Free Verse: My Love In Her Wild Magnificence

Hello again sweet Toads and Toad friends. Fireblossom here. I know that some of you were convinced that I had gone off my nut and abandoned everything I believe in, yesterday, when I set before you a form challenge. Here is my sinister reason: I knew that, today, I would be talking about My Love, also known as free verse. 

Consider the wolf pack on the hunt. I think they would make fine free verse poets, and here's why. They don't run in strict military formation by any means, but neither do they just dash pell mell in all directions without purpose. They are focused and organized, but they are not show horses bound to a fixed program. They run like hell, working together as if their lives depend upon it, which they do. As I said, they would make fine free verse poets!

Let's start by talking about what free verse is NOT. First of all, free verse is NOT prose. Prose is defined in Webster's dictionary as "ordinary writing; not poetry".
So, therefore, simply breaking ordinary writing down into lines does not make it free verse, or poetry at all. 

I went to the store and 
bought eggs, 
then 
I got on the bus and went home 
where I 
made a cup of tea and 
dozed off.

Looks like a poem, doesn't it? It's not, though. It's ordinary writing. A simple test is to remove the line breaks and look at it like this:

I went to the store and bought eggs, then I got on the bus and went home where I made a cup of tea and dozed off.

It's obvious now, isn't it? NOT poetry. All right, let's try this trick again, but this time we'll turn it around. I'll start with ordinary prose:

As a child, i felt invisible to my family, which left me restless, agitated, and feeling as if I'd like to get up and scream to make them notice me. I never did, though. I stayed quiet.

That's fine as prose, but not as poetry. Now, let's see how this same feeling is conveyed by poet Gregory Corso in this section from his poem "This Was My Meal":

I turned to my father,
and he ate my birthday
I drank my milk and saw trees outrun themselves
valleys outdo themselves
and no mountain stood a chance of not walking

Desert came in the spindly hands of stepmother
I wanted to drop fire-engines from my mouth!
But in ran the moonlight and grabbed the prunes.

Mark Twain said that the difference between the right word and almost the right word, is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. The poetic image and the fresh phrase are two crucial differences between ordinary writing and free verse poetry.

Here's another example. "You're only as old as you feel" and "Do your own thing" are bumper stickers, cliches, greeting card pap. In the hands of Alta, in this excerpt from her poem "i don't know how to play, either", it sounds fresh, like this:

let's frolic, dear friend
tho we're 30 & bitter
& our faces attest to our pain.
let's dance without music
and laugh without reason;
to hell with the circus they gave us."

It can be scary to read something really well done and then wonder, "How can I do that?" One trick is to write down the thought you want to write about, in plain language, first. Then ask yourself, how can I set a match to these words and make them burn brighter? 

Another thing that distinguishes free verse, and any poetry, from ordinary writing, is the use of metaphor. Consider Charles Simic's poem "Fear":

Fear passes from man to man
Unknowing,

As one leaf passes its shudder
To another.

All at once the whole tree is trembling
And there is no sign of the wind.

He isn't talking about a tree, or leaves, or wind, not really. And yet, by use of these metaphors, he says more about how fear spreads than he could have with any prose.

Now, let's delve into the free verse toy box, where we will find gadgets and gizmos that lend themselves to free verse better than to any other form. Here is a short piece by Michael Curley, which would seem, at first glance, to be "ordinary writing." It isn't, though. In the space of four lines, he paints a portrait of a type of woman we all know and have encountered, and knocks over the pleasant facade to reveal something more. This is called "Night School Ladies".

Aging housewives pour over a textbook for one course
ruining averages, boring people with their banter,
and pictures of their grown children who are
always doing well.

Brevity, they say, is the soul of wit, and concision can be the soul of fine free verse. Here is another by Michael Curley, entitled "A Teacher's Response To Creativity":

E = MC2    PLEASE SHOW YOUR WORK!!

