Read this.

Yes — out loud.

By and by, I will examine you:

West Wind #2

Mary Oliver

You are young.  So you know everything.  You leap

into the boat and begin rowing.  But listen to me.

Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without

any doubt, I talk directly to your soul.  Listen to me.

Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and

your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to

me.  There is life without love.  It is not worth a bent

penny, or a scuffed shoe.  It is not worth the body of a

dead dog nine days unburied.  When you hear, a mile

away and still out of sight, the churn of the water

as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the

sharp rocks – when you hear that unmistakable

pounding – when you feel the mist on your mouth

and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls

plunging and steaming – then row, row for your life

toward it.

Simply, poetry that has no distinct meter. The poet is free to turn the line at his or her discretion.

Perhaps they feel it a natural pause, perhaps for emphasis, perhaps they want to emulate a conversational style. It is largely up to you to decide if this works.

Let me here step aside and offer an example from that great pioneer of vers libre, Walt Whitman.  Some things to note as you read: if you count the syllables of the lines you see no set meter, but Whitman is indeed using sentences to communicate to us his opinion.

48

I have said that the soul is not more than the body,
And I have said that the body is not more than the soul;
And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one’s self is,
And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy, walks to his own funeral, drest in his shroud,
And I or you, pocketless of a dime, may purchase the pick of the earth,
And to glance with an eye, or show a bean in its pod, confounds the learning of all times,
And there is no trade or employment but the young man following it may become a hero,
And there is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheel’d universe,
And I say to any man or woman, Let your soul stand cool and composed before a million universes.

And I say to mankind, Be not curious about God,
For I, who am curious about each, am not curious about God;
(No array of terms can say how much I am at peace about God, and about death.)

I hear and behold God in every object, yet understand God not in the least,
Nor do I understand who there can be more wonderful than myself.

Why should I wish to see God better than this day?
I see something of God each hour of the twenty-four, and each moment then;
In the faces of men and women I see God, and in my own face in the glass;
I find letters from God dropt in the street—and every one is sign’d by God’s name,
And I leave them where they are, for I know that wheresoe’er I go,
Others will punctually come forever and ever.

49

And as to you Death, and you bitter hug of mortality, it is idle to try to alarm me.

To his work without flinching the accoucheur comes;
I see the elder-hand, pressing, receiving, supporting;
I recline by the sills of the exquisite flexible doors,
And mark the outlet, and mark the relief and escape.

And as to you, Corpse, I think you are good manure—but that does not offend me;
I smell the white roses sweet-scented and growing,
I reach to the leafy lips—I reach to the polish’d breasts of melons.

And as to you Life, I reckon you are the leavings of many deaths;
(No doubt I have died myself ten thousand times before.)

I hear you whispering there, O stars of heaven;
O suns! O grass of graves! O perpetual transfers and promotions!
If you do not say anything, how can I say anything?

Of the turbid pool that lies in the autumn forest,
Of the moon that descends the steeps of the soughing twilight,
Toss, sparkles of day and dusk! toss on the black stems that decay in the muck!
Toss to the moaning gibberish of the dry limbs.

I ascend from the moon, I ascend from the night;
I perceive that the ghastly glimmer is noonday sunbeams reflected;
And debouch to the steady and central from the offspring great or small.

50

There is that in me—I do not know what it is—but I know it is in me.

Wrench’d and sweaty—calm and cool then my body becomes;
I sleep—I sleep long.

I do not know it—it is without name—it is a word unsaid;
It is not in any dictionary, utterance, symbol.

Something it swings on more than the earth I swing on;
To it the creation is the friend whose embracing awakes me.

Perhaps I might tell more. Outlines! I plead for my brothers and sisters.

Do you see, O my brothers and sisters?
It is not chaos or death—it is form, union, plan—it is eternal life—it is HAPPINESS.

So, you are reading the poem, aware that a line is not necessarily a sentence – which is a complete thought.

If the line turns, you are still following the sentence,

Aware that many – but not all – poets capitalize

The first letter

Of the next line, and

That the sentence will stop. It might stop at any point

In the line. You follow the sentence,

Understand it

And when you comprehend the first.

You go to the second, understanding that and how

The first sentence informs the second and

The second the first,

Then you’re getting the verse! Get me?

Reading a sense poem is much the same as reading a paragraph, except the poet is going to dance the language; he or she will turn the line, slip in time, add color, shift from the literal to the figurative. It’s a mental challenge: are you up for it?

For the scholar-athlete or warrior-poet, explain that reading poetry is a sort of mental negotiation of an obstacle.

Step 1: Understand what a sentence is and the ways in which a sentence ends or is incomplete.

(You’d think this is obvious, but I can’t tell you how many readers get hung up on this step.)

Step 2: Realize that in poetry, the sentence may be part of a line, the whole line, more than a line, and perhaps several lines.

If the sentence stops within the line, this is called caesura.

End stop means the sentence ends at the line’s conclusion.

If the sentence goes on despite the line ending, this is called run on or enjambment.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Many poets practice the convention of capitalizing the first letter of each line regardless of whether this begins a new sentence. In my opinion, this worst of grammatical conventions confuses so many young readers. Be aware that in poetry capitalization does not necessarily indicate a new thought has begun.

Step 3: Apprehend whether the poem is a sense or a non-sense poem. (sic)

A sense poem is attempting to convey meaning to you in a more-or-less conventional form, such as a narrative or exposition. More on this later.

A non-sense poem may hint at sentences, but is not understandable in a conventional sense. A non-sense poem might play on shape or sound or an enigmatic hint at clear meaning.

Some examples of non-sense:

                             r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r
                      who
  a)s w(e loo)k
  upnowgath
                  PPEGORHRASS
                                        eringint(o-
  aThe):l
             eA
                 !p:
S                                                         a
                          (r
  rIvInG                         .gRrEaPsPhOs)
                                                         to
  rea(be)rran(com)gi(e)ngly
  ,grasshopper;

Cummings is using the placement of letters to convey the skittish, wild hopping of the insect, but there is no sentence to this. We don’t attempt to elicit a meaning from this in the usual way. There is no message or moral.

Some poems hint at sentence structure, but again, sense does not appear to be the poet’s goal. Here, Louis Zukofsky translates Catullus not to bring the meaning into English, but to capture the song-like quality of the original Latin:

Catullus

Poem 41

Ameana pulling, a foot touted high,

touched me for all of ten thousand, and popped scut

is the tour-pickled, low-puling long nosed, ah

decocted heiress of the milked Formiani.

Propinquity, quick buss this fuel, cure eye,

amigos, medicos, call convocations:

no nest, she is nuts, pulls her neck, rogue harried,

what lies sit solid ice imagine o some.

As a rule, AP students are not likely to see non-sense poems as any major part of the examination. This doesn’t mean unconventional poetry has no worth and is to be glossed over: it means you apply a different lens.

Remember, the essential question is “What diction/tone/figures of speech does the author use to convey meaning?” We will spend many hours on this.

Here’s a list of poetry type by ethnicity/nationality.
These are described in excellent book Shapes of Our Singing by Robin Skelton. The purpose of this post is to support the fact that almost every culture has a rich tradition of poetics.

If you know of another form, please comment.

Anglo-Saxon