Blank Verse Versus Free Verse

Have you ever met a person who reminds you of someone else? The two may look alike or express themselves with similar gestures, but after you get to know them, you might see they’re not alike at all. The primary characteristic you first noticed may be the only one they share. That's how it is with blank verse versus free. People often confuse the two, thinking they’re the same although they have little in common – with one big exception:

Neither blank verse nor free verse has regular end-line rhyme.

The following might help to clarify:

• Free Verse is free of all preconceived patterns or fixed forms. 

Free verse often has no rhymes whatsoever, but it’s just as likely to have true and/or slant rhymes tucked less conspicuously into its lines. Notice, for example, the true rhyming pair receive/believe in the poem “After Shock” and the slant rhymes thicket/wet and guarding/Garden. If you read aloud the poem (derived from the biblical book of Genesis), you’ll also hear sound echoes of resonating vowels and repeated consonants.

After Shock

When we awoke, we found ourselves

in a thicket of trees, the man called a forest –

our eyes too wet to see.

The boys had disappeared,

most likely exploring,

but the flaming torches

guarding the Garden had long

been leafed from sight.

Is this called sorrow?

Are we banished from God

forever?

Oh, why did we agree to receive

more than our Maker had made?

How could we believe that sliver

of truth in a slithering serpent?

by MaryHarwell Sayler from poetry book, Lost in Faith, ©2017

Free verse follows its own unique shape. It has the freedom to freely use or not use rhyme, rhythm, or meter – unless any of those features falls into a regular pattern.

Metaphorically speaking, free verse is a stream flowing freely within interesting, irregular, and sometimes surprising boundaries. Conversely:

• Blank Verse is rhythmic poetry blank of end-line rhymes.

In blank verse, the lines do not end in rhyming pairs even though the form is “traditional verse,” which usually does have a rhyming pattern. However, blank verse most often follows tradition with a sonnet structure of 14 rhythmic lines.

Figuratively speaking, blank verse is like a drinking glass used for tiny sips of water but appropriate for large gulps too. In classical English literature,  blank verse has occasionally been the medium for epic poems or plays, generally confining itself to metered verse set in iambic pentameter such as loosely shown here in sonnet length:

Blank Verse on a Blackboard

School children leaning over the flat world

of their desks symbolize tomorrow. How

will the chin lift, the back straighten, the eyes

refocus in time to come around in time

for the circle’s revolution from straight line

into that ongoing entity of spin and spin? 

We sat still once to become conversant

in the past’s apparent presence in pyramids, 

ancient cultures, and Babel's complex

structure – tortuous and convoluted, like

fault lines in the earth where quakes occur

below a city built to outlast blasts of when.

Who knows what we can learn from turning

pages – poured over, revised, and read again?

by MaryHarwell Sayler from the poetry book, Faces in a Crowd, ©2016

As you experiment with blank verse and free verse writing, you might discover you want the predictable, reserved blank verse for everyday company, while enjoying the spontaneity of free verse to help your writing flow, freely, into new terrain.

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Note: The above post primarily came from the Christian Poet’s Guide to Writing Poetry e-book. For more information about blank verse and free verse, you can also type the topic of your choice into the Search box on this blog page to find related discussions.

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Happy Birthday Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman would be 199 today if he were alive, yet he's still going strong. Considered to be one of the all-time “greats” in American poetry, Walt self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 with only a dozen poems! Over the years, however, he added to the collection, continuing also to publish each edition of the book himself.

Those poems and others have been republished along with his prose in the book shown below, providing a comprehensive look at his work, which has subsequently been published by numerous presses over the years, no doubt contributing to the belief that poets become more famous after their deaths! The question, though, is why. Why do people - including those who seldom read poetry - keep on buying and reading Walt’s books?

From the start, the poet's perennially favored poems drew readers because of their generosity of line and spirit.

In a time when most poets still wrote in traditional metered forms and perhaps even tried to outdo each other with wit and word plays, Walt’s loosened lines sprawled across the page in a new formless form, akin to conversation.

