Literary Technique: Free Verse
Poem Example:
Peculiar Properties
By Juan Delgado
On my cutting board, I discovered them,
the tiniest of ants, roaming dots of lead.
At first, they were too few to classify, hiding
under crumbs, these scavengers of leftovers.
Admiring their labor, I immediately granted them
citizenship, these tailgaters of a kitchen's routines.
In Miami, I had no stove, working far from my home.
My wife was a midnight call to San Bernardino.
While searching for crumbs, especially for
the taste of apricot jelly, they fell into a line
across my cutting board; I saw it again,
saw the line my sixth-grade teacher drew
on the board, pointing to each end.
While he planted himself on his desk, he leaned
his face toward us, telling us in a low voice:
"You don't see it yet, you're too young
still, but that line in front of you continues
infinitely on either side. And if there is
the slightest slope in that line, either way,
it will slowly begin to sag, then curve and veer
and eventually one end will find the other.
And lines, lines are never perfect, they are
like us, never completely straight. So just
imagine the searching that goes on all
around us, every day. And to happen on
that union is really to witness the most earthly
of forms you'll ever get to know. If you're lucky,
you'll see that, even luckier if you're part
of that union."
Biographical Information: Mexican American poet Juan Delgado first started coming to the United States with his family when he was a child. He attended California State University, San Bernardino, where he studied accounting before discovering writing and majoring in English. He earned an MFA from the University of California, Irvine, where he was a Regents Fellow. Delgado’s collections of poetry are Green Web (1994), selected by poet Dara Weir for the Contemporary Poetry Prize at the University of Georgia; El Campo (1998); A Rush of Hands (2003); and Vital Signs (2013), which is about his hometown of San Bernardino. His poems have been included in the anthology Touching the Fire: Fifteen Poets of Today’s Latino Renaissance (1998).
Delgado’s work often portrays the realities of the immigrant experience, with its attendant poverty, hardships, and love. In El Campo, Delgado’s poems about Mexican farmworkers and their families are accompanied by paintings by Simon Silva. Rosa Martha Villarreal, reviewing A Rush of Hands for Tertulia, noted the “muted images of personal sorrow and terrified wonder,” adding that Delgado “takes images from the community of shadows, the undocumented immigrants, and gives substance to their being.”
Explanation of Technique: Free verse is poetry that does not rhyme or have a regular meter. This poem is a free verse because it does not rhyme nor does it have a consistent, regular meter. It tends to follow the rhythm of regular speech.
Interpretation of Poem: In this poem, Delgado sees a line of hungry ants march across his cutting board. They remind him of a little speech given by his sixth grade teacher on the property of lines. To summarize his speech, a line continues infinitely in either direction, but one slant or curve could completely change the line. Eventually, both ends will meet. Just like lines, people are never straight. They bend and twist and curve, searching for their other end to complete themselves.
Visual Representation:
Explanation of Visual: This image depicts a group of ants marching along in a rather crooked line. When the narrator of the poem sees ants across his cutting board, he is reminded of the fact that like lines, people aren't always straight. This picture is appropriate for the poem because it matches the first two stanzas.
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