Free Verse

Not long ago, I was asked to write poetry for an art competition. I am, by most accounts, not a poet. My degree was in English literature and nonfiction creative writing. I last wrote poetry circa 2002.1

One may find poetry challenging because of its many rules. I find the opposite to be true. I can type out a sonnet faster than a tweet, but free verse leaves me paralyzed. My cursor blinks steadily into the distance with no footprints to follow. Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow room, yet in an open field, I lose myself.

I’m embarrassed to admit that I am a lover of rules. Free verse2 terrifies me in its disregard for authority. I have a hard enough time getting down my thoughts—how can I do it without forms to guide me, not to mention grammar, the most fundamental forms of all? When I write free verse, I speak into a void with neither beat nor echo—nothing to convince myself of my own existence. With no link to tie them together, my words fly away.

When I read free verse, I find myself wanting. The mind craves rhythm, craves tempo, if only because meters and cadences create a semblance of understanding. The flight of ideas leaves me bewildered, grasping for a line between the pathological and the divine.

For the poet, no verse is free. It comes at the price of ink spent, tongues aflame. According to some, all verse has structure; it is guided by principles; it is tasked with the creation of art. (But what is art??) Yet both its creation and consumption leave me invariably speechless, thoughtless—without rhyme or reason.

What is it that poetry frees us to do? Without a demand for coherence, I wonder if I am at liberty to be incoherent. Can I use words for their sound more than their meaning? Does sound matter at all? Do words on the page have a sound, or do we read silently, in solitude, in solidarity? “The word on the page is the mark of absence,” a professor once said. So we write ourselves into absence, over and over and over—til lips fall mute and ink runs dry and one day we find ourselves free.

  1. With the exception of the haiku presented in my previous blog post, and an 81-line continuation of David Lin’s impeccable couplet: Phail the Quail with haste set sail / to the land of sex and beans and kale. ↩

  2. The definition of free verse is enough work for a thesis, let alone a blog post… It is part of a much, much larger argument I might put forth one day, but not today. ↩

 
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