Characteristics of Free Verse Poetry

Characteristics of Free Verse Poetry Practiced Among Members of the Green Mountain School of Poetry by Jack T. Scully

Robert Frost once said, “writing free-verse is like playing tennis with the net down.”

In dissing free verse, Frost did acknowledge one of its prized characteristics. The use of vivid imagery to describe an emotion or record an event. For instance, a journalist might describe a tragic house fire in meticulous detail. Not Frost. In The Need of Being Versed In Country Things, he chooses a simile to capture the fire’s effect in one memorable verse:

…the chimney was all of the house that stood,

Like a pistil after the petals go.

Unlike Frost, we practitioners of the Green Mountain School of Poetry prefer a downed tennis net. In each draft of our poems (short, short stories— really), we’d rather spend our time searching for precise words and phrases than struggling to follow a set of pre-ordained rhyming rules. 

The author discussing free-verse book Mianus Village at a recent conference in Greenwich, Connecticut

But that not’s all that goes into our free verse poems. Here is our list of this School’s free verse characteristics:

1.     Freedom from forced rhymes and set beats per verse.

2.     Avoidance of experimental linguistics, esoteric references, and seemingly incomprehensive lingo.

3.     Realistic storytelling that celebrate life in simple, clear and direct terms.

4.     Liberal use of figures of speech that paint pictures in everyday language.

5.     Endings that leave a reader with a lingering feeling, a gut laugh, a smile of recognition, or a lesson learned.

While some wordsmiths have a natural ability to write rhyming couplets and tight inner rhyme schemes, it is a bar too high for most beginning writers. Remember the famed Motown group, the Four Tops and their hit song Sugar Pie Honey Bunch Its lyrics, written by Holland, Dozier, and Holland, exquisitely uses rhyming couplets as shown here:

When I call your name…
It starts the flame

burning in my heart
Tearin' it all apart
No matter how I try
My love I cannot hide

It easy on the ears and sounds as good today as it did in 1965, right? But it is hard to meet such high standards. One stilted rhyme or awkward construction and the magic mood is broken. Our ears are attuned to reject forced rhymes. So unless you’re a poetic genius, like the three lyrists who gave life to the Motown Sound, it’s best to leave such quatrains to the pros.

Arlo Guthrie’s 1972 City of New Orleans achieves a similar poetic effect. Rather than writing tight rhymes, though, its writer Steve Goodman relies on sweeping imagery to trace the journey of a train on a “southbound odyssey” from Chicago to New Orleans:  

The train pulls out at Kankakee
Rolls along past houses, farms and fields
Passin' trains that have no name
Freight yards full of old black men
And the graveyards of the rusted automobiles 

It succeeds by painting pictures with words. Readers, like riders, are swept along as if they too are aboard the train.  

Feel the wheels rumblin' 'neath the floor
And the sons of pullman porters
And the sons of engineers
Ride their father's magic carpets made of steel
Mothers with their babes asleep
Are rockin' to the gentle beat

In “Safe at Home,” a free verse story in my book Mianus Village, I describe a mother’s feeling for a young son who has been bullied at school. Each word is designed to leave the reader with a sense of similar remembrance or longing for such a relationship. It is also a good example of another characteristic of Green Mountain poetry. The use of a final verse to evoke an emotional response.

Mother stuffed out

her cigarette and

began running her fingers

through my wiry hair.

Their soothing touch,

present to this day,

made my eyelids heavy

but I can still hear

her whispering ,

“Don’t worry puppy,

you’re safe

with me.”

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins, shown below, says this about free verse poetry:

Poet Laureate Billy Collins reads his poems and discusses poetry at Master Class

A poem should be “felt and enjoyed” without leaving one “brooding about it meaning.”

 For him, a poet should not worry about following a “set rhyme patterns, rhythm, or line and stanza numbers. Rather verses should flow together as if one were talking casually to you.” Along the way, Collins uses humor to make subtle points while slipping in “profound observations” about the meaning of life and moral conduct.  

 For those who see value in these traditional aspects of free verse poetry, welcome to the Green Mountain School of Poetry.