What's the best book on how to write free verse?

"Best" might depend on how you want to use it. Of the how-to books I own, I value Frances Mayes's The Discovery of Poetry most highly because it's got so many example poems; it's a good anthology in itself. It covers all types of poetry, not just FV.

Though Ted Kooser's The Poetry Home Repair Manual might seem too elementary, it has parts I like, as does Steve Kowit's In the Palm of Your Hand.

(In spite of all of these, I still feel comparatively ham-handed whenever I approach nonmetrical writing.)

Oops, I should have said explicitly that the books I have but like less well are more textbookish and have lots of exercises. If you're trying to teach a poetry course, you'll have a different opinion.

Obviously you are not asking for yourself, http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/wink.gif . so I will raise my hand to answer.

Since to write good free verse, one needs to know most of what one needs to know to write metered verse, one should just go for a good book on prosody.

A good book for beginners who need a lot of handholding is Mary Oliver's "A Poetry Handbook." There is a chapter titled "Free Verse" which explains in the second para "Free verse is not, of course, free." It is a good book for scaredy-cats. (IMO.)

Better, and on a level for the hungrier novice is "Prosody Handbook: A Guide to Poetic Form" by Robert Beum and Karl Shapiro It also has a chapter on free verse that lets you know it ain't free. It is intelligently written and even poets who have been at it for considerable time will find much food for thought. Highly recommended.

Better, and bigger, the book that tells beginners (and lots of practitioners) everything they didn't know they should ask is "Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry" by John Frederick Nims and David Mason. It is chock-full of excellent poems as examples. Every intrepid newbie just setting up poetic houskeeping should have a copy.

Obviously to write good (or even halfway decent) free verse, the poet needs to be able to use structure, rhythm, allusion, assonance, alliteration, anaphora, phrasal repetition, imagery, and lots more.

I have seen some pretty awful books on the subject too but the least said about them, the better.

I am awfully glad you put this question up, Michael, and I hope others will contribute other titles.


Crossposted with Maryann.

Come on, Mike, you don't read
up on how to write free
verse--you just smoke a
joint and let it flow,
like Ginsberg,
baby,
ya, ya, ya!

(Edit in: You dig?)

[This message has been edited by Poochigian Aaron (edited September 03, 2008).]

Cute, Aaron, but... you have a point, in a way. Free verse doesn't dispense with the tools of poetry; it just deploys them in more discrete ways where the metrical stuff is concerned. It's really not all that different.

And adding in: I never read a book on how to write metrical verse when I started out. Some teacher or other explained accentual-syllabic meter to me as a kid. I learned the basics then, read a bunch of poetry, and just... did it. I doubt I would have appreciated Steele's book if I hadn't already had meter down (it is really more about the subtleties than the basics), and Bill Baer's book suffers from the misfortune of having been written by Bill Baer.

But anaphora and enjambment and assonance and all that stuff still goes in free verse, and if you have that down, the organizing principles are up to the poet.

[This message has been edited by Quincy Lehr (edited September 03, 2008).]

A book I am currently reading, "The Flexible Lyric" by Ellen Bryant Voigt is not for the beginner and rather dry in some places, but she makes a lot of good points.

Such as;

…My own resistance to their [ Neo-formalists] program (which is no doubt more heterogeneous than advertised) is twofold: that "formal means" is narrowly defined, and that so few of their members have Richard Wilbur's ear. Poems of contemporary voice merely willed into quantifiable verse, with unvaried, arrhythmic meter or predictable rhyme, seem as static, as inert, as discarded mollusk shells—although the same may be said of many free verse slugs as well."

I like that she stresses that both forms should be approached with an awareness of the need for craftsmanship as well as content.

Janice,

But I don't trust many (mainly free verse) poets to have "the sense to read without jingling" (Ezra Pound of all people, praising Thomas Hardy). It's actually difficult to write metered verse in an unvarying cadence. If we end our sentences in different places in the line, if we have varying degrees of stoppage in our syntax, use words of different length, sentences of different length, etc., etc., the work of rhythmic variation is largely done for us. Whether the resultant rhythmic variations will be apt, expressive, what have you, is another issue. But statements like Voigt's often perplex me (and I hear them even in these environs).

That's another thread, Mike, put it up and we'll talk about the prejudices of both camps. Probably not for the first time in the history of the Sphere!

Voigt's book is worth reading but some may drop out in the middle when it gets more thesis-like.

Whether formal verse or vers libre, this is what a poem is supposed to do.

Gentle Reader

Late in the night when I should be asleep
under the city stars in a small room
I read a poet. A poet: not
A versifier. Not a hot-shot
ethic-monger, laying about
him; not a diary of lying
about in cruel cruel beds, crying.
A poet, dangerous and steep.

O God, it peels me, juices me like a press;
this poetry drinks me, eats me, gut and marrow
until I exist in its jester's sorrow,
until my juices feed a savage sight
that runs along the lines, bright
as beasts' eyes. The rubble splays to dust:
city, book, bed, leaving my ear's lust
saying like Molly, yes, yes, yes O yes.

Jospehine Jacobsen ( from In the Crevice of Time: New and Collected Poems)

Sorry Michael J., A wee highjack. Pls forgive.

All the Fun's in How You Bray a Thing, by Heehaw McVerse

Measure This! by Tum T. Tum