What is a good free verse poem?
This is one I like quite a lot: O my pa-pa by Bob Hicok Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop. They sit in a circle of disappointment over our fastballs and wives. We thought they didn’t read our stuff, whole anthologies of poems that begin, My father never, or those that end, and he was silent as a carp, or those with middles which, if you think of the right side as a sketch, look like a paunch of beer and worry, but secretly, with flashlights in the woods, they’ve read every word and noticed that our nine happy poems have balloons and sex and giraffes inside, but not one dad waving hello from the top of a hill at dusk. Theirs is the revenge school of poetry, with titles like “My Yellow Sheet Lad” and “Given Your Mother’s Taste for Vodka, I’m Pretty Sure You’re Not Mine.” They’re not trying to make the poems better so much as sharper or louder, more like a fishhook or electrocution, as a group they overcome their individual senilities, their complete distaste for language, how clo
