[Maryann Corbett]

I know there are at least some of us who write both formal and free verse, so I'll try this set of questions:

How do you decide whether a given idea is going to be set down in form or in free verse? Do you just start writing and see what comes out? Do you often change your mind and try drafts both ways?

And when you decide that a poem should be helped to find form (I think that's Golias's phrase) is there a process?

I'm eager to hear your ideas.

Maryann

[Ethan Anderson]

Well, I'm extremely excited to be the very first to weigh in with It Depends, but let's see:

I think an awful lot about the idea "you know, I'm staring at an unreadable piece of flash fiction that really should have been a rock video," (or variations of that) when I'm reading. And when I'm writing, I fuss a lot over right fiction, right form. So generally, a lot of it has to do with what I'm after, and which format gives me the weapons to do what I want to do.

And that said, after I have an idea, yes, I do sit down with the deliberate intention to cough up a formal poem.

This works about a third of the time. I don't know whether this speaks to my abilities or the forms, but it's comforting to compare it to golf--the constraints are what makes it interesting, if you work through them once or twice to make it sing, you're hooked, and you don't always have a good round every time out. I'm just glad I'm caught by writing, and leave the golf to my friends.

When it comes to free verse, lately I've been writing a lot of narratives, so it often boils down to what needs to be prose and what is better served at the level of the line. So again, after I have what I think is a suitable idea, I do sit down deliberately to write free verse. And this works about half the time.

What about the duds? Most often they're just that. Occasionally, there's a conversion--I get a short story out of it, or a formal attempt becomes free verse, or (rarely) vice versa.

Fun question, and like you, I'm curious to hear how others go about it.



[This message has been edited by Ethan Anderson (edited June 10, 2006).]

[Julie]

I guess I don't really decide. I write in a very freeform sort of way. The first line goes down on the page and the rest of the poem depends on what that first line looks like. If it was in IP, the poem will be in IP, potentially rhymed. And then it's off to the races, so to speak.

I have lots of poems where I've written one version in free verse and another in IP. I have one poem that exists as free verse, IP, and an anapestic tetrameter sonnet.

I can generally sit down and write in whatever form I'd want to if there's a reason to. But that's generally not my preference.

Julie

[Jerry Glenn Hartwig]

Maryann

I used to write strictly metrical, then began exploring the dark side, to concentrate strictly on other elements of a poem, save meter and end-rhyme.

Now, I generally write a draft in non-met, although it's usually very close to IP. At first I develop the idea without form, though generally a structure develops on it's own. It normally works itself into meter. Rhyme takes greater effort.

[Quincy Lehr]

Maryann,

Despite the adage of "the poem decides," I believe (though every poem strikes me as a minor miracle) that I decide the form with a fair bit of malice of forethought. Sometimes I pick wrongly, which is where the poem begins to strenuously assert itself. But, probably like many people who work for a living, I tend not to immediately start writing a piece as soon as the idea comes to me. Rather, it goes in two stages. First, the idea--what the poem will be about, what mood I want it to strike and what formal devices will likely accomplish that and then, sometimes soon afterwards, sometimes considerably later, I start writing. By that point, I've typically thought enough about the potential piece to know what form I want it in, how long I want it to be, roughly, and so forth.

Quincy

[Thomas Newton]

Maryann,

I follow Robert Frost's advice.

[Quincy Lehr]

Thomas,

Robert Frost gave funky buttloads of advice on writing poetry over the course of a particularly long life. To which advice do you refer?

Quincy

(A note on Frost--he was discovered by the great--GREAT!--free-verse poet Ezra Pound, which perhaps adds a wrinkle in this discussion. Or maybe not.)

[Clay Stockton]

Michael Donaghy: "The cyclist, not the cycle, steers."

In other words, what Quincy said. I quite like bullying my poems into submission. Uppity little SOBs.

--CS

[Katy Evans-Bush]

Well, I'm pleased to say I'm with Clay and Quincy. Actually whay I usually do is carry an idea around for a while - like Quincy, I'm busy - then when something gels, or comes to me, or I get a minute, I start jotting. sometimes the jot turns into a draft, sometimes it's notes. But by the time I sit down to write it really is "the hand that moves the pen," and words just tumble out. Sometimes I may save only two words out of that, but what will have happened is that the thing will have asserted itself in some particular rhythm, or in an aural pattern, and it's a question of hearing that and shaping it.

but that's me. It's almost unheard of for me to write in a strict rhyme scheme - I don;t dislike poems that have them, I just think it isn't authentically my sound. You have to get to know, understand, and respect, your own style/ear/(dreaded word)voice.

Another thing is that I'll often sit down to write what I think is one poem, and end up dredging up all kinds of other stuff I had no idea I was going to write about. Very often what I think are three separate topics or ideas will all come together in one poem. And you're like: "Oh!"

I'll also point out that Pound, like all good free verse poets, had control of form.

It really is, as all the creative writing books tell you, a strange combination of intuitive writing - opening the mind in a particular way to receive the information - and that other process, of judging, manipulation, critical thinking.

We're artists, and I think it is important to remember that control of the medium is our task.

Of course if Clay and Quincy come on and disagree with me here I'm sunk.

KEB

[Mark Granier]

"If poetry comes not as naturally as leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all." Keats

Well, I guess that's most of us screwed then.