More important, the contents included, acknowledged, and empathized with almost everyone, leaving readers with the assurance of being seen.

This generosity of spirit and inclusiveness speaks to us especially in a time when mean-spiritedness, prejudice, and social exclusiveness seem to prevail.

As poets and people, we have much to learn from Walt. For those of us who are uptight or write tight, his poetry can show us how to loosen up!

In the following, however, I wrote a prose poem aka concise paragraph poem after seeing a man who reminded me of photos of Walt.

Leaving Walt at the Mall

Coming out of Dunkin’ Donut, I walked right by
Walt Whitman without even speaking. You know
how he likes to include everyone in a conversation
and so can go on a bit, but I just wanted to get
home before my caffeine let down. Later I felt
bad about giving him nothing more than a nod,
especially since I’m sure his driver’s license
expired long ago. He’s been gone for over 100
years now and was almost that old when he died,
so I could have at least offered him a ride some-
where, but he might not have liked being confined
to this little boxcar of a poem.

by Mary Harwell Sayler


Whitman: poetry and prose, hardback



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Every poem doesn’t have to rhyme!

When I first began writing poems, they inevitably rhymed and bounced to their own rhythm. Most poets can probably say the same, and that’s fine! Rhythmic and rhyming lines work wonderfully well for humorous verse, nursery rhymes, and greeting card verse.

If, however, you want your poems to have a literary tone or quality, you and your rhymes may need to break up for a while! You won’t be saying goodbye forever, but when you return to rhyming, you’ll have a purpose and appropriate form.

Since haiku has been perennially popular for centuries, it makes a good place to start weaning yourself from rhymes. The brevity of its three lines and picturesque scenes from nature provide an excellent exercise in areas far more important to poetry than rhyme, for example:

• Being concise (aka “writing tight.”)

• Being highly observant (i.e., noticing – really noticing what you see and sense.)

• Using fresh comparisons of This with That (to SHOW, rather than TELL.)

To make a clean break with rhyme, consider writing prose poems, which focus on insights, thoughts, feelings, or even a mini-story, rather than rhyme.

Also, consider writing free verse, which relies heavily on the way in which you arrange and rearrange your line breaks.

As long as your free verse stays FREE of any pattern, including a rhyme scheme), the poems might scatter rhymes internally, rather than end-line, but they’re more apt to use sound echoes – word pairs that echo off of one another, creating audial interest.

Once you’ve spent some time with these alternatives to rhyme, learn how to scan a poem, which is much easier than it sounded in high school! (You can do it!)

Then, you have the tools you need to write rhyming poetry in such traditional patterns as the sonnet and villanelle. Writing in these classical forms not only gives you a strong sense of satisfaction in your work, it can elevate your level of poetry-writing into literary realms. There, you’ll be more apt to find poetry journals and anthologies waiting for your poems to fill their hungry pages.


Mary Harwell Sayler, ©2017, poet-author of Living in the Nature Poem, Outside Eden, Beach Songs & Wood Chimes (for children), Faces in a Crowd, PRAISE! and Kindle e-books on poetry

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The new release of Observations by Marianne Moore

In the new release of Observations, which publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux kindly sent me to review, the poems of Marianne Moore have been restored to their original appearance.

After the book first came out in 1924, the poems were so well received that Moore became the second recipient to receive the highly prized Dial Award, won previously by T.S. Eliot. Nevertheless, Moore later omitted at least a dozen of the poems in subsequent collections of her work and radically revised some of the poems that remained.

As the “Introduction by Linda Leavell” reminds us, Marianne Moore “was the first major poet to appropriate for poetry the language of textbooks and commerce.” Occasionally, her poems even included quotations from ads or from comments she had overheard!

Equally innovative were the syllabic patterns Moore set for herself, which, as Linda Leavell tells us, “are most easily seen in ‘The Fish,’ where each stanza contains six lines of 1-3-8-1-6-9 syllables each, and the rhyme scheme is aaxbbx. The title, as is often the case with Moore, serves as first line.”

