Blank Verse: Mindful Poetry's Form-of-the-Month for July, 2012

 

 

 

Blank minds, blank calendars, blank looks, blank verse. Anything here sound familiar? My life these days is anything but blank. I’ve launched a new business—taxi driver. My only clients are my children who have jobs, but no license. If it weren’t so blanketie-blank-blank hot, they’d all be able to bike to work. But since they all work in some aspect of the food industry, arriving at work in an unappetizing state isn’t acceptable.

This month of July, we will be writing in blank verse. Although that formal metered pattern takes its place as most common and well-known in English poetry, Mindful Poetry—almost four years old—has never featured it. Frankly, I find writing a poem in blank verse with its lack of structure or rules analogous to walking a tight rope with no net. (Hyperbole, anyone?)

Blank verse, five unrhymed iambic feet per line, is simply an instruction for the line itself, it does not elaborate on the structure of the poem beyond the line. Therefore, your poem may have any number of lines, any number of stanzas or no stanzas at all, but one long contiguous-lined poem.

Friends of Mindful Poetry, it’s uncharacteristic of me, but I offer you a blank slate. Write your poetry at will as long as you maintain blank verse. While you might find in books or online variations on blank verse, we will follow the teaching as this: blank verse contains five iambic feet per line and is never rhymed. (p. 667, An Introduction to Poetry, tenth ed., X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia.)

As an example of blank verse that I found sublime, read Gretchen Lee Bourquin's Permission.

Additionally, today's prompt: write about phobias or fears. I'll send out another prompt in ten days.

Last month’s ballades were light in number, but not in skill. Please take some time to visit our Feature Page and read them where they are highlighted for a week more.