Good Reasons for Writing Free Verse

I was at an open mic night a few years ago, just before the pandemic put a stop to such social events for a while. After I had read my three poems–all free verse–the next poet got up and announced that he was reading poems that had rhyme. He said that he favored that practice.

I understand this desire. I suspect that some people only think of real poetry as that which has rhyme schemes and strict rhythms. As one customer said in a Barnes & Noble where I was looking over the poetry section, “You can’t tell the good from the bad poetry. There are no standards.” Perhaps he was thinking that free verse has made things too easy. There is this idea that free verse feels like writing that is of small value.

Yet I don’t think this is true. Writing free verse can be a wonderful way into writing poetry. It can lead to rambling, certainly, even wordiness. It can seem easy as we simply write whatever is on our minds. But this can also lead to greater conciseness. It can even lead to experiments with meter and rhyme.

Back in college, my poetry teacher talked about how his poems would start small, amounting to a few stanzas, and then, as he revised them, they would expand. They would open out into all sorts of new suggestions for him to consider. Eventually, he would edit these drafts back down, often ending up with poems that were as short or even shorter than the first draft was.

Once he really engaged the process, allowing himself to really try to see all that he was writing about in a poem, he could then get at the phrases that made the most concise meaning.

From my poetry teacher, I got the distinct impression that a rough draft usually only contains a hint of the writer’s sense of what she has to say. Writing further drafts can lead to a fuller exploration of what was only the start of an idea.

Writing the Bad Poem

Recently, I’ve had similar experiences with several poems I wrote that started out in my daily routine as rough drafts, which I tend to call bad poems. These poems I gathered in my notebooks, and at some point later, I would look at them again and begin to rework them, often doing what my poetry teacher suggested, adding to the poem, making it longer.

With a few of these poems, I found much internal rhyme and images taking shape that I’d not guessed at before, even as the poems ran over in length to cover the better part of two pages, single-spaced.

This was when I began to really see the potential of the original short poem. I could sense how the images, words, and ideas were connected in my experience.

I don’t know that I could tell that customer in the bookstore who complained that modern poetry has no standards that my poems were of high quality. But they are not just random free writing, with no planning or structure. In fact, they are complicated and move to emotional places. In one, for example, I’ve made the connection to my son’s former past time of hanging out in Good Will stores with his friends before he took his life. In a later verse, I return to the Good Will images as I think about the random possessions we still have from him and how the context changes as the years pass.

It was in expanding the poem that I discovered this connection, and I think it works. I may eventually edit the poem down to a single page or a few stanzas, with that idea implicit in it. But I needed to write long and free to find it.

This is one reason I write in free verse. And I think that in the multi-verse, there is room for more of it, as well as poems that rhyme.