Form in the Free Verse Poem by Adam

Form in the Free Verse Poem { by Adam Tavel presented at the 2016 Bay to Ocean Writers’ Conference March 12, 2016 Chesapeake College Wye Mills, Maryland *This Power. Point is available at http: //adamtavel. com/readings/.

Our Mission “Form in the Free Verse Poem” will challenge the notion that a successful free verse poem can be lackadaisical in its structure and appearance. We will examine a diverse array of work by poets famous and obscure to explore the formal elements in poems lacking meter and rhyme, paying particular attention to line breaks, stanza breaks, white space, symmetry, and balance. Our discussion will impart many craft techniques, which will give aspiring poets new strategies for organizing, revising, and polishing their own poems. ü ü ü All poems featured here have published within the past year. All poems featured here are relatively short. I have reviewed (and praised) all of the poets featured here for Plume.

Free Verse: A Brief History Le Vers Libre was a French movement that began in the 1880 s that concerned itself with (among other things) moving beyond conventional poetic forms. You are probably familiar with the major figures: Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and their peers. Between 1909 -1912, free verse found its way into English, which gave birth to Imagism and Modernism. Ezra Pound, that troubled genius, crystallized the sentiments of the period in some short, aphoristic essays that you can read here.

Is Free Verse ‘Free’? “No vers is libre for the man who wants to do a good job. ” --T. S. Eliot “Writing free verse is like playing tennis with the net down. ” --Robert Frost “Being an art form, verse cannot be free in the sense of having no limitations or guiding principles. ” --William Carlos Williams “The form of free verse is as binding and liberating as the form of a rondeau. ” --Donald Hall

Some Problems Emerge “Off for the War / Home from the War” from Daneen Wardrop’s Cyclorama, Fordham University Press, © 2015 ü What dictates the poetic line in this poem? ü Is there a discernable reason why some lines are indented? ü How do stanza breaks guide the voice and narrative?

Line & Stanza “Things I Haven’t Told My Father” from Zarah Catherine Moeggenberg’s To Waltz on a Pin, Little Presque Books, © 2015 ü The lines are even in length, endstopped, and colloquial in their tone. ü Each quatrain indicates a shift in chronology. ü The poem’s ending is provocative and compelling because it demands the speaker take action now that she is in a position of power.

Pause & Repetition “Jerusalem” from The Poetry of Yehuda Amichai, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, © 2015 ü Each stanza break serves as a cognitive leap, with the two blank lines serving as pregnant silence. ü Images dominate: linen, towel, kite, flag. ü Line 7 repurposes line 1 while line 4 repeats line 3, preparing us for the repetition that dominates the closing stanza.

Shape & Thrust “Wild Pear” from Greta Stoddart’s Alive O, Bloodaxe Books, © 2015 ü Concrete poems always risk gimmickry. Their language must overcome our resistance. ü The lines here reflect a staggered/staccato pace that, coupled with the heavily enjambed lines, create a dreamy recollection. ü The ending—emotionally nuanced and unexpected—earns our attention and solidifies the poem’s themes.

Pacing, Sound, & Image “A Brief History of the Human Ear” by Bruce Bond, published in Boston Review on December 2 nd, 2015 ü Couplets allow for legato pacing, especially in a poem sonically rich with alliteration. ü They also grant readers breathing room and time to process metaphoric leaps: bones of the ear, the jeweler’s watch, nature’s music. ü Consider this poem’s various binaries: stimulus and response, sound and ear, science and wonder, human and animal…

Conclusions? A poem is a linguistic, cognitive, auditory, and visual construct. We cannot cavalierly dismiss or ignore any of its dimensions. Written language—much like the humans who fashion it—usually seeks a pattern, a logic, an emotional current. Randomness invites scrutiny, turning eager readers into annoyed editors. Beware of gimmickry. Weigh cleverness against risk. Consider your reader. Respect your reader. Trust your reader. Each poem is a record of the choices a poet made or failed to make.

What We Can Glean Bleed it out first. When writing a free verse poem, we should do everything we can to silence our inner critic. The most pressing concern is capturing the gush. Follow your ear. Reading out loud is a great technique for determining our approach to the poetic line as well as the musicality of a poem. It also helps us prune, rephrase, tinker, and hone. Form follows function. The structure of a free verse poem should reflect its content. We should strive for unity. Revision is a sandbox. Go play. Save multiple versions of the same poem and experiment with structural considerations such as stanza breaks and white space until you find the right approach. Only time will tell. Whenever a poem stumps us, we need to stray and return: hours, days, weeks later. We also need trusted readers to support us, good books to inspire us, and new poems to distract us.