Improving Your Free Verse Poetry
Finding the hidden structure in all good free verse poetry
The myth of writing free verse poetry is it is a form without structure, with no rules nor any real need for style. You think, you write, and your words spill down the page forming a poem. This belief in no rules is also why many new writers of free verse don’t get read.
Free verse poetry writing depends on you, the author, to determine the rules and style guides you want to follow for your work, but still, you must give the piece structure, so it achieves readability and impact.
Free verse is anything but a free roaming beast. Yes, it might be free of traditional metrical rhyming schemes, but if it is to work, it must have structure of some type. When writing free verse poetry, consider some of the following ideas:
Seek natural speech patterns in your writing
Free verse is a move away from formal structure into a more casual, conversational tone. The key is to capture the feel of you sitting across from me, the reader, as you share private thoughts or recant a story over a glass of wine. Formal poetry often feels like an evil professor lecturing a miserable freshman class until they submit to his poetry will, while free verse should feel like a personal…
