[Robert J. Clawson]

Although half my work is free verse, I find making it more difficult than making formal verse. I find myself being hyper-keen to cadence and turns, and the eventual shape of the poem. If publication were to be the best marker of my success at free verse, I have a poem, "Grappling," in The Southern Review that rests on many formal, rhythmic elements. Yet, because of its rather complex narrative and graphic stucture, it looks unlike a received form
and, I would guess, qualifies in the editor's ear as free verse.

As far as the triggers of free verse poetry, I find them in things people say, in things I discover in dictionaries, in articles I read in, say, Scientific American. I generally hear, or intuit a lovely contradiction, an irony, or just something bull goose looney. And from that, I take off and let my imagination and the poems sounds lead me.

I'd say that half of my published poems are what critics would call free verse, but each rides on my ear, which hears iambs everywhere, even in road signs.

Bob