From a New York Times story by Elisa Gabbert headlined “The Lyric Decision: How Poets Figure Out What Comes Next”:

The poet Andrew Weatherhead once tweeted, “The best way to read a poem is to pretend each line is the name of a horse; so the poem is just a list of horses.” This joke says something serious about poetry. It calls attention to the line as a fundamental unit, which in some sense always stands alone — the next line could always be anything.