Free Verse Poetry: Getting Started

In the beginning of the twentieth century, poetry had gotten bloated, according to some of the young people (Ezra Pound and Hilda Doolittle, in particular). Poets were focusing on rhyme and meter and they were adding unnecessary words in order to fill out the poetic line. Pound and H.D., as Doolittle was known, created a new aesthetic for poetry: to use only the words that were necessary in order to get the idea across, and to focus on concrete images instead of abstractions. That means if you want to talk about something abstract like love (well, usually they didn’t; they wanted to talk about other things), then you might focus on a red rose and write your poem about that. It would be metaphorically exploring the idea of love, but the words would be focused on an image of a flower. That type of poetry was called “Imagism.”

Traditionalists in the world of poetry became very upset, naturally, that modern poets had decided that poetry didn’t have to rhyme. But eventually such poetry became not just accepted, but the mainstream, particularly in among academic poets.

So, how do you get started writing a free verse poem?

One way to do it is to do a free-write about something concrete. That means thinking of a thing and allowing yourself to record your thoughts about that thing as they occur, with no censoring. It is important to do free-writing for at least five minutes because the first stuff that comes out of your brain will be just what everybody thinks about whatever your topic is. For example, I had a student do this and she wrote about the football stadium (here in Buckeye-obsessed Ohio). At first, she wrote about the band and the cheerleaders and all that. But as time went on and she had to keep writing, she found herself comparing the stadium to a cathedral, and that was where she found her poem.

Your brain will eventually move into your own personal perspective if you practice free-writing enough. Then you can find words, phrases, metaphors, and ideas to use as the basis of a free verse poem. Free-writing is a great way to start a poem, to find something you care about and to find your unique perspective on it, and then you can craft your words.