Yep, I confess, it’s been ages since I wrote in this blog! In my defense, I have been busy with two
big poetry-related projects since my last update. The first is that I changed
jobs, moving from a public community mental health team to facilitating groups
in a private mental health hospital and day program. As part of my new role, I
have been preparing and leading creative writing groups for inpatients and
outpatients, and it has been so enjoyable. It is so satisfying for me to be
able to bring my occupational therapy skills and my writing skills together in
this role, and to practice one of the core principles of my profession – using
occupation (meaningful activity) for therapeutic purposes. I love bringing
people together to write and share words in a way that helps them with their
recovery journeys. It’s a privilege to listen to the diversity and the richness
of writing when participants choose to read out what they’ve written in
response to the same prompts. It’s also fun to share poems from some of my favourite
poets and see how the group responds to them – we often have robust discussions
(while being respectful of everyone’s opinions of course!) I find myself listening
to writing podcasts, watching poetry videos and reading poetry and other
creative writing with a double purpose now – for my own enjoyment but also to
find material that would be good to share with the group.
The second piece of news is that in May last year I was awarded a
Career Development Grant from the Australia Council, which is the arts funding
and advisory body of the Australian Government. This meant I was able to work
with a mentor and editor, the wonderful Gina Mercer, to transform my second
poetry collection – which is all based on one theme – into a verse novel. It
was so exciting to delve into the little-known genre of verse novels, read as
many as I could, ponder the qualities that I liked best about my favourite
ones, and expand my own skills by writing one. Gina is a fantastic mentor and
was so helpful in coming up with ideas to help me when I was stuck. Once I
finally settled on some key character and location details, the new poems came
thick and fast. Gina was also very helpful with the editing phase, which mostly
happened concurrently, helping me to pare back my words to make the work as
sharp and concise as possible.
I will write more about this project in a future post, but for
now, I thought I would share some notes about what I have learnt so far about
verse novels. Okay so it turned into a bit of an essay, read on if you are
interested …
Not many
people even know they exist! So writing a verse novel is absolutely not the
best way to become rich and famous … lucky that’s not my goal. Still, it would
be nice if more people knew what verse novel were, and maybe had read a few good
ones …
What’s the
definition of a verse novel? I'd say it is story-telling through
poetry.
How long
have they been about? A long time! Wikipedia lists
some of the older verse narratives which date back to Ancient Greece in the 8th
Century BC, including the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Other classics often
mentioned are Byron's Don Juan (1818–24), Alexander Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin (1831) and Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora
Leigh (1857). I haven’t read many of the classics but I'd like to. I have read Vikram Seth's The
Golden Gate (1986), which apparently was a surprise bestseller, and
really enjoyed it. I thought it flowed along well, considering it was written
completely in Petrarchan sonnets, and it covered a satisfying mix of
themes and relationships dramas.
According to Wikipedia, “the Australian poet, C.J. Dennis, had
great success in Australia during World War I with his verse novels, The
Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915), and The Moods of Ginger
Mick (1916).” I’ve just taken these out of the library and am looking
forward to reading them. Derek Walcott's award-winning Omeros (1990)
was also mentioned in a lot of the interviews.
What are
they about? Anything and everything! I went on much the same journey as Judy
Johnson who wrote “When I first became interested in writing a verse novel, I
binge-read every example I could get my hands on: contemporary, historical,
Australian and culturally diverse. I suppose I was looking for a bright star, a
guiding principle that I could lean on whilst writing my own. Nothing of the
sort exists of course. What I have learnt, is that, like poetry itself, the
world of verse novels is a broad and inclusive church. Long may it remain so.” (From
Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on
Writing edited by Linda Weste). I definitely came across some favourites though,
and sought to learn from their techniques.
Dorothy Porter wrote some riveting crime thrillers in this genre,
including probably her most famous, The
monkey’s mask, featuring the cynical lesbian private investigator Jill
Fitzpatrick, and my favourite of hers, El
Dorado, also a crime thriller, this time about the hunt for a serial child
killer, which includes a focus on the friendship between an investigative
police officer and his long-time lesbian friend. (Two of her other verse
novels, What a Piece of Work and Wild Surmise, won the Miles Franklin
Literary Award and El Dorado was
nominated for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in 2007.)
