Verbless poetry is poetry written without the use of verbs.
From A Poet’s Glossary
The following definition of the term verbless poetry is reprinted from A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch.
Poems without verbs. On one hand, the verbless poem can create a static quality, a sense of the arrested moment, which is why it has appealed to poets who write haiku and other types of imagist poems. For example, Ezra Pound’s defining imagist poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” consists of fourteen words without a verb. It juxtaposes two images without a comment, suggesting rather than stating the relationship, and in the process freezes a moment in time. Here is the original version that first appeared in Poetry: A Magazine of Verse (April 1913):
The apparition of these faces in the crowd :
Petals on a wet, black bough
On the other hand, the verbless construction can give, as the linguist Otto Jespersen points out in “The Role of the Verb (1911),” “a very definite impression of motion.” That’s why verbless constructions especially appealed to the futurists, such as F. T. Marinetti (1876–1944), who eliminated verbs in order to create a sense of telegraphic communication in a furiously changing world.
Both verbless modes, the static and the dynamic, have been employed in Russian literature, which has an unusually strong tradition of verbless poetry. On the epiphanic side: two of the most well-known lyrics by the Parnassian Afansii Fet are verbless poems, “Storm in the evening sky . . .” (1842) and “Whispers, timid breathing . . .” (1850), which are impressionistic word pictures, stopped moments. On the hyperkinetic side: the Russian imaginists (1918–1925) created a sense of dynamism in verbless poems that consisted of long strings of startling images and metaphors.