Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Free verse and formal verse
The arresting poem
Short-form genres
In this chapter
· Penning formal and free verse
· Images and how you represent them
· Writing depth and urgency
· Using prosody, rhythm, and rhyming
The question of poetry’s identity as a form of creative writing used to be easier to answer. If the words rhymed and had a regular meter (a type of rhythm), they probably constituted a poem. As cliché goes, “If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and looks like a duck, it must be a duck.”
However, these days, not all poems rhyme or fit into standard forms. Moreover, poets and literary theorists alike are fond of offering musings about how important and meaningful poetry is, how it’s the true essence of our world, the oxygen that keeps us alive, etc. Some of this is interesting and inspirational, but most of it isn’t very helpful if what you’re looking for is an actual explanation of what poetry is and how to write it.
One reason why it’s so hard to get a straight answer on the subject is because people disagree about what should and shouldn’t be considered poetry.
Despite this ambiguity, there are some general differences between poetry and prose you can use as a practical means of identifying the former. In fact, the easiest way to recognize poetry is that it usually looks like poetry. (Remember what they say about ducks ….) While prose is organized with sentences and paragraphs, poetry is normally organized into lines.
Here’s part of a poem by Robert Herrick:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to-day
To-morrow will be dying.
The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,
The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
And nearer he’s to setting.
See how that kind of looks like poetry? Now here’s the same part of the poem, organized in a paragraph as if it were prose:
Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old Time is still a-flying: and this same flower that smiles to-day to-morrow will be dying. The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, the higher he’s a-getting, the sooner will his race be run, and nearer he’s to setting.
If you print a page in prose, the ends of the lines depend on where the margin is. With a bigger font size or a bigger margin, the lines are shorter. But in poetry, the poet (and sometimes an editor) decides where the lines end. This choice is an essential part of how you hear and see a poem. It affects how fast or slowly you read and where you pause when you’re reading it. It causes certain words to stand out more or less. It affects the way the poem looks to you on the page, too. For example, is there a lot of white space, which affords a feeling of lightness and air, or are the words packed solidly together?
WRITING PROMPT
Select two of your favorite poems, and render them in prose. Then make a list of how this changes their meanings and your emotional disposition toward them.
Poetry, more than prose, communicates through the way the words sound and way the poem looks on the page. Think of how music can make you feel: angry, irritable, peaceful, sad, triumphant, and so on. Poems work the same way, but instead of sound and rhythm created by instruments, they use the sound and rhythm of words. In songs with good lyrics, the melody joins with the words to create an intense feeling. Similarly, in poetry, the sound of the words works together with their meaning for more emotional impact.
The look of the poem on the page adds still another dimension. Some poems have smooth shapes; some have delicate shapes; and some have heavy, dense shapes. The breaks in the lines lead your eyes to certain areas. There are even poems with shapes that intentionally imitate what the poem is about. For example, a poem about standing beneath a waterfall could have lines that trickle down the page.
The letters and words in poems do several jobs at once. They do one thing with their meaning and another thing with their sound. Even their meaning may be working on more than one level.
An important characteristic of poetry is compression, or concentrated language. I don’t mean concentrated in the sense of paying close attention, but rather in the sense of concentrated laundry detergent, or concentrated orange juice. A half-cup of concentrated laundry detergent does the same work as a cup of regular detergent; a poem typically gets across as much meaning as a larger amount of prose. Concentrated orange juice has the water taken out; a good poem has similarly been intensified by removing the nonessential words. This is one reason why poems are often short.
Prose normally talks to the logical part of the reader’s mind. It explains and describes things; it makes sense. Poetry does all this, too, but it also tends to work at an emotional or irrational level at the same time. Often, some part of a poem seems to speak directly to the readers’ emotions. It gives readers a peaceful feeling or an eerie feeling, or it makes them want to cry, even though they might not be sure why they’re reacting that way to it. Sometimes the poet isn’t even sure, although usually—like puppet masters—they are.
WRITING PROMPT
Make a list of what emotions the following opening stanzas of Andrew Marvell’s poem, “The Definition of Love” trigger in you and in which directions they seem to travel and intersect.
My love is of a birth as rare
As ’tis for object strange and high:
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.
Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne’er have flown
But vainly flapped its tinsel wing.
One way poems function is through the use of sound. They also tend to suggest things beyond what they actually say. Often what causes the strongest emotions is not what the poem describes, but what it makes the reader imagine. Some of the parts of poems come like dreams from deep places in the mind that even the poet might not understand, and they touch something similarly deep in the reader. As ambiguous as that might sound, it’s what poets often hope for in their work.
Free verse and formal verse
Free verse and formal verse. People who write poetry generally tend to advocate one kind or the other, and tempers sometimes flare over the issue. Robert Frost declared that writing free verse was like playing tennis with the net down and wrote only one free verse poem in his 89-year life. Adrienne Rich, after writing a number of formal poems in her youth, including the memorable, oft-anthologized “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers,” moved entirely to free verse as a young adult. William Carlos Williams declared formal verse a thing of the past, unsuited to the complexities of the twentieth century.
DEFINITION
Free verse is poetry open in pattern and recognized as nonconforming and rhymeless verse. Poetry written in formal verse follows “rules” regarding stanza length and meter or rhyme patterns.
A poet friend of mine, while in graduate school, mentioned Richard Wilbur (one of the most prominent formalist poets in the United States) to a visiting poet, who responded with great anger, suggesting that a writer of sonnets, ballades, villanelles, etc. should not be considered a poet at all and should never be mentioned in the company of real poets like Williams, Rich, etc.
My friend choked back his answering anger but responded by writing and publishing vast numbers of sonnets, villanelles, sestinas, blank verse narratives, and other formalist poems—rarely producing any of the free verse he was forced to write to placate the visiting poet. He became friends with other formalist poets and went on to edit a journal of great distinction.
Here are some of the more common types of formal verse poetry:
Haiku A form of Japanese descent, consisting of three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively, and traditionally dealing with natural subjects.
Sonnet Whether in English or an Italian rhyming scheme, the form constitutes a single- or two-stanza lyric poem containing 14 lines written in iambic pentameter.
Sestina A six-line stanza followed by a three-line stanza. There is a predetermined pattern in that the same six words are repeated at the end of lines throughout the poem. The last word in the last line of one stanza becomes the last word of the first line in the next stanza. Then, rounding it off with the final three-line stanza, all six end words appear.
Villanelle and the pantoum Two forms closely related to each other, the villanelle, a nineteen-line poem, is made up of five three-line stanzas and one four-line stanza (or quatrain) at the end of the poem. Alternating between the ends of each tercet (three-line stanza), two refrains eventually end up forming the last two lines of the quatrain. The pantoum, by contrast, is comprised totally of quatrains. In each stanza, the second and fourth lines are repeated in the first and third lines of the following stanza until the final stanza, where the first line is the poem’s first and the second line is the poem’s third line.
Likewise, although often in flux, here are some of the types of free verse:
Cadence Common language rhythm is substituted for regular metrical pattern.
Free iambic verse Verse with an inconstant number of equal feet in a line (as distinguished from the varied feet in free verse). Moreover, verse lines of unequal length are combined freely. See the work of such poets as T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden.
Free verse proper A popularly used form in which the inconsistency is at the center of the poem. There’s no set metrical rhyme or patterns of meter and rhythm. Unlike traditional verse, free form is not constrained by the rules regulating syllables in stanzas.
Visual poetry Poetry written in the shape of its subject.
Other various forms of avant-garde poetry related to free verse are surrealism, concrete, and language poetry.