How to Write Free Verse

To many, free verse seems like an oxymoron. Some would call it the anti-poetry. But free verse apparently did originate from styles only slightly loosed from meter. These were called "cadenced" styles. Free verse, technically, is just poetry without the classic formulas of poetry, with no set meter or line length. Poets of the post-modern era reveled in this liberty of style, but in the end, according to many and evidenced by the virtually nonexistent market value of a poem, it spelled the death of the medium.

Instructions

1. For free verse, there's no geometry or calculation. Just start where poets always start; the muse. Let your creative spirit meander into the fords and gullies of the imagination until you find something you think is worth writing about.

2. Choose your words. Since there are no other forms for free verse, your words will have to be stellar. Choose them well.

3. Keep it short. Brevity, as they say, is the soul of wit. Your poetic line can be as short as the popular "shortest verse in the bible" now used as a colorful colloquialism: Jesus Wept.

4. Look at line length. There is no set line length for free verse, but that shouldn't stop you from analyzing it. Use extremely long or extremely short lines to express feeling and bump words across multiple lines to make emphasis like the old masters, the Russians, for example who scattered subject and predicate across the page either obscuring or underscoring the point they were trying to make.

5. Look at modern American poetry for examples. One "traditional" of free verse is Allen Ginsburg's 'America' where Ginsburg uses raw emotion in place of any poetic form, where you can almost hear the suppressed or unbridled feeling in the reader's voice.

Tips & Warnings

• Free verse is trial and error. Don't be afraid to throw something out and start again.

Resources

• Read this Article in Spanish
• Free verse poems from the poetry of International Poets