One line, two sentences, and yet it speaks volumes. Free verse also lends itself to the Rant, and can go on for some while without losing its power. A prime example of this is Allen Ginsberg's famous poem "Howl" from which I give you an excerpt here:

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!

"Howl" runs to some eleven pages, and far from tiring the reader, it gathers force throughout, slamming aside the complacency of the 1950s in a mighty steamroller of outrage. Got something you feel passionate about? Let it rip. Free verse can accommodate this kind of fury and emotion.

Free verse can be written in lines which are dense or spare, gentle or manic, and can take almost any form in terms of stanzas, punctuation, or premise. The thing to remember is, never let it be ordinary. Never write poetry in dull language. Keep writing and changing and experimenting and challenging yourself until you have something with the power and surprising newness of the best free verse.

I'll leave you with a section from Judy Grahn's "A Woman Is Talking To Death." I love how she packs this with so much of what really matters, and twists what we expect into something more:

4. A Mock Interrogation

Have you ever held hands with a woman?

Yes, many times--women about to deliver,women about to have breasts removed, miscarriages, women having epileptic fits, having asthsma, cancer, women having breast bone marrow sucked out of them by nervous or indifferent interns, women with heart condition, who were vomiting, overdosed, depressed, drunk, lonely to the point of extinction; women who had been run over, beaten up. deserted. starved. women who had been bitten by rats; and women who were happy, who were celebrating, who were dancing with me in large circles or alone, women who were climbing mountains or up and down walls, or trucks or roofs and needed a boost up, or I did; women who simply wanted to hold my hand because they liked me, some women who wanted to hold my hand because they liked me better than anyone.

Thanks for letting me talk about free verse! I will include a linky in case anyone would like to link their free verse poem. Today, it does not have to be a new poem, though it would be cool if it were; it simply has to be free verse, and to incorporate some of what has been discussed here in this article. I look forward to reading. 





 
  

What is so great about Romantic Poetry?

Odes, sonnets, lyrical ballads and epics... and the ‘Big Six’: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats: should they be relegated to the dusty tomes on forgotten library shelves, or can Post Post-Modern poets learn anything by blowing the dust from their pages?


Romanticism, as a philosophy and literary movement, made its appearance in the late 1700s and predominated in the first half of the 19th Century. In many ways, it can be viewed as a revolution of consciousness, born from the age of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. There was a breaking away from the formality of classical poetry, in style and diction, and a renewal of pastoral themes in response to the increasing urbanization, which was to dominate the Western world in the 20th Century. Most importantly, they flung the windows wide on imagination.


William Blake could see a world in a grain of sand; in his hand a flower would open into eternity. He believed that reality is imagination, and knowledge is simply a tool and that one should look through the eye, not with the eye. Blake saw that there was something in the human race which was indestructible, and championed human rights against exploitation, as seen in The Chimney Sweeper.

A little black thing among the snow:
Crying weep,weep, in notes of woe!
Where are thy father & mother? say?
They are both gone up to church to pray.


Because I was happy upon the heath,
And smil’d among the winters snow:
They clothed me in clothes of death,
And taught me to sing the notes of woe.


And because I am happy, & dance & sing,
They think they have done me no injury:
And are gone to praise God & his Priest & King
Who make up a heaven of our misery.


In the age of Napoleonic expansion through aggression, William Wordsworth believed that an extension of self was possible through individual imagination, allowing expansion of perception without the necessity of violence. In a simple lyrical poem, like The Daffodils, he brings to life the dynamic relationship between the perceiver and the perceived.

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.


Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margins of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.


The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such jocund company:
I gazed – and gazed – but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:


For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.