Bernadine Evaristo, best known for her Man Booker Prize-winning book Girl,
Woman, Other, wrote about her family history in the verse novel Lara, which I loved. When talking about
one of her other verse novels, The
Emperor’s Babe, she describes herself as a “literary archaeologist”, in
that when she first found out that there were Africans in Britain before the
English arrived, she felt propelled to “get black British stories out there”,
so she wrote about the life of a black African girl in AD 211 in London, who
becomes a lover to the Emperor. I found this book to be so clever, original and
captivating.
Sally Morgan’s Sister Heart
is a heart-wrenchingly beautiful book, told from the perspective of a young
Aboriginal girl who is taken from the north of Australia and sent to an
institution in the distant south. Morgan cuts the words down to the bare bones and her measured use of repetition and dialogue is brilliant. It is concise and
quick to read but leaves a lasting impression. I think that is one of the
strengths of the verse novel form – it is possible to tell a dark or tragic
story without dragging people down too much or for too long, because the poetic
form allows the story to be told in crisp snippets or vignettes, with the
softening and enriching addition of imagery, metaphor, rhythm or aural devices
and carefully curated words. Unlike most regular novels, many verse novels can
be read in one sitting where it’s possible to enjoy the beginning, middle and
the end all in one evening (like a movie).
Judy Johnson’s Jack is
another one of my favourite verse novels, telling the story of a captain’s “mesmerising descent into madness on
board a Torres Strait pearling lugger in the 1930s.” (from Venetia Green’s
Bookreads Review). Although it’s a grim, masculine-focused read, it was
fascinating in terms of the characters, the setting, the history of shell
diving and the skilful use of poetry to tell the story.
I also enjoyed Stag’s Leap
by Sharon Olds, which is not exactly a verse novel but a masterful series of
poems about divorce, telling an autobiographical story.
And
my last favourite mention is Sarah Crossan’s Toffee which tells the story of a
teenage girl, Allison, who runs away from her abusive father and
accidentally ends up with an old lady who has dementia and thinks Allison is
her childhood friend called Toffee. I have ordered Crossan’s other verse novels
and can’t wait to read them, including her first one for adults, Here is the Beehive,
which was released last year (see The Guardian review).
Are verse
novels popular? A 2016 article by Claire Hennessey in The
Irish Times titled “The rise of the YA novel in verse” mentioned that “in American bookstores,
Ellen Hopkins regularly tops the New York Times bestseller list. Hopkins, like
many writers of YA verse novels, uses the sparseness of the form to explore
some very difficult subjects in sensitive ways.” She said that they often
attract favourable attention from critics, giving the example that “Jacqueline
Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, a
memoir of her childhood as an African-American in the 1960s, racked up a
variety of awards including the National Book Award for Young People’s
Literature, a Newbery Honor, and a Coretta Scott King Award.”
Imogen Russell Williams argued in
The Guardian (UK) in May 2019 that “Young
Adult verse novels are currently in the ascendant, with three American poets
appearing on the Carnegie shortlist: The Poet X by Elizabeth
Acevedo, Long Way Down by Jason Reynolds, and Rebound by
Kwame Alexander. On this side of the Atlantic, the driving force behind the
verse novel’s resurgence is the Irish children’s laureate Sarah Crossan, whose
2011 book The Weight of Water won acclaim both from adult
reviewers and from a wide-ranging young readership. Crossan went on to produce
more highly successful verse novels: One, a story of conjoined
twins, won the Carnegie in 2016, and Moonrise, an account of a
boy’s farewell to a brother on death row, was shortlisted for the 2017 Costa
children’s prize.”
It seems that Hennessey was right in thinking that Irish and UK
writers would soon catch on to the verse novel trend happening in the USA. In that
2016 article she argued that “The American readership seems to have realised
earlier than we have that poetry can be a way of tackling the very difficult
subjects without giving into the temptation to preach. When every single word
counts, the tendency to state the moral of the story – and then state it again
just in case the reader didn’t quite understand – becomes much more obvious to
both author and editor, and they can pull back in time.
