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Okay ... I've heard of prose poems ... and I'm not sure what kind of critters those things are. I will be honest ... I can be rather persnickety about poetry. I fell in love with modern poetry in my college years. Maxine Kumin, e.e. cummings, and the lot. I still have my well worn, blue paperback, thick as a church cornerstone Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry around here somewhere.
Verse novels are playgrounds for figurative language. Metaphors, similes, symbolic imagery, assonance, consonance, alliteration --- it's like a fireworks store filled with literary devices. Boom! Sizzle! Flash! You can do so much more with so much less in a verse novel.
Verse can and should still have a sense of rhythm even when it does not follow a strict metrical pattern. Each word counts and should be carefully chosen. Line breaks also contribute to the rhythm. I usually make a line break where the speaker would naturally pause. Sometimes I may isolate words on a line for emphasis. Sometimes my line breaks are solely practical and done in a way to get the whole dang poem to fit on one page.
So, here concludes my brief sputterings on verse novels. I suppose I should end with something profound or witty, but I have work to do. For someone who resisted this genre for a long time, I have one out, one bubbling on the stove, and the recipe for a third on the table.
These are good thoughts. For something that reads very much like prose poems to me, pick up Naomi Shihab Nye's Honeybee, which came out last year. It's got lots of actual poems in it (and they are brilliant), and lots of compact, gem-like short short stories that read an awful lot like poetry (lots of use of poetic devices and language, but it sure looks like prose). I (and several other panelists for the CYBILS) considered many of them to be prose poems. Whether we are correct or not is another thing.
ReplyDeleteLike these free verse sputterings...thanks!
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