What kind of a poem is Margaret Atwood's "You Begin"?

Question

What kind of a poem is Margaret Atwood's "You Begin"?

Answer 1

It is more prose and less poetry. It is free flowing without specific meter...  It does not rhyme. It is simplistic with deep meaning.

The piece is about getting past what you have been taught and what you have initially learned; and to move on to discoveries of life and of the world. You must do this on your own, and it will be relentless.

You begin this way:

this is your hand,

this is your eye,

this is a fish, blue and flat

on the paper, almost

the shape of an eye

This is your mouth, this is an O

or a moon, whichever

you like.This is yellow.Outside the window

is the rain, green

because it is summer, and beyond that

the trees and then the world,

which is round and has only

the colors of these nine crayons.This is the world, which is fuller

and more difficult to learn than I have said.

You are right to smudge it that way

with the red and then

the orange: the world burns.Once you have learned these words

you will learn that there are more

words than you can ever learn.

The word