a quick note on free verse

more inside baseball

so i was in this poetry workshop once, & in every workshop they are legally obligated to teach you how to write a sestina, i think because otherwise they get anxious about whether they have taught you anything in particular at all. so i was getting taught for like the third time how to write a sestina & starting to get suspicious of the whole endeavor. the professor talked a lot about—all writing professors teaching students fixed forms always really hammer on this, i was noticing that too—how we shouldn’t get frustrated writing in form because constraints are generative & would help us produce phrases etc we wouldn’t come up with otherwise, & we could always revise into free verse if the form didn’t work.

when we turned in our poetry that week, one girl had written a sestina that was formally perfect except that she had neglected to put one of her refrain words in her envoi. which is to say, one tiny little flaw in the long, complex sestina form right towards the end. the professor was like “this sestina is great but we need to figure out a way to work in that last refrain word into the envoi” & was like brainstorming ways to do it & do you know what the student said?

she was like “this isn’t a sestina. this is free verse. you said that if we couldn’t make the form work we could use what we wrote as free verse”

the professor was like struggling to explain to her the difference between reworking stuff you wrote for formal poetry into free verse, & just taking what was clearly an unsuccessful attempt at a fixed form & calling it free verse, & i feel that the student’s failure or refusal to understand this showed a severe lack of taste. but anyway this kind of speaks to something i see in general when reading free verse

idk if you’ve heard but human beings really like to do pattern recognition. when someone reads a poem for the first time they are usually looking at least on one level for the rules that the poem is following. the reader doesn’t have to be a literary critic for this to be true, at the very leasthey will be paying attention to like whether it rhymes. & free verse isn’t free (this is something else they have to say in every poetry workshop i’m pretty sure), even if the poem is just words & line breaks put down completely at random, there will be places where the poem appears to be generating/following some rules, & then usually places where those rules begin to break down—unless, of course, those rules are generated towards the end of the poem

i’m not sure how well i’m going to express this next bit but basically i think you can see how this means that free verse pretty much has to either tighten up formally or loosen up formally over the course of the poem

when a free verse poem loosens up formally as it goes:

• there can be a sense that the poet couldn’t follow through on making the rules work

• there’s a sense of losing something

• there’s a sense of entropy

when a free verse poem tightens up formally as it goes:

• there can be a sense of the poem finding out what it’s about or how it works

• there’s a sense of finding something

• there’s a sense of order

this doesn’t mean that a poem should always tighten up formally, there are lots of situations where a sense of loss/entropy/increasing looseness can make sense. but in general i do think that it’s more pleasing when it tightens up formally

dunt: a poem for a dried up river by alice oswald is an example of a poem that seems to loosen up, rightfully i think & it works

sea grapes by derek walcott is a poem that tightens up. specifically, the end rhymes get tighter & closer as the poem goes on; also the earlier lines are kind of random rhythmically, while towards the end the lines get closer & closer to iambic pentameter til the last line is pretty perfect