Free - Verse

1. Free - Verse Poetry

2. Free verse poetry: Free verse is poetry that doesn’t have a regular rhythm, line length, or rhyme scheme. It relies on the natural rhythms of speech. Today it is the form of poetry that most American poets prefer. Free-verse poetry invents and follows its own forms, patterns, and rules.

3. Remember the power of I First person experiences need a first person. Make sure your I is present and is thinking, feeling, seeing, acting. Give your readers someone to be with. Find your voice as a poet. Wave your I flag in your poetry.

4. Beginning a poem: Leads: Begin Inside In the words of Horace, one of the greatest lyric poets of all time (65 B.C. – 8 B.C.), begin poems “in the midst of things.” Start your poems inside an experience, feeling, observation, or memory.

5. Breaking lines and stanzas and punctuating: Free-verse poetry generally breaks its lines to emphasize the pauses a reader’s voice might make: line breaks signal the briefest of rests, breaths, or silences. Also, it’s good to recognize that most poets end their lines on strong words: nouns, verbs, and modifiers, that is, adjectives and adverbs. Pause at the point of great meaning, the end of the line. Finally, be aware of how the poem looks on the page. Poetry is the only genre in which form matters as much as content.

6. Compressing To compress means to force something into less space. Some of the power of a good poem comes from the poet’s ability to say or suggest a lot in a short space – to make sure that every word is loaded with meaning and necessary to the poem. William Coles said: “Poetry is elegant shorthand.”

7. Repetition Repetition gives writing rhythm, movement, and feeling, which provides cadence. But don’t use the same words too closely together or it sounds awkward. Effective repetition happens when a poet chooses a word or phrase that’s significant to the meaning of the poem, then uses it to deepen the meaning and move the poem. It stresses an important word, phrase, idea, or theme.

8. Figurative Language • It makes comparison between unrelated things or ideas, in order to show something about a subject. • Metaphor: the writer transfers qualities of one thing to another thing without using like or as. • Simile: compares two things using like or as. • Personification: gives human or physical qualities to an object, animal or idea.

9. Conclusions: There are two place where readers find the deepest meanings in free-verse poems. The first is a “turn”- a point in a poem where the poet moves in a new, surprising direction. The other place is the poem’s conclusion. End strongly: leave a reader thinking, maybe even trying to finish your thought. Use words that will resonate and vibrate in a reader’s mind.