The craft
Free verse
Free verse is not a poem that got out of bed without getting dressed. It is verse that has declined the contract of regular metre and end-rhyme — and must therefore make every other technical choice more deliberately, or collapse into chopped prose.
What it is free from
The French vers libre and the English-language modernists (Eliot, Pound, H.D., Williams, later the Americans who followed Whitman) wanted out of the iambic rented rooms of the nineteenth century. They did not want out of rhythm, image, or argument. “Free” means: no recurring foot-count, no obligatory chime at the line-end. Everything else — diction, lineation, sound, stanza, turn — is still your job.
It is not the same as blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) or as prose poetry (which gives up the line). If you can rebreak your free-verse poem at random and lose nothing, it was prose with a nervous return key.
The line as the unit of meaning
In metrical verse the line is partly given (five iambs, and you are home). In free verse you must invent a reason for each break. Typical reasons that work:
- a breath a speaker would actually take;
- a word you want isolated in white space;
- a double meaning that exists only at the break;
- a visual shape that mimes the action (a stepped descent, a long unspooling);
- a pattern of starting-words, indentations or refrain that returns like a ghost of stanza.
I said I would not call.I called.The river, which had not been consulted,went on.
Cadence and the ghost of metre
Many strong free-verse poems hover near pentameter and then duck it. The ear, trained on Shakespeare whether it likes him or not, feels the almost. You can also build cadence from:
- repeated syntactical shapes (I came / I saw / I left the porch light on);
- lists and catalogues (Whitman, and every inventory of a kitchen after a death);
- clusters of stressed monosyllables against a run of slacks;
- anaphora, the poor poet’s rhyme.
How to revise free verse
Free verse fails in characteristic ways. Diagnose yours:
- Chopped prose. Restore it to a paragraph. If it improves, it was not a poem yet. Rebuild from the images, not from the original breaks.
- Line-breaks as drama. A break after every “and” is a soap opera. Save the gasp for a word that can take it.
- Inconsistent form. Three long couplets, then a scatter of one-word lines, then a block. Variety is good; accident is visible. Choose a stanza habit and break it once, on purpose.
- No turn. Free verse still needs a volta. Description of a walk is not a poem until the walk changes the walker, or refuses to.
If you find you are secretly writing metre, be honest and go to Rhythm and Traditional forms. The art is in choosing the contract, not in pretending you have none.