Writer Lisa Jacobson, in a 2014 interview for Writer’s Victoria, listed
some of her favourite Australian verse novels and stated that “I sense the form
is experiencing a revival, both here and abroad.” She said this is especially
so for young adult readers, writing that “in this current climate, it’s the
Young Adult (YA) verse novels that are flooding the bookshelves”, maybe because
“the verse novel is a great way to capture younger audiences with increasingly
short attention spans and get them reading!”
Thanks to Linda Weste for putting together a book called Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing
where she interviews twenty-two verse novelists from the UK, USA, Australia and
Canada about the genre. It was so great, when setting off on this project, to
be able to start by reading direct words from verse novelists, including two of
my favourites – Bernardine Evaristo and Judy Johnson. Some of the snippets that
I thought were especially interesting from this book were:
Bernardine Evaristo: “I think they [verse novels] work best when
there’s a real sense of character, drama and storytelling. I think the
boundaries are and should be porous. The verse novel is a form of reinvention
that can embrace the best of both genres – fiction and poetry.” It was so
interesting to read about how she went about writing her verse novels Lara and The Emperor’s Babe – Lara
started as a prose novel and then she spent two years reworking it into a verse
novel – and The Emperor’s Babe began
life as a few poems about a black Roman girl growing up in London 1800 years
ago and ended up as a book-length sequence of poems about her life – “I then
found myself writing a high velocity narrative that moved along at some pace
but it needed its quieter moments for balance and emotional depth. As a writer
whose background is in poetry and verse drama, I crafted the novel as a poet,
polishing each “poem” before moving on to the next. Of course it’s a verse
novel, so the poems aren’t really discrete from each other, they are more like
poetic passages”.
Alice Jolly wrote that both plot and language are important in
verse novels and she prefers those that are gripping page-turners. “For me, the
verse or poetry of the book was not about slowing the reader down, or asking
him or her to pause to admire a particularly good sentence. Instead the verse
or poetry was about pushing the reader on through the narrative. I wanted to
ensure that it wasn’t only the story that was pulling the reader through the
book but the language as well.” When talking about her poetic techniques, she
wrote “My approach was to read the work aloud to myself again and again so that
I could hear the rhythms and patterns of the words.”
Christine Evans also said that she “read it aloud to myself,
walking around the room. I was listening for the language to sing.” She wrote
that “Narrative is primary in Cloudless,
but the soul of the book is in the language, so balancing those aspects took a lot
of concentration. I wanted the imagery to carry the emotional subtext of the
book.”
Sarah Corbett wrote that “I also had to think about the complex
web of symbols, details, images I was setting up over quite a large frame that
would allow the reader to make sense of my ‘puzzle’.” Judy Johnson said that
“The use of first-person dramatic monologue was my biggest narrative decision.
I also used a lot of space within lines, particularly indents, to mimic the
pauses in human thought and speech, or to withhold something for a few beats for
effect." Alice Jolly feels “that the distinction between poetry and prose
is largely illusory. A skilful writer of prose uses most of the same techniques
that a poet uses.”
Ros Barber wrote that “Story is central. The form must be dictated
by the story. Poetry gives you the option of greater emotional musculature,
should you be brave enough to use it”.
Alan Wearne wrote that “for any verse novel ‘passing muster’ a
poet must have an interest-nearing-obsession with language, character, dialogue
and narrative. All these needn’t be in perfect balance, but when a verse novel
lacks them all it ceased to be a novel and probably verse.” He believes that
“the verse novel is the domain of poets, not novelists” and that “the idea of a
novelist who hasn’t written poetry before, announcing ‘I’m going to write a
verse novel…’ is laughable.”
Many verse novelists who were interviewed talked about needing to
get the balance between narrative (or plot, story) and lyricism (or poetic
techniques) right, including Geoff Page who wrote “Overall, the main thing I’ve
learned is the important lesson of how much metaphoric or linguistic density to
employ. The balance has to be ‘just right’. If not, you have a disaster on your
hands.” Judy Johnson said that “It becomes obvious [in the editing process]
where there is too much narrative to the point that the lyricism is lost and
vice versa”. David Mason wrote “Trust the story. Don’t get too poetic.”
