Identity

“Identity” is written in free verse, a form that is common in Modernist and American Romantic poetry and that was popularized, in part, by the works of Walt Whitman. Free verse is unique among poetic forms due to its lack of formal constraints, but that does not mean it’s not without some formal qualities.

Often, poets dictate the form and meter of free verse by patterns of speech and the collection of ideas rather than by line count and rhythm. The organizing principle of Noboa Polanco’s poem, for instance, is the alternating description of flowers and weeds. Though some lines in “Identity” fall into an iambic meter (a metrical foot that has an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable), the number of feet vary per line, and the iambic rhythm is not consistent. One of the things that distinguishes free verse from most prose writing is the way that free verse still utilizes poetic devices, including line divisions. In this way, free verse can be seen as a freer expression of poetic ideas and images, as it is not constrained by formal rules.