From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2003 14:00:36 -0500

Here are some helpful comments from Virginia Euwer Wolff, whose novels include Bat 6, Make Lemonade, and True Believer.

VIRGINIA EUWER WOLFF'S MESSAGE:

Blank verse requires lines of unrhymed iambic pentameter.

Make Lemonade & True Believer are prose written in funny-shaped lines. In those stories I was trying to catch the rhythms and breath and pulse of speech as they came from one particular narrator's mind and mouth. I hoped the language would be appropriate.

I'm a lifelong English major, a lover of poetry, and I for darn sure am not writing anything with enough heft and illumination to be called poetry. In a poem, every word must carry highly charged significance in combination with the words surrounding it. We all have our favorite examples of fiction written in lovely prose, transforming prose, prose that changes our lives. But most of it is still prose. And I'll repeat what I opined to Roger Sutton (Horn Book, May/June 2001):
"Poetry should have more ergs per word."




Ginny Moore Kruse gmkruse at education.wisc.edu
Received on Wed 09 Apr 2003 02:00:36 PM CDT