poetry that leaves you gasping for air

By; sofia garcia

In poetry, there are rules. Some poets follow the rules of rhyme and meter while there are others that could care less about those rules. Those rule breakers created something called free verse. They try to fool their readers by claiming they are writing “free verse”, and that of course is matter of opinion. Free verse just means the poet made up their own rules to write their poem.

Whitman in his poem, “I Sing the Body Electric” he uses free verse. He writes in run-on sentences which contain very little punctuation, and literally leaves the reader breathless. There is no name for that, but it inspired poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio to write “We Are All Whitman: #2: Song of/ to/ My/ Your/ Self” and “Song of Myself:  Walt Whitman in Other Words” which are just as breathless as Whitman’s “I Sing the Body Electric”.

Surprisingly enough, Ambroggio actually writes in “We Are All Whitman: #2: Song of/ to/ My/ Your/ Self”, “In everyone’s Self,/the poem’s universal soul,/in each innumerable Walt Whitman,/cosmos without rubrics,/”, in which he references Whitman which led me to assume that he was Ambroggio’s inspiration to write theses poems as long as the tittles themselves.

When Professor Humberto Garcia, read “I Sing the Body Electric” to the class, he was out of breath by the time he was finished reading it. In contrast, when Luis Alberto Ambroggio, Christopher Merril, and Sholeh Wolpe read “Song of Myself:  Walt Whitman in Other Words” they sound like they are reading a book to the audience. The three narrators have their breathing composed.

In “I Sing the Body Electric” Whitman talks about how his poetry affects the body and proceeds to break it into parts in his poem. He goes on about this without stopping. He even says it in his poem, “I believe the likes of you shall stand or fall with/my poems and that they are my poems” (Whitman lines7-8). This poet believes that poetry should reach every country so he goes on to list every country. It leads Ambroggio to have the same rhythmic enumeration. On the subject, translator and poet Sholeh Wolpe says that when you translate poetryyou get “into the bone of poetry.”