Deer Creek High School | Pre-AP English II | Mr. Stephenson
Free Verse Poetry: Examples, Tips, Quickwrites
“I Go Back to May 1937” by Sharon Olds
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don't do it--she's the wrong woman,
he's the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don't do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
Notice the simile on this line.
Look how many commas she uses.
Notice the repetition of “you are
going to”
Notice the entire poem is one long
stanza.
Sharon Olds writes many of her poems about her own life experiences. This poem is based
on a picture of her parents taken in May 1937.
QW: Find a picture of someone you know (family, friends, yourself), and write in response to it.
Describe the picture, but also write about what you know now about the people present in the
picture.
“Metaphors” by Sylvia Plath
I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.
This line also has nine syllables.
This poem is tricky. Can you tell what it’s talking about?
QW: Write a riddle poem.
“Language Lessons” by Alexandra Teague This title has a double meaning. Get it?
The carpet in the kindergarten room
was alphabet blocks; all of us fidgeting
on bright, primary letters. On the shelf
sat that week's inflatable sound. The th
was shaped like a tooth. We sang
about brushing up and down, practiced
exhaling while touching our tongues
to our teeth. Next week, a puffy U
like an upside-down umbrella; the rest
of the alphabet deflated. Some days,
we saw parents through the windows
to the hallway sky. Look, a fat lady,
a boy beside me giggled. Until then
I'd only known my mother as beautiful.
This poem begins with a vivid image: ABC
carpet.
Notice the “t” alliteration?
Many poets use italics to indicate dialogue
instead of quotation marks.
The power in this poem doesn’t really emerge until the final three lines. What a surprise
ending! The final lines also give a new meaning to the title of the poem. Try playing around
with your poem’s title, so that it takes on more than one simple, straightforward meaning.
QW: Write a poem about one of your earliest memories in school.
“Ode to Mix Tapes” by Sherman Alexie
These days, it’s too easy to make mix tapes.
CD burners, iPods, and iTunes
Have taken the place
Of vinyl and cassette. And, soon
Enough, clever introverts will create
Quicker point-and-click ways to declare
One’s love, lust, friendship, and favor.
But I miss the labor
Of making old-school mix tapes—the midair
This poem is broken into stanzas, but the
lines are indented. Notice how the first
two stanzas are indented the same, but
the third stanza is indented differently.
Acrobatics of recording one song
At a time. It sometimes took days
To play, choose, pause,
Ponder, record, replay, erase,
And replace. But there was no magic wand.
It was blue-collar work. A great mix tape
Was sculpture designed to seduce
And let the hounds loose.
A great mix tape was a three-chord parade
Notice how the line breaks in midsentence. That’s called enjambment.
Led by the first song, something bold and brave,
A heat-seeker like Prince with “Cream,”
Or “Let’s Get It On,” by Marvin Gaye.
The next song was always Patsy Cline’s “Sweet Dreams,”
Or something by Hank. But O, the last track
Was the vessel that contained
The most devotion and pain
And made promises that you couldn’t take back.
Sherman Alexie is better known for his fiction (including The Absolutely True Diary of a
Part-Time Indian), but he also writes poetry. An ode sets out to praise something that is
usually no longer in style or existence. But an ode can be written about anything. Chilean
poet Pablo Neruda wrote an ode to an onion!
QW: Write an ode to anyone or anything.
“Problems with Hurricanes” by Victor Hernández Cruz
A campesino looked at the air
And told me:
With hurricanes it’s not the wind
or the noise or the water.
I’ll tell you he said:
it’s the mangoes, avocados
Green plantains and bananas
flying into town like projectiles.
This a surprising concept.
How would your family
feel if they had to tell
The generations that you
got killed by a flying
Banana.
☺ Poetry can be funny.
Death by drowning has honor
If the wind picked you up
and slammed you
Against a mountain boulder
This would not carry shame
But
to suffer a mango smashing
Your skull
or a plantain hitting your
Temple at 70 miles per hour
is the ultimate disgrace.
The campesino takes off his hat—
As a sign of respect
towards the fury of the wind
And says:
Don’t worry about the noise
Don’t worry about the water
Don’t worry about the wind—
If you are going out
beware of mangoes
And all such beautiful
sweet things.
Notice how the poet hardly uses any punctuation. Some
poets rarely punctuate their stanzas. This poet relies
more on line breaks.
An obvious theme: Beautiful things/people can be
dangerous.
This poem is very playful and humorous, even though it talks about death. Don’t feel like
your free verse poem has to be completely “deep” and serious.
QW: Write about something that is also surprisingly dangerous.
QW: Write a poem entitled “Problems with ________________.” You fill in the blank.
