Get started with free verse

First things first.

At first glance, free verse is one of the easiest forms of poetry to write. It certainly is among the most enjoyable and free-flowing. You just sit down and throw your soul and observations onto a piece of paper, breaking lines at random…right?

Not so fast. Like the practice of freedom itself, free verse can be challenging. The key is to correlate the rhythm of your subject with the rhythm of your natural voice. A natural poetic voice is lyrical and metrical, with accents and pauses that are as prevalent as those written into the strictest of classic verse forms. While the cadence, line counts, stanzas, and syllables per line are not mandated by tradition, the actual presentation of the poem is deliberate.