Free Verse Poetry Quotes & Sayings

It is something to have gazed on the constellated white,
felt it running from the eyes and the pores: the salt of love.
It is something to have whispered wild thank-yous
in the only ways we know how. — Bryana Johnson

In the poetry of arrival, the garage door is free verse; the front door can be anything from a rhyming couplet to a sonnet. — Akiko Busch

If there has been one overriding change in poetic practice, it is that under the influence of free verse the poets have made a primary virtue out of exactitude and economy of meaning: this has replaced metrical skill as the first thing the poet tunes to. — Martin Langford

Sometimes at night, when I leave and ride by the front of the White House and the lights are on, it is so beautiful, I have some sense of, 'Hey, that's where I work, and Jimmy is President now.' But day in and day out, it's a job. — Hamilton Jordan

You should be more careful
when you move, my dear
what with you...

spilling moonlight
into my poem, with a mere
flick of your hand. — Sanober Khan

I love the unknown. — Cindy Gallop

Although our feelings may at times seem like a major inconvenience, especially when it comes to our digestive health, when you pay attention your gut can be a source of excellent psychic information. — Catherine Carrigan

I've given offense by saying I'd as soon write free verse as play tennis with the net down. — Robert Frost

The next time you hear someone in a workshop remarking on how good a particular free-verse line or passage sounds, scan it. The odds are that it will fall into a regular metrical pattern. — Annie Finch

in the end
it is words
poetry. sunsets
someone's deep blue
silk voice.
mountain scents.
someone's smile.
eyes. that we have
no defenses against. — Sanober Khan

I scratch down happiness, I
want my ink to do happy dances,
to careen across the pages staggering
like a drunken fellow, giddy
on moonshine or sunset. — Bryana Johnson

The voice is raised, and that is where poetry begins. And even today, in the prolonged aftermath of modernism, in places where 'open form' or free verse is the orthodoxy, you will find a memory of that raising of the voice in the term 'heightened speech.' — James Fenton

I like poetry because poetry - even in free verse - is formal, and it has to be very concise and packed and rich, and I like the feeling of having to do that, having to make the language tight and still free, as if the deepest freedom is created by the restrictions. — Pattiann Rogers

Happiness is our one ultimate end. Boil it right the way down, reduce all those motivational drivers, and sitting right there at the centre of our very human hearts, is our yearning to be happy. — Simon Pont

True education is gained through the discipline of life. There — Henry Ford

I am bothered by poems I don't understand. — Joyce Rachelle

It is not good form to take a Trick out unless one is so firmly established as to be able to afford being associated with someone who might at any given moment write a poem in public. — Fran Lebowitz

Dream for life; dream for love; dream for a better world. The purpose of life should not be only to achieve silver and gold. — Debasish Mridha

Theophilus Crowe wrote bad free-verse poetry and played a jimbai drum while sitting on a rock by the ocean. He could play sixteen chords on the guitar and knew five Bob Dylan songs all the way through, allowing for a dampening buzz any time he had to play a bar chord. He had tried his hand at painting, sculpture, and pottery and had even played a minor part in the Pine Cove Little Theater's revival of Arsenic and Old Lace. In all of these endeavors, he had experienced a meteoric rise to mediocrity and quit before total embarrassment and self-loathing set in. Theo was cursed with an artist's soul but no talent. He possessed the angst and the inspiration, but not the means to create. — Christopher Moore

Fairness dictates that the highest income people should pay the greatest share of taxes, and they do. — Mitt Romney

A midst deceit I found the truth;
there in the rough I found a diamond.
And from the moment we met,
I think of no one else
Today I choose to be, to live and breathe;
to dream, to weep, and to sing in free verse.
And you, the object of my delight:
a like-minded opposite I am myself with,
a mind-fuck times six, seven, eight thousand and three.
I know that you love me with every inch of your deep. — Donato DiCristino

The rules, religion to religion that man set forth, made me shy away from religion and have my own one on one with God and cut out the middleman. — Ja Rule

I believe everything is about balance. I'm not 100% vegan, and obviously my fiance and my friends are not vegan, so I have to come up with a menu that will satisfy everybody. — Valentina Zelyaeva

