A caesura is a strong pause within a line. A pause. A break. A stop. An end. An occurrence.
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I’m thinking about absences a lot this month. I think that—if I have a kid someday—that means there’s an open space now where one day a new person will be. I think of the blank page, which I’m avoiding. I think about How To Do Nothing, which so far has me taking a step away from social media and a step towards cross-stitching aimlessly without watching enough tutorials. I’m working on a strawberry. I don’t think I’m making the X’s quite right.
Cancer, So Far by Elizabeth Crowell, is slowing me down:
“My wife and I spend more time alone together than we have in years. I tell her I am sorry about this, for what we had imagined about raising our children and growing old together. She says none of this is my fault. We have some version of this conversation every day, though each of us knows it makes no sense. We recognize that these words are just cover for the wordless scream searing through each of us as we consider what it means to lose a life—or lose a love; about what it means to have an absence—or be an absence.”
I guess slowing down is an act of resistance. I guess letting the air muddle around my ears, going outside in the morning and standing still enough to hear birds, not looking at the clock before bed, putting down the fork between bites, are all ways of slowing the fuck down.
Of creating space.
I guess that’s what ‘cesura’ is.
Here are 6 different definitions of cesura:
A caesura is a strong pause within a line, usually alongside enjambment.
It refers to a break in a line of poetry, where the reader takes a pause, usually marked by some form of punctuation such as a period, comma, ellipsis, or dash.
A caesura is defined as a natural phrase end, especially when occurring in the middle of a line.
A caesura is a pause in a line that is formed by the rhythms of natural speech rather than meter.
A caesura will usually occur in the middle of a line of poetry but can occur at the beginning or the end of a line.
A stop or pause in a metrical line, often marked by punctuation or by a grammatical boundary, such as a phrase or clause.
A pause. A break. An end. A stop. An occurrence.
In Diana' Nguyen’s “Triptych,” she explores the white space created by her brother, who cut himself out of all the family photographs before dying of suicide. She explores a palpable, sharp-edged absence in these poems. There’s a sharp clipping where space is created—something like a cesura, something like a breaking, an ending, a pause—a new created space. A hurting one.
So cesura.
So learning how to do nothing.
So finding space to pause, to break, to end.
So creating space—organically, rhythmically, or by design.
I think cesura is about listening.
About breath.
About hearing better—because of that silence—what’s next.