You Can Write Poetry - Jeff Mock [39]
Blank verse and the other poetic forms make patterns similar to those of a flower bed: repetition and variation. The poet is the gardener, planting the words in the best order, arranging them to provide different colors and shapes, the meters and rhymes of different flowers, growing the poem to catch the reader's eye.
PRACTICE SESSION
1. List the five most intense physical sensations you've experienced. Consider the causes and effects of those sensations. Select one and write a draft in ballad form about it; tell the story of the sensation.
2. Write a draft of a sonnet (your choice of sonnet form). Fashion an extended metaphor to run through the draft.
3. Write a draft in blank verse. At least half the lines must be enjambed lines. Focus on the sounds of the words you select and emphasize alliteration and assonance. Include the names of three small towns.
4. Imitate Theodore Roethke's villanelle "The Waking." Read it several times. Select one of his two repeating lines and use it in the same locations. The other repeating line is up to you. Include a songbird and a bathrobe in the draft.
The Responsibilities of Free Verse
In counterpoint to the formal garden is the field of wildflowers. Around my part of the country, open fields are home to dame's rocket, Queen Anne's lace, bull thistle, fireweed and whitewood aster. While a field of wildflowers lacks the strict arrangement of the formal garden, it's no less stunning. The difference between them is similar to that between poems written in form and those written in free verse. Free verse is, simply, nonmetrical poetry. Rather than using meter, free verse makes use of more natural cadences for its rhythm. The stressed syllables of words are still important, but their arrangement in the line is less so. In the same way meter sets up expectations for the rhythm, free verse sets up expectations for the cadences and sounds of the poem. Unlike poems written in meter (which are alike in that they establish a predominant rhythm, vary from it, and always return to it), free-verse poems can vary greatly from one to another. All sonnets, for example, are rhythmically similar, but the same cannot be said for free-verse poems. They don't follow established rhythms. They create their own. Here's a free-verse poem by Ian Clarke, a contemporary poet:
PALE SPRING
Nothing is close in this weather:
A grasp that hushed the world is gone.
Snowflakes lose their spider's touch.
The roads, the frozen troughs between corn rows,
Are not even whitened—onion snow
Like streaked glass over the first ridge of South Mountain.
A crow calls
Where no one has walked.
I turn and face the sound,
Cold as the angel
Who sings over the bronze dead, palming
A flame that gives no heat in either world.
What distinguishes this poem from a formal poem is the absence of a predominant meter. You will notice, however, that it's written in stanzas, the tercet. It makes good sounds: the alliteration of th in nothing and weather in the first line and of l in snowflakes and lose in the third line; the assonance of o in roads and frozen in the fourth line and of e in even and whitened in the fifth line. It makes use of metaphor in the snowflakes' "spider's touch" and of simile in "Cold as the angel." It even makes use of end rhyme in the fourth and fifth lines, rows and snow, and a slant rhyme in the seventh and eighth, calls and walked.
You may also notice that