Free verse is like a
drive on unstriped rural roads,
unmonitored by
inviting the wildest sort
of driving violations.
No anachronism,
structued verse---sonnets, tanka,
iambic lines---are
suburban roads: one still gets
there, but with a lost less risk.
Kyakuchuu
Author's Notes/Comments:
In the spring of 1981, that terrible and terrifying year of the transition from college life (well, the entire seventeen years since kindergarten) to the real (and much less accomodating) world---a time when all that I believed and held dear seemed tainted with failure---I realized I did not understand free verse. Where does an individual line end? And must the next line be entirely different? How does it avoid sounding like (vertically formatted) prose? Like so many other questions I had at that time, the answer was in Pop Stevens' poetry.
