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“April April
Sinks through the sand of names”
~ W.S. Merwin

Here we are at the beginning of April and after my last MTB prompt looking into the meaning of names, I did a little research and discovered that April most likely derives from the Latin name Aprilis from the verb aperire, “to open“, an allusion to its being the season when trees and flowers begin to open. This ties in with the modern Greek (ánixi) (opening) for spring.

Emily Wakefield’s prose poem “April” certainly taps into this sense of an initial blossoming:

“...it makes sense that we met in April. It makes sense that the leaves have filled out around their branches and the thunder wakes me up before dawn with thoughts of you and it makes sense that I can smell the rain shower through my open windows. The flowers bloom like they know a prophetic secret and the sun shines brighter to let them. It makes sense….”

In this second verse of his “April Morning” poem, Jonathon Wells hints at opening as a very beginning:

“This Sunday the rain turns cold
again and steady but the window 
is slightly open and there is the vaguest 
sense of bird song somewhere in the gaps 
between the buildings because it's spring 
the calendar says and the room where 
you are reading is empty yet full 
of what loves you and this is the day
that you were born.

Aside from their mutual topic, what both poems have in common is the clue to this prompt, and there is hint of it too in the first verse of Czeslaw-milosz “Ars Poetica”:

“I have always aspired to a more spacious form
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose 
and would let us understand each other without exposing 
the author or reader to sublime agonies….”

For some of us those agonies are in the very form of poetry – that is The Closed Poetry Form of rhymes in a set scheme, syllabic counts, the meter of stressed and unstressed syllables etc.

So for this prompt our writing will be in the Open Poetry Form, otherwise known as Free Verse or Vers Libre. This is not to be regarded as an anarchic free-for -all but rather poetry set free from the uniform straight jacket.

So your poem can include any of poetry’s characteristics but without any consistent regularity:

  • rhyme (inner, end) meter;
  • repetition; alliteration; assonance
  • imagery, symbolism, metaphor

The underlying challenge to Open Poetry is to give your poem a structure, which inevitably lies within its musicality and cadence, akin to the conversational. The above Free Verse poems gives us a sense of this.

And what of topic? That too is a free choice but suggestions include April; Open; Love (since the month of April was dedicated to the goddess Aphrodite.) Or even an Ars Poetica on this poetry style

Useful Links:
Open Form with poetry examples
How to write a Free Verse poem
10 of the Best Free Verse poems
dVerse – Form for All… 2012

So once you have posted your poem according to the guidelines above, do add it to Mr Linky below then go visiting and reading other contributors as that is half the fun of our dVerse gatherings.

[N.B. Mr Linky closes Saturday 3 p.m. EST]

ANNOUNCEMENT: We are going to celebrate the 15th anniversary of our dVerse in 2026 and invite poets from around the world to contribute!!
~SEE HERE ~