Jan's Master Class--FREE VERSE

[glorybee]

Joanne--

Thanks for the link--I loved reading that poem again.

Well--by one of my "tests", it might be considered "artfully arranged prose" in that each stanza could be a perfectly grammatical sentence, and the poem as a whole could be a lovely little descriptive paragraph.

BUT...if you'd entered it as a little paragraph, I'd probably have called it "lyrical" or "almost poetic" becuase it really does have a lot of great "stuff" in it--repetition, a wonderful coined word (boymade), superb imagery, personification...

I guess I should have added to my "could it be a paragraph?" test, and said something like "would it be a fairly ordinary paragraph?" And this is far from ordinary...

In my book, it's a great little free verse poem, Joanne.

[GShuler]

Free verse for the bug crew:

Bugs

Six legs make you
squimish.
Eight legs make you
scream.
I laugh beneath your
pillow
with my thousand legs.

[hwnj]

Well it looks like my assertion that free verse does not lend itself to light verse/humor has been utterly blown out of the water.

[glorybee]

Betsy, after reading those two pieces (and several of your other entries), you're rapidly moving up my list of awesome writers.

As to those poems--as I've said before, I'm hardly an expert on free verse, but I'd say that they definitely qualify. Even if they're not packed with poetry "tricks", they are both packed with emotion, and with deliberate word choice. Especially in the second one--you just wouldn't write prose that way. And the first one practically demands to be written in a way that challenges the reader a bit, takes her out of her comfort zone, so that she feels--just a teensy bit--what your narrator feels.

Great examples of free verse, Betsy. Thanks so much for posting them here!

[glorybee]

Anne, wonderful work here--I love the extended metaphor of the plough! So glad you stopped by to share your poetry!