Such titles as “Bowls,” “Novices,” and “The Octopus” also act as the opening lines to their respective poems, but, unexpectedly, that octopus consists “of ice. Deceptively reserved and flat” and lying “beneath a sea of shifting snow dunes” in a long poem whose lines sprawl and retract like their namesake.

Other titles bear note, too, not for their brevity or line placement but their quirkiness, for example: “Is Your Town Nineveh?” “An Egyptian Pulled Glass Bottle in the Shape of a Fish,” “To a Steam Roller,” “Diligence Is to Magic as Progress Is to Flight,” or “Nothing Will Cure the Sick Lion but to Eat an Ape.”

Notable, too, among the poet’s many experiments and innovations are the Moore-made patterns she set for herself in writing syllabic verse with such odd line breaks that readers might miss the sound echoes and rhymes unless they read the poems aloud.

Anyone who has read Moore’s poetry has likely noticed her experiments in forms and free verse, but the contents of the unusual lines bring to light a poet who challenges the status quo, for instance, in “Roses Only” when the poet tells the flower often memorialized in poetry, “You do not seem to realize that beauty is a liability….”

Or, when the poet writes about “Poetry,” the 1924 version begins, “I too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle./ Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one/ discovers that there is in/ it after all, a place for the genuine.” Moore aimed to show that genuine while disdaining the obtuse poetry in and out of vogue during her lifetime. In 1925, her heavily revised version of “Poetry” tells us:

“I too, dislike it:
there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
The bat, upside down; the elephant pushing,
a tireless wolf under a tree,
the base-ball fan, the statistician –
'business documents and schoolbooks' _
these phenomena are pleasing,
but when they have been fashioned
into that which is unknowable,
we are not entertained.
It may be said of all of us
the we do not admire what we cannot understand;
enigmas are not poetry.”

Those of us who remember Ms. Moore sweeping onstage in her floppy hats and outgoing personality know how entertaining she could be, chatting with Jack Parr on The Tonight Show, but apparently that image of her as poet lingered too. Years later, at my high school reunion, a friend asked if I'm still writing, and when I answered, "Yes, poetry," he said, "Then, why don't you dress like a poet?" Why, indeed.

Review by poet-author Mary Harwell Sayler, © 2016


Marianne Moore Observations, Poems, paperback



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Writing paragraph poems or prose poetry

Confined to little brick-like blocks of text, prose poems offer about as much visual appeal as a business letter. When it comes to writing them, though, prose poetry often allows more freedom than free verse. For instance, you don’t have to decide where to break every single line to the best effect since the unadorned form of a paragraph acts like a shoe box where you can drop in almost anything.

Since you do not have to count feet, syllables, and lines or count on rhymes, prose poems also come with less stress than traditional patterns of poetry.

To give you an example, here’s my first attempt that placed in a 2011 issue of The Prose-Poetry Project! and was later included in my book, Living in the Nature Poem.

Hapless Holiday

I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I can shut the door you bolted on the other side. Keeping out weather is one thing, raccoons another, although I know there's nothing below the kitchen sink they might find appealing – blackened banana peels, black coffee grounds, and those eggshells I keep on breaking as I walk.

© 2011, Mary Harwell Sayler

As you try your hand at writing prose poetry or paragraph poems, experiment with these devices:

• Write all around an image, insight, or event – real or surreal.

• Let the poem flow in a stream-of- consciousness.

• Create a verbal collage of almost anything – from dreams and diaries to factual data, stories, episodes, or headlines in the news.

• Use juxtaposition to startle your readers, or ask a timely question to ignite thought.

• Sprinkle in a little alliteration.

• Add wordplays, humor, or a rhythmic beat.

Prose poems usually come across as intimate, fresh, honest, and, sometimes, bizarre – like real people in real life! And here’s a bonus:

Prose poems depend on the same blocks of paragraphs you use for regular writing, so regular, non-poet people often come to prose poetry unaware and unscared! They just start reading, not realizing it’s a poem until poetic aspects surface as, hopefully, they'll do.

