Thank you for your response, John. I appreciate your insight and a part of me agrees. I just feel that something that really does come from your core and prose that you’ve worked at — be it free verse — will build a connection with the reader. Poetry is plain truth.

And rhyming is not the only way to build rythm in a poem. The few poems I’ve written don’t rhyme but I work upon one piece for days on end. Until I find that one thing that sets it alive.

For example, here are a few verses from Jane Hirshfield’s The Weighing (1953),

“So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it.”

To me, that’s real poetry. It doesn’t even occur to me that there’s no rhyme.

When I read Rilke or Agha Shahid Ali, I feel connected. Regardless of whether there is rhyme or not.