 1st line. back in my typewriter days I used to send adding machine tape thru the machine. you know, like Kerouac, but he had wider paper. I got 2 or 3 words per line. sometimes forcing the issue that way helps rearrange your thinking. voicing the work helps too. you can do such things as counting syllables or words per line, why not. one wants to feel the poet thunk about the matter, that received wisdom didn't steal the day.