Writing the Prose Poem

Is this better or this, my right eye asks, sharpening the focus on the left and shifting the view toward the proverbial third eye centered in the forehead where more depth and better balance can be found by considering two differing perspectives. Rational thought and rumors of romance dance in lines and squiggles, circling and circling like squirrels ready to mate or preying partners ready to consume almost anything. Oh, who knows which way a poem will go?

© 2015, Mary Harwell Sayler, all rights reserved. This post is a revision of Mary’s earlier article posted on 2011/01/18 but with the addition of two examples of prose poems from her book Living in the Nature Poem, published in 2012 by environmental publisher Hiraeth Press.

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Line breaks can make or break your poem

Whether you write free verse, prose poems, traditionally patterned poetry, or experimental verse, the artistry often comes with such poetic techniques as musicality, sound echoes, internal rhyme, insight, imagery, or unusual juxtaposition (comparisons, contrasts, or even weird positioning) of thoughts and pictures.

Since all types and forms of poetry need at least one or more poetic traits, they could all sound or look alike except for one big difference:

The dividing line comes in dividing lines.

As you write prose poems, for example, you divide the lines into blocks of paragraphs that look like those you normally use in writing articles, stories, books, and business letters.

As you write and scan traditional metered verse, you extend each line only as far as your choice of patterns will allow. For instance, if you write in the classical English pattern of iambic pentameter, each line scans into five feet of iambs, which, hopefully, we’ll talk about again in upcoming articles. Or, if you choose to write syllabic poetry such as haiku, you count the syllables to determine where to break each line.

And then there’s free verse.

Poets often assume that free verse is the easiest type of poetry to write since they think they can do anything they want. However, freedom comes in being free, not of poetic techniques, but of the constraints, predictability, regularity, and consistency found in counting a predetermined number of syllables, beats, or metric feet per line.

Free verse is free of pattern.

Free verse is free of refrain.

Free verse wears no uniform.

For instance, you can scatter rhymes into free verse unless those sounds start to get predictable, which means the poem has lost its freedom from a set pattern or routine.

The freedom of writing free verse comes in freely breaking lines.

Unfortunately, this freedom can also bring indecision. Choices! Choices! Where do you break each line? What look will your new poem wear? Will you go for long lines? short lines? tabbed over lines? dropped down lines? Or, will you go, not for how your poem looks, but how it sounds? Or, as yet another option, will you break lines into fragments of thought to generate mystery, shock, emphasis, or surprise?

Regardless of your goal or deciding factor, each line break needs to lend a poetic feel or quality to the poem, which brings us back to an ongoing motto:

Read each poem and each revision aloud.

Listen carefully to the effect of each word, phrase, pause, and line break. Then revise the poem until you get the effect you want.

Usually, your poetic ear will let you know what works and what does not. The last time we talked, though, I gave an example of lines broken by similarities seen in syllables noticed by the eye or mind. In the following poem, the line breaks show a choice to emphasize connotations or layers of meaning that accompanied some of the words.

Since the setting for this poem includes the uncertainties of war in general and the concerns of a World War II soldier in particular, I also wanted the line breaks to help build drama appropriate to the scene but without becoming overly dramatic, maudlin, or sentimental. The latter especially concerned me since I wrote the poem from the “I” of my father’s perspective, basing thoughts and feelings on his WWII letters – letters, which I never read until decades later, not too long after his death.

Night Flying in Uneven Lines
by Mary Harwell Sayler

Everywhere the night explodes
in darkness –
blank and black
like a deep hole cut
to accommodate a casket.

Some nights before a mission,
sleep exhumes me,
draws me
from disarming
visions: relics,
recollections, and what still
remains.




(c) 2011, Mary Harwell Sayler. Other poems from the Winning the Wars chapbook have been included on the International War Veterans Poetry website.

Breaking line with free verse

Last time we talked about how, in some ways, prose poems have more freedom than free verse since they act like little shoe boxes that let you freely drop in anything you want – from mental snapshots to contrasting thoughts that seem to have nothing to do with one another. When it comes to form, though, prose poems confine themselves to those same blocks of paragraphs that you use to write fiction and nonfiction, whereas free verse gives you the freedom to break the lines wherever you want.

