catching up with line

A couple days ago I began talking about Silliman's idea of line, a definition I find rather ... mm ... elemental? He seems to be talking about a principle antecedent to line. He says, "The line is literally what enables positionality within a word & the positionality of words within any statement."

I'm one who defines poetry as "language as art" and art as "made thing" or even maybe "noticed thing" ... So it's not like I'm gonna get all hot about how I think what Mr Silliman is talking about doesn't have much to do with line. In the def of poetry to which I just referred where does rhyme or scansion come in? Line breaks? Concision? You don't even get to that stuff from "a thing made of language" or, even more distantly, "a language-specific object someone notices."

But let me say that I don't think the definitions of poetry and art that I offer are particularly useful, certainly not when applied to a particular poem or object of art. I mean, say you point at a thing and say, "Fits the def. It's a poem." What then?

Suppose you look at a piece of language and say, "It has line. After all, of what can you speak that has no 'positionality'? When encountering the object I see that the pieces of which it consists are in an order, an order that does not rapidly and arbitrarily/randomly change. Let's say the object is made of language. Thus we look at the thing, see that it has a position, an order, and is made of language. It has line." What then?

"In oral literature," Mr Silliman says, "the line is most audible through the evidence of devices such as rhyme, which demarcate units & break a long tale down into measurable (and memorable) segments." This idea of line seems to me to offer tools for dealing with the object. One could ask, "Does the line marshal devices, such as rhyme? Are the segments memorable?" At this point I have to ask, why aren't the segments lines? It seems to me more useful to reserve the term line for these segments and to use some other term to refer to "positionality within a word & the positionality of words within any statement." Syntax? That might do for "the positionality of words within any statement". For "positionality within a word"?