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Hey @anne-of-lothlorien thanks for joining the conversation here! And I totally agree with you on a personal level because free verse has become my preferred poetry writing style for some of the same reasons as you shared. Free verse offers a lot of freedom of expression, and when it’s handled artfully, it can express a LOT in a very poetic way. I’ll admit some free verse poetry seems like it just randomly breaks the rules for the fun of it, but my favorite free verse poems are intentional about their line breaks. They use them to control the rhythm, emphasize certain words or phrases, create branches of meaning, etc.

Probably the first time I admitted to the power of free verse was in a free verse poem my creative writing teacher challenged me to write. Two lines stood out to him in particular, and through those two lines, he helped me see the value in it all. They went something like this:

“And there is no air

conditioning this black Crown Vic”

My instructor told me it was really cool how I’d created a double meaning, and how both of those meanings complimented each other well.

Now that’s not to say that some of these same things can’t be accomplished in traditional form. I think Frost, Yeats, Owen, Dickinson, etc. stand as testimonies to that. But I will acknowledge that I believe that the impact of a poem should come first and its form should enforce rather than detract from that impact. So if I can write a very impactful poem in free verse and a moderately impactful poem around the same theme with verse, I’ll go with free verse, and vice versa. In fact, some of my tankas (they’re like haikus but a smidge longer) are more impactful than my attempts at free verse with the same idea in mind. There’s always room for experimentation with poetry 🙂

Now that we’ve had some good discussion on what makes for good, authentic poetry, @dakota , @sparrowhawke , @anne-of-lothlorien , what do you think about each of us sharing one of our own poems that we think is really authentic in this thread and using it to discuss what we find authentic about it or what others have said about it? No pressure and no fear of judgement about any autobiographical details in said poems. I just figured it could be a good way to give some concrete material to this discussion.