What The Fuck is Free-Form and How Do I Write It?
Writing free-form poetry is like asking your soul to somehow take a pen and simply write down whatever it thinks. It’s spilled thoughts: it’s like spilling ink onto a page that forms the most beautiful linguistic patterns that completely capture your truest intentions and emotions, and captivate your readers in the most fascinating of ways. It can be clear, ambiguous, explorative, and even comfortably familiar. It is like writing down a little piece of yourself and keeping it alive in words forever.
The art of free-form captures the essence of the beat-poet era. It draws upon the Ginsberg’s and the Kerouac’s inside us all and changes and propels itself into startlingly new contemporary heights, and right now, it’s starting all over again with you. Right here, by reading this, you're starting yourself off on an amazing literary adventure.
As a relatively young poet, I’m going to be stereotypically strong-willed and opinionated on my views of poetry. Like a Victorian Romantic, full of angst and anti-establishmentarianism, I’m a liberally prescribed and typically self-assured Byronic student, one who will stand defiantly in my beliefs about what makes poetry great. When I talk about my life as a writer, (specifically one who L O V E S poetry), one of my biggest peeves is when someone says to me: “This can’t be a poem because it just don’ rhyme!” Now, typically, my instantaneous reaction would be to scream “poetry doesn’t need to rhyme!” in a very Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men-esque way, but let’s face it... if you truly believe that poetry has to rhyme then you can’t handle the truth of how poetry can actually be written. It doesn’t need to have a fully prescribed set of rules about recurring rhyme or metre, and we most certainly don’t have to abide by the idea that a poem needs to be written in a trochaic or dactylic fashion.
Yes, I’ll admit, we all like a good strict form poem, (personally, mine is ‘The Tyger’ by William Blake), but writing in this way doesn’t have to be the be all and the end all of poetic writing. I don’t want to seem like I hate rhyming, really, I love a good rhyme, and this is something you should remember too. Rhyming in poetry isn’t always cheesy or cliché. If you get the words right and the tone of where and how to use it then, hey presto! you’ve got a pretty damn good rhyme. A free-form poem can indeed contain a rhyme too, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be in an ‘abab’, ‘abcb’ form. Throw in a few rhyming couplets if you think it’ll work, or maybe some internal rhyme, whichever you think will help the flow because it’s your poem and you’re making it the way you want it to be. So then, as we read through and experience our own and others free-form poetry, what we read or write will hopefully resonate with us on many levels, with each new finding arising from yet another discovery of another level or another layer of meaning. Think of it like Sherk and his onion analogy. Free-form has got many layers, and you've just got to work your way through them.
Writing fiction is much like trying to sew together a patchwork blanket. There is no ideal place to start, no one continuous idea which you can copy from your brain and paste onto a page. It is about snippets of this and that, a line here, a character there, a few themes and thoughts which you somehow have to sculpt into a narrative, regardless of how nothing seems to initially fit together. So how does this metamorphoses of jumbled thought smooth out into something worth reading, or indeed, worth writing? There is, unfortunately, no set formula for this. For some, the process of crafting your piece is persistence whilst juggling a multitude of other things, for some, it’s seclusion, for others, it is writing whilst indulging in an adventure. But what is imperative is that there is a starting point. More can be crafted with a wisp of smoke than thin air. The smallest idea can be nurtured, developed and layered into something beautiful – this small idea is your starting point. It can be a character, a theme, an aspect of plot etc. as long as it is something you can place in the centre of a page and brainstorm. Your first set of spider diagrams and notes can be as simple as listing the semantics and conventions associated with your idea, then from that, you can draft and re-draft your brainstorms, developing and building the notes which catch your eye until you have enough to sew these little fragments together to compose an initial draft.
For me, however, the most important aspect of crafting a story is feedback. There will come a point where you become numb and blinded by your work. Sometimes it is that you know something is wrong, but cannot pinpoint it, or it is that there’s a hole that can only be filled with a subplot you have no inspiration to write. Giving your story to a friend, not even one which shares your love of writing, just one which you trust and likes to read, is the key to ironing out the violent creases in your narratives. Once you have your initial draft – which in my case is mostly a flowery framework constructed from my notes – re-drafting is the key to creating a viable piece, however, re-drafting can only be a successful process when you have feedback from a reader. It is the opinion of a reader which matters most when trying to create a story worth being read.