Angela had never really got on with modern poetry. Even stuff like Seamus Heaney, Death of a Naturalist and the other book. He seemed such a lovely man and she really did try, but it sounded like prose you had to read very slowly. Old stuff she understood. Rum-ti-tum. Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white ... Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack ... Something going all the way back. Memorable words, so you could hand it down the generations. But free verse made her think of free knitting or free juggling. This, for example. She extracted a book at random. Spiders by Stanimir Stoilov, translated by Luke Kennard. She flipped through the pages ... the hatcheries of the moon ... the earth in my father's mouth. — Mark Haddon

By(e) pen, I've tried my hand at poetry; only to see how boring it is to me. That is, unless I get a chance to destroy each and every piece while doing it as I please. — Criss Jami

What exactly is the new verse movement? The New Verse Movement of the 1910's was to make poetry relevant again by immersing it into the spaces, technologies, and social dynamics of the modern city.
And Now In The Present And Future ?
The New Verse Movement of the 21st Century follows these same beliefs. To somehow ignite the spark and to help make poetry relevant again in a new age of technologies (The Internet) and to support new & experimental as well as older poetic forms. The New Verse Movement of the 21st Century is all about change and free expression of the creative mind. — R.M. Engelhardt

Free verse is like free love; it is a contradiction in terms. — G.K. Chesterton

When I met Judd Apatow, he told me I should start writing screenplays. They'd be really bad at first, but the more I did it, the better I'd get. — Bill Hader

The ocean-blue bowl won't
refuse to bruise, won't hold it back
from the gaping earth-wounds.
There will still come
water, chill wind and happy
goosebumps,
and in the utmost corners of oaks,
leaves laughing. — Bryana Johnson

I started wanting desperately to say something, to make a point, to be heard - and I still feel that way. Free verse served me best when I embarked on poetry. — Denise Duhamel

To later Romans Ennius was the personification of the spirit of early Rome; by them he was called "The Father of Roman Poetry." We must remember how truly Greek he was in his point of view. He set the example for later Latin poetry by writing the first epic of Rome in Greek hexameter verses instead of in the old Saturnian verse. He made popular the doctrines of Euhemerus, and he was in general a champion of free thought and rationalism. — Quintus Ennius

Looking back on my life, I'd say I am grateful to my two sons for having brought me up. It could not have been easy - for them or for their father. For me it was a "Poetry Workshop," a way of doing poetry by another means (in no sense a continuation of Iowa) - as well as the sort of upbringing I never got from my mother.

As luck would have it, I had a poet, a classical poet, for a mother. She didn't write free verse; she wrote poetry until the last years of her life in the classical Chinese style. So a lot of work was done for me - when you imbibe Tang and Sung poets with a mother who chanted verses on the balcony in the moonlight. — Wong May

If a poem is not memorable, there's probably something wrong. One of the problems of free verse is that much of the free verse poetry is not memorable. — Robert Morgan

Just as in the second part of a verse bad poets seek a thought to fit their rhyme, so in the second half of their lives people tend to become more anxious about finding actions, positions, relationships that fit those of their earlier lives, so that everything harmonizes quite well on the surface: but their lives are no longer ruled by a strong thought, and instead, in its place, comes the intention of finding a rhyme. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Scatter as a prayer
escaping my lips...

as orchids
blooming in clouds. — Sanober Khan

Among those today who believe that modern poetry must do without rhyme or metre, there is an assumption that the alternative to free verse is a crash course in villanelles, sestinas and other such fixed forms. But most ... are rare in English poetry. Few poets have written a villanelle worth reading, or indeed regret not having done so. — James Fenton

Poetry speaks most effectively and inclusively (whether in free or formal verse) when it recognizes its connection - without apology - to its musical and ritualistic origins. — Dana Gioia

"vers libre," (free verse) or nine-tenths of it, is not a new metre any more than sleeping in a ditch is a new school of architecture. — G.K. Chesterton

Modernism in other arts brought extreme difficulty. In poetry, the characteristic difficulty imported under the name of modernism was obscurity. But obscurity could just as easily be a quality of metrical as of free verse. — James Fenton