Fragment as Form

Exploring the art of poetic disjunction

What happens when we stop asking a poem to hold itself together? When we allow the stutter, the breath, the blank space between thoughts? What if fracture is where the light enters and what slips through becomes the poem?

Let’s invite in some light ourselves and discover some of the sense in fragmentation.

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.
Leonard Cohen

#Field Notes

Dear Writers,

In disjunctive poems, meaning doesn’t unfold in a straight line. It flashes, flickers, or emerges obliquely, asking the reader to make intuitive or emotional connections.

Poetic disjunction refers to a deliberate breaking or disruption of logical, grammatical, narrative, or emotional continuity within a poem. Instead of following a linear or cohesive path, disjunctive poetry often leaps, fragments, juxtaposes, or resists easy interpretation.

It embraces rupture, contradiction, or non-sequitur—not as a flaw, but as a formal strategy to mirror the complexities of thought, memory, and experience.

For example, notice the difference between continuous poetic movement and disjunctive poetic movement:

Continuous: The poem moves smoothly. Each image, or thought grows out of the one before. It tells a story, builds an argument, or explores a feeling from start to finish.

I walked to the field / where the trees still held the storm / the wind spoke my name.

Disjunctive: A poem leaps. It interrupts itself. It fragments. Instead of clarity, it offers resonance. The reader is invited to feel the connections, not follow them.

Wind caught in the mouth of a tree. / Something missing, still / I answer.

Think, too:
Collage: Juxtaposed images or lines with little connectivity but emotional coherence
Silence: Pauses, gaps, white space that resist explanation
Intuition over logic: Dreamlike or associative path instead of argument or chronology.
Interruption: The line that shouldn’t follow but does and transforms the poem.

Fragment as theme
Fragmentation isn’t just a stylistic choice. It mirrors how we actually experience the world. Memory arrives in flashes. Emotion contradicts itself. Language fails and stutters. There are themes that pair well with nonlinear structure: memory and trauma, grief, war and displacement, longing and absence, dream logic and surrealism. The nature of the mind under pressure of certain emotional states is associative, elliptical, disordered. We don’t live in neatly ordered narratives, and our poems don’t need to either. In embracing the fragment, we acknowledge the truth of being human: that brokenness isn’t the opposite of beauty. It’s often where the most honest work begins.

Fragment as style
Fragmentation as a style refuses smoothness. It interrupts, leaves gaps, resists closure.
It asks the reader to lean in—to assemble, to wonder, to feel what isn’t said. This isn’t disarray for its own sake. It’s a structure that mirrors emotional complexity, uncertainty, and the fractured nature of perception.

There are tools available to the poet to portray those leaps. They provide assistance by look, as well as feel, of the disjunctiveness. To allow the style to mirror the intent is to cast the reader into the spectrum of associative thought and ultimately the experience itself.

Some craft considerations include:

• Syntax: Short, interrupted phrases; enjambment that suspends closure

• White Space: Strategic use of caesura, stanza breaks, and page layout

• Repetition: Refrains or motifs that resurface like echoes

• Collage and Juxtaposition: Unrelated images or thoughts side by side

• Silence: Use of gaps, dashes, and ellipses to evoke the unsaid

Practice
1. Create a fragmented elegy. Let what is missing dictate the form.
2. Begin with a “full” poem and “break” it by removing lines, words, punctuation.

Poets and books (with links to my affiliate account at Bookshop.org)
Jorie Graham, The Errancy: Graham uses syntactic interruption, spatial shifts, and disjointed logic to mirror the complexity of perception and thought.
Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God: Carson mixes fragments of memory, literary criticism, and poetic narrative. Meaning isn’t handed over; it emerges, strangely and slowly, in the gaps.
Carl Phillips, Then the War: And Selected Poems, 2007–2020: Uses interruption and fragmentation for intimacy, letting the fragments trace the complexity of thought, desire, and uncertainty as they unfold.
Jean Valentine, Door in the Mountain: Spare, elliptical, and emotionally charged, her poems unfold through silence and fragment, revealing meaning in what’s left unsaid.

Jorie Graham’s “The Errancy” (from her book The Errancy) is a poem of wandering and disruption. Its fragmentation mirrors the instability of desire, identity, and perception. Rather than resolve, it offers an experience of being lost—suggesting that errancy itself, with all its gaps and uncertainties, may be a form of insight. In this excerpt, note the leaps, the disjuncture, and the continual shifts of imagery. Read the entire poem at The Poetry Foundation.

The Errancy
          Jorie Graham

Then the cicadas again like kindling that won’t take.
The struck match of some utopia we no longer remember   
                                                   the terms of—
the rules. What was it was going to be abolished, what   
restored? Behind them the foghorn in the harbor,   
the hoarse announcements of unhurried arrivals,
the spidery virgin-shrieks of gulls, a sideways sound, a slippery   
                                                            utterly ash-free
delinquency
and then the subaqueous pasturings       inexhaustible
phosphorous handwritings the frothings of their own excitements now   
erase, depth wrestling with the current-corridors of depth 
...