“Sure” by Arlene Tribbia
1
I miss my brother sure
he drank Robitussin
washed down with beer
sure he smoked dope
& shot heroin
& went to prison
for selling to
an undercover cop
2
& sure he robbed
the town’s only hot dog stand,
Gino’s like I overheard
while I laid on my bed
staring up at the stars
under slanted curtains
3
This poet uses an ampersand (&) instead of writing out
the word and. What’s the effect of this?
4
Notice the “s” alliteration.
& sure he used to
leave his two year old
son alone so he could
score on the street
5
but before all this
my brother sure
used to swing me up
onto his back, run
me around dizzy
through hallways and rooms
& we’d laugh & laugh
fall onto the bed finally
and he’d tickle me
to death sure
Ah ha! “But” indicates a shift in tone or ideas.
6
7
“Sure” is the title of this poem, and the word sure appears in the poem six times. The
speaker of this poem is obviously the younger sibling of this rebellious, older brother. Even
though the brother has made some foolish choices, I have sympathy for him because the
speaker conveys so much emotion in the final stanza.
QW: Write a poem that makes use of one word repeatedly throughout the poem. Title your poem
after this word.
“Unit of Measure” by Sandra Beasley
All can be measured by the standard of the capybara.
Everyone is lesser than or greater than the capybara.
Everything is taller or shorter than the capybara.
Everything is mistaken for a Brazilian dance craze
more or less frequently than the capybara.
Everyone eats greater or fewer watermelons
than the capybara. Everyone eats more or less bark.
Everyone barks more than or less than the capybara,
who also whistles, clicks, grunts, and emits what is known
as his alarm squeal. Everyone is more or less alarmed
than a capybara, who—because his back legs
are longer than his front legs—feels like
he is going downhill at all times.
Everyone is more or less a master of grasses
than the capybara. Or going by the scientific name,
more or less Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris—
or, going by the Greek translation, more or less
water hog. Everyone is more or less
of a fish than the capybara, defined as the outermost realm
of fishdom by the 16th-century Catholic Church.
Everyone is eaten more or less often for Lent than
the capybara. Shredded, spiced, and served over plantains,
everything tastes more or less like pork
than the capybara. Before you decide that you are
greater than or lesser than a capybara, consider
that while the Brazilian capybara breeds only once a year,
the Venezuelan variety mates continuously.
Consider the last time you mated continuously.
Consider the year of your childhood when you had
exactly as many teeth as the capybara—
twenty—and all yours fell out, and all his
kept growing. Consider how his skin stretches
in only one direction. Accept that you are stretchier
than the capybara. Accept that you have foolishly
distributed your eyes, ears, and nostrils
all over your face. Accept that now you will never be able
to sleep underwater. Accept that the fish
will never gather to your capybara body offering
their soft, finned love. One of us, they say, one of us,
but they will not say it to you.
This humorous poem is also
expository in nature—it
includes many facts about a
random South American
rodent. Part of the fun in
this poem is discovering
unique traits about the
capybara.
Notice how many sentences
begin with Everyone.
Now the sentences start
with Consider. This change
in repetition indicates a
shift in the poem.
In the final lines of the
poem, Accept starts most of
the sentences.
QW: Pick a person or thing as a unit of measure and write a poem in response. When I did this
exercise, I chose Brad Pitt. Ha!
“Trigger” by Jason Stephenson
I.
Ducks dropped from the sky when I shot in Eric’s bedroom.
Mashed against the TV screen, the orange barrel unloaded
explosive fire. Prey glanced at me with saucer eyes and
disappeared into the grass. The gun housed no bullets, only a
plastic shell. Our hunt complete, we jabbed the Power button,
dashed outside and cannonballed into the pool.
II.
Dad invited me into the world of men the Christmas
he gave me a BB gun. Nine years old, I poured pellets
into the gun’s mouth, pumped, squinted, squeezed.
The gentle grunt tipped cans to the ground.
I couldn’t bring myself to shoot the cartoon animals
my dad had painted on wooden squares.
This part of the poem is
about playing Duck Hunt
on the original Nintendo.
I really did get a BB gun
for Christmas, but I didn’t
mind shooting the cartoon
animals. ☺
III.
I pressed my father’s .22 against my shoulder only once.
In this final stanza, a real
Our breath curled into the air as I aimed into the valley
gun and video games are
at a fiery tree, braced myself, pulled the metal trigger.
combined.
The explosion shook the sky, careened into my shoulder.
Leaves fluttered to the earth, as I trudged home. Inside,
I grabbed a controller, smashed buttons to swing a sword
and hurl bombs, leaving destruction on the screen,
where it could disappear forever with the press of the reset button.
This three part poem is called a triptych. It’s partially based on my life experience, but part
of it is invented as well. The title “Trigger” works because it refers not only to a gun but
also to the buttons pressed on a video game controller.
QW: Write your own triptych about a reoccurring theme or image in your life. If you play a sport
or instrument, you could write about that.