Free Verse vs Formalism

Some thoughts on free-verse, since I have the time (kind of).

Sorry it’s been a long while, spring break makes me lazy. I’ve been working on this poem for a few weeks now, and it’s my second attempt at free verse in a row. This one, I think, is much better though. We talked in Ed’s class several weeks ago about how free verse (good free verse, that is) is just as difficult, if not more so, than formal verse, in a very different way, because since there is no formalistic means of determining line breaks and what is contained in any visual container of meaning on the page, the writer must be 100% deliberate about every decision they make to break a line or arrange a set of lines in a certain way. There must be a reason behind everything, and a reason that works within the poem. I sorta failed at that in the first attempt after a long hiatus from free verse (the Ode to a Pottery Shard one). But this last attempt, I took several weeks on, reading then laying aside then re-reading again and attempting to shape every line deliberately.

Even though my last poem was in free verse, I think this poem was really the sign of the “reawakening” (to be dramatic about it) of a sense of free verse in myself. I wrote it initially the night after Steve Scafidi came to talk to our Contemporary American Authors class after we read his book “For Love of Common Words” (read it right now. It’s one of my new absolute favorite books of poetry). He writes a lot about the Shenandoah River, which of course I connected to immediately. But he also writes in a style that was quite unlike anything I’d come across, or anything I’d come across and taken the time and deliberation to understand. Many of his poems are long (which I also appreciated seeing, because I write really long poems usually, and not intentionally, and I like to see examples of people who do this well and don’t make them seem tedious, so I can model myself on that). Many of his poems are written as a single sentence, which first gave me the impression that they were spewed out in a single breath, giving the reader the sense of being almost breathless at the end. Of course, the mark of a good poet is to make a poem seem like it came out in one breath, when actually it was deliberated over meticulously. But then he echoed almost the same feeling I had when reading his poems when he talked to us, saying he liked poems that “took your breath away,” in a sense, like that, and poems (if I can remember his words) that seemed to move so fast that they almost burst apart. Of course, what keeps them from breaking apart is the rhythm of the stanzas and the line breaks and groupings that holds it together on the page; but I imagine an old jalopy speeding down the road working its engine so hard it almost bursts apart at its wielded seams.

I basically came home from class in a daze that night. I don’t mean to place too much emphasis on singular outside forces, like a book or a person has these mystical qualities that have the power to transform you or change something in you simply by being witnessed by you, when in reality I think most of the time the things that get stirred are changes and movements you already had going on inside you and particular things happen to sometimes prick that nerve. But anyway, I basically came home, poured wine, and wrote this until I went to sleep (instead of doing work). Then spent the next few weeks making it something I felt was perfect, free-verse-wise: nothing random, everything deliberate, everything locking and working. Of course, you’ll never get a sense that anything you write (“you” meaning “I”) is perfect, but there comes a point when you can say “Ok…I can stop.” Like you’re satiated after being starving.

But writing it made me realize a bit why I think I had been so resistant to free-verse since starting grad school and being introduced to the possibilities of formal verse. Keep in mind, everything I’ve exhalted about formalism in the past is still true: I think it can be liberating and does open up a million and one possibilities in a poem you would not have ordinarily thought of because you didn’t have to; I do think it gets at the heart of what defines poetry, its rhythms and musicalities, and writing different forms are like writing different styles of music, you can lend a whole new feeling by writing in different meter. I think it often allows us to get past the quest for Poetry (see post-semester entry I did last semester for what I’m talking about here) and simply write poetry, and allows us to see the Poetry we may have otherwise missed in our lives, by presenting it as poetry. But I think that’s where the crux of my fear of free verse developed. I loved the fact that I didn’t have to have subject matter that carried the poem with formal verse. I could write about damn near anything I wanted, and it could still be successful as a poem (as long as it wasn’t…you know…god awful subject matter, like fuzzy bunny noses being shaped like hearts or how cool the Holocaust was). With free verse, since there (seemingly) are no formal considerations with which to measure its success, what you are saying seems to have to carry that much more weight. And I never, ever, EVER, after writing a poem, have a sense that what I’m saying matters in any way, enough to make other people read it and seriously consider it. And I think most writers (artists, musicians, mimes, what have you) feel that same way. Even though you DO have to be that much more deliberate with your lines and your formatting than you do in formal verse in order to write a good free verse poem (which, frankly, a lot of people reading free verse, unless they’re trained in formal verse too, probably won’t recognize), that scary weight is still there.

So thus, in conclusion, I’m skeptical of anyone who only advocates or writes in free verse or only in formal verse. I think it’s naïve to think there’s no value in form but erudite and dusty snobbishness, and I think it’s equally naïve to think that free verse (when done well) is always going to be poorly developed and have no sense of itself and the way it reads, and to limit yourself to one or the other. I think you have to have a good grasp on formalism to have the deliberateness it takes to write free-verse. I also think it’s cowardly (and I admit, coward here) to limit yourself because of that fear of what you have to say not mattering enough to say. So that’s why I’m glad I have both. I can go to formal verse when I’m not confident about my subject matter, to give me a grid with which to explore it and open up doors in it I maybe didn’t know existed; to focus on the rhythmic and musical elements of it; to have a fantastic time solving a puzzle. I can go to free verse when I feel that is what suits the feeling of the poem the most.