A very close literary friendship existed between Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose attention was more consistently focused on stripping away the ‘film of familiarity’. He preferred a free flow of thought association, trying to evade literary stereotyping. The task of the poet, he believed, was to resist the temptation of the conventional line, because an over-riding interest in structure and style, attempts to ‘build up the rhythm’ narrowed his attention to technique for its own sake, while neglecting actual experience. He had a tendency to try to escape from emotion by immersing himself in rigorous, abstract activity. In Coleridge’s hand, the texture of a poem could take on a life of its own: meaning clothed with exotic language and sensory images of enchantment, as can so clearly be seen in Kubla Khan.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers girdled round:
And here were gardens bright with sinuous rills,
Where blossomed many an incense-bearing tree;
And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchanted
As e’er a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover!


Poets, in the present age, have rid themselves of the shackles of convention, of form and technique, with results which are increasingly prosaic and unmusical. Poetry remains the art form of the written and spoken word, but so often becomes the brick-laying at the base of an ancient gothic cathedral, where deconstruction has taken the place of imagination. Freedom of creative expression is our birthright, given to us by the revolutionary poets of the Romantic Age, but they still have lessons to teach us about the process: that poetry should never be mindless, haphazard or free from social context.


What are your thoughts on this topic? Feel free to share your ideas in commentary below.

Things Salvador Dali Said

"Democratic societies are unfit for the publication of such thunderous revelations as I am in the habit of making."
Salvador Dali

Salvador Dali (1904 - 1989)

"I have Dalinian thought: the one thing the world will never have enough of is the outrageous."

                        Soft Watch at Moment of First Explosion


"Mistakes are almost always of a sacred nature. Never try to correct them. On the contrary: rationalize them, understand them thoroughly. After that, it will be possible for you to sublimate them."

                                 Galatea of the Spheres


"Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision."

                                          The Infinite Enigma


"Progressive art can assist people to learn not only about the objective forces at work in the society in which they live, but also about the intensely social character of their interior lives. Ultimately, it can propel people toward social emancipation."

             Gala Nude from Behind Looking in Invisible Mirror


"Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it."

Cadence in Free Verse

Poetry may be based on the irregular rhythmic cadence or the recurrence, with variations, of phrases, images, and syntactical patterns rather than the conventional use of meter.

Rhyme may or may not be present in free verse, but when it is, it is used with great freedom. In conventional verse, the unit is the foot, or the line; in free verse the units are larger, sometimes being paragraphs or strophes. If the free verse unit is the line, as it is in Whitman, the line is determined by qualities of rhythm and thought rather than feet or syllabic count.

Such use of cadence as a basis for poetry is very old. The poetry of the Bible, particularly in the King James Version, which attempts to approximate the Hebrew cadences, rests on cadence and parallelism. The Psalms and The Song of Solomon are noted examples of free verse.

The Bride and the Bridegroom (Song of Solomon)
9	I have compared thee, O my love,          to a company of horses in Pharaoh's chariots.
10	Thy cheeks are comely with rows of jewels,          thy neck with chains of gold.
11	We will make thee borders of gold          with studs of silver.

Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass was a major experiment in cadenced rather than metrical versification. The following lines are typical:

All truths wait in all things
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon.

Matthew Arnold sometimes used free verse, notably in Dover Beach.

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night. 

But it was the French poets of the late nineteenth century --Rimbaud, Laforgue, Viele-Griffln, and others--who, in their revolt against the tyranny of strict French versification, established the Vers libre movement, from which the name free verse comes.

In the twentieth century free verse has had widespread usage by most poets, of whom Rilke, St.-John Perse, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Carl Sandburg, and William Carlos Williams are representative. Such a list indicates the great variety of subject matter, effect and tone that is possible in free verse, and shows that it is much less a rebellion against traditional English METRICS than a modification and extension of the resources of our language.

Adapted from: Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics / Alex Preminger

Figurative Language

D.A. Powell wrote a great article on Poets.org a few years ago that breaks down the different methods and uses of figurative writing in poetry. I recommend this article to anyone that is looking for new avenues of expression in their writing, and every time I read it I get something different out of it.

The Great Figure: On Figurative Language by D.A. Powell

Enjoy.