The problem comes in knowing where you want to break a line and, more importantly, why.

Like prose poems, traditionally metered poetry and also syllabic verse have their own unique forms that keep them in line, but free verse gives poets so much freedom that they sometimes trip over the lines or choices. So, what’s the solution? What's a poet to do?

Experiment.

Play!

Break lines at the end of a phrase, in the middle of a phrase, or even in the middle of a word. For example:

Suspended Belief

I thought I had upgiven childhood fan-
tasies: toys from San-
ta Claus, bunny baskets, and monstrous mounds of can-
dy on All Saints Hallowed Eve.

But sipping my morning cup of Columbian
coffee with Christmas-like pleasure, I saw a man
named Juan
and his nameless donkey, bean-laden, on TV,
and I believed.

I believed in the goodness of coffee
for those who grow and pick and drink.

I believed in the kind-eyed man
and his mule – actors both,
bean-dropping on my reality.

And God?
Such belief comes so much harder than
the coffee man's assuring nod.

The One I cannot seem to see
is not so easy to believe,
and, therefore, as I live and deeply breathe,

I believe.


Mary Harwell Sayler
[Poem originally published in the now defunct Writer To Writer magazine and later in my chapbook, Speaking Peach, available through this site.]


As you probably noticed, those lines break with each “an” then “e” sound, which technically speaking, takes the poem out of the free verse realm for a while as it follows a particular pattern before, again, breaking free. Regardless, the broken pattern seemed to fit the theme of enduring faith despite the lack of logic, and, initially anyway, the lines got broken with broken words.

Does this set a pattern for you too? Not really, except to encourage you to play with something that first seems radical or even silly to see what effect you get. If the world’s weirdest line breaks work for you and the poem, great! If not, try something else, and let your ear be your final judge.

Read every poem aloud, allowing the tiny pause suggested by the end of each line break.

Listen carefully to the overall effect.

Do you like it? If not, revise until you do. With free verse, your poems have at least as many options as they have words!

To expand your options as a poet, look for upcoming articles here on traditional poetry and syllabic verse. If you have not yet studied the wealth of poetic techniques and forms available to you, check out the e-book version of the poetry home study course I wrote and used for years in working with students. The poetry dictionary for kids is fun and helpful for all ages too.



(c) 2011, Mary Harwell Sayler

What kind of poems fit you?

Before you wear yourself out with a poetic style you don’t even like, consider the types of poetry you want to wear for reading. Is this the kind of poem you would like to put on or show off or quietly carry over your shoulder like a shawl?

Do you look good in colorful images?

Do you like to put on your dancing shoes of rhyme or regular rhyme?

Can you pull off wearing bling in flashy patterns of in end-line rhymes?

Do you prefer to tone down your poems by scattering rhyme freely into free verse, but not in predictable patterns?

If you’re more concerned about content, rather than a stylish form, tailor that preference to yourself, wearing either free verse or traditional metered poetry such as the sonnet, villanelle, or sestina. It just depends on what appeals to you. So whatever you want to wear, be sure the poetic style fits you.

Regardless of your shape or size, putting on an appealing poem might begin with a foundation of firm but willowy lines or with an artificial yet artistic means of getting those natural lines into a traditionally pleasing shape. Various schools of poetry may disagree, but either way works. So if you’re a highly gifted poet with a natural eye or ear for poetry, you and free verse may go nicely together. Or if you’re a highly gifted poet with a natural eye and ear, you might dress up well with an extraordinary use of traditional verse forms.

To wear your poems well, check the mirror for masters of that particular form or type of free verse. Don’t just study contemporary poets whose work you like the look of, but also scan old catalogs of classical poets who wrote with style throughout the centuries. Even if you opt for the bargain rack of packing rhyme, rhythm, imagery, and social commentary into the vintage pattern of a sonnet as countless poets have done, your voice, your fresh idea, your apt comparison, your poetic face can make an outmoded fashion look new and “in” again.




[This article by Mary Sayler, originally entitled "How To Wear A Poem," appeared 2010/01 on her blogIn a Christian Writer's Life.]