Christine Evans wrote that she really enjoys verse novels as a
reader. “I love white space on the page, and the necessary compression and
suggestiveness that the form commands.” She wrote that “the heart of a novel
beats through character(s) undergoing a transformative experience … we need to
travel with them as life de-rails them, and they struggle to find a way back,
forward or sideways”.
Is anyone
going to publish, review and read a verse novel? Alice
Jolly’s book Mary Ann State, Imbecile,
was recognized by the judges of major prizes such as the Walter Scott and Folio
Prize, but she wrote that initially “my publishers found it impossible to get
this book reviewed at all” and she goes on to advise writers against novels
that “involve any typographical disruption” ie are laid out on the page like a
poem, “as many readers are sadly rather cautious in their choices”.
Ros Barber, whose verse novel The
Marlowe Papers won several awards, believes that “for many adult readers,
the form is really off-putting. I can’t tell you how many people tell me they
haven’t read The Marlowe Papers
because it is in verse. The idea of poetry (and such a big chunk of poetry) is
intimidating to most readers…. even to me … I’m very quick to abandon them if
they don’t grab me in the first twenty pages or so.” She went on to say that
“Even if the storytelling is compelling, most people won’t even find that out,
because they won’t even try to read it, being intimidated by the fact that it
is in verse”.
I remember listening to a Chat 10 Looks 3 Podcast in November last
year where
Annabel Crabb talks about a verse novel she found fascinating by Sarah Crossan,
Here is the Beehive, “about a woman
who’s been having an affair with a [married] bloke for a number of years … and
he suddenly dies and … the whole novel is her coming to terms with grieving
somebody who nobody knew she had a relationship with. … The weird thing about
the book is that it is written all in verse”. Leigh Sales then says “Oh, you
know what? I was going to ask you can I have it, and then as soon as you’ve
said that, it’s put me off”. “No no no, no, ah but that’s the thing, I thought
oh no, AND you just do not notice. It’s not like rhyming verse. It is really
really engaging. Surprisingly … You really do not notice it. Even on page one”.
She convinced Sales to give it a try. Crabb emphasised “This book, like it is a
novel … I like you thought alright ohh (disparaging tone), I’ll give this a go
… and it’s absolutely gripping. The style actually lends itself to what this
character is doing which is living in her own mind, remembering fragments
…” While Sales also spoke about Dorothy
Porter’s The Monkey’s Mask, saying
“It’s a thriller and it’s really brilliantly done and I loved it”, both Crabb
and Sales’ tendency to be put off by the concept of a novel being written in
verse is widespread I think. I have noticed that, while talking passionately
about verse novels with friends, colleagues and acquaintances, no-one has ever
written down any recommendations or asked to borrow any! I often notice a kind
of blank look come over their faces and only a polite level of interest shown.
Getting people to pick up a verse novel and read the first few pages might be a
challenge.
Christine Evans also wrote about verse novels being hard to sell
and explained how she was offered a deal by an international agent if only she
would rewrite her Cloudless
manuscript from verse to prose. She decided to stick to her initial vision of
the book because “the book lives in the form that it came to me, and that gives
me joy”, even though “the likelihood is that very few people will ever read my
book”. Alan Wearne thought verse novels “could be the way of the future” or
“could be the ultimate literary mug’s game”!
All those experiences and perspectives could be very depressing to
someone, like me, who has just written their first verse novel manuscript! But
the thing is, when I read a really good verse novel, it is so intensely
satisfying. Certain stories seem to lend themselves so well to the form. And
it’s good to be different, isn’t it?!
If you want to check out verse novels, these two lists might help:
Ten verse novels recommended by Sarah Crossan
and in the Young Adult genre, 14 Books in Verse You Need to Read
Other verse novels I have read include:
·
Gap by Rebecca Jessen, which won her Best
Emerging Author at the 2013 Queensland Literary Awards
·
The Lumberjack's Dove by Genna Rose
Nethercott
·
Walking
With Camels: The Story of Bertha Strehlow by Leni Shilton
·
Freehold:
Verse Novel by Geoff Page
·
Coda for
Shirley by Geoff Page
·
Blood and
Old Belief: A Verse Novel by Paul Hetherington
Below are some of the books I have read or am looking forward to reading:
(Author quotes not otherwise attributed are from Inside the Verse Novel: Writers on Writing edited by Linda Weste).