From: AAngel at aol.com <AAngel>
Date: Wed, 9 Apr 2003 15:19:21 EDT

In reading over comments about verse that proved "too sophisticated for the voice that is supposedly narrating," I was surpised that Grimes' "Bronx Masquerade" was pulled out by Steven as an example of poems where "the characters truly have composed the poetry they share ..." but said he felt
"...it was a stretch at times, and the style of poetry not diverse enough
(though the poems themselves were very effective)." I thought that the poems reflected Grimes' characters well from the perspective of the age of a particular voice and intended poetic ability. It was interesting to me to see the way each individual character's emotional honesty and insight grew through poetry. At the same time we witnessed an evolving understanding from each character about poetic form and format. We saw the teens go through the process of learning about poetry as they wrote. And their poetry improved.
  That brings me to another issue that has come up in these conversations about the poetic novelists' use of free verse and the question about whether it is, in fact, poetry. I think I already said that although there's some poetry out there that probably isn't of the highest literary quality, much of what I've been reviewing for an upcoming article relies upon poetic devices. I think that's the case for a lot of the free verse novels, too. Although Grimes' "Bronx Masquarade" feels, in the beginning, like it's bogging down in free verse -- or as Steven pointed out, a lack of diversity among poetic forms -- Gromes' novel reflects a true teen voice while demonstrating how teens learn and begin to use poetic forms in their own writing.
    A closer look at the uses of free verse might help all of us to evaluate which of the poetry novels we're reading has true poetic value. From my reading, I've seen that the strongest of these rely either upon multiple internal voices to allow insight into a particular event (Such as The Brimstone Journals which is a schoolwide story about a potentially volitile Columbine-like situation, and Mel Glenn's Split Images which is a variety of teens' recalling their perceptions of a young woman's togetherness only to discover she commits suicide) or they rely upon a single voice that uses metaphor and figures of speech to deliver emotionally intense and personal stories. They do this well by "telling it slant," much the way Walt Whitman used his incredible imagery and metaphor to tell it slant. For example, his famous poem, "The Red Wheelbarrow" that begins, "Much depends upon..." offers up a metaphor for the intensity of a moment when the poet looks outside the room of a dying person and can only focus on the red wheelbarrow in order to know this moment is real. The poet captures this intense moment with a visual image -- like a snapshot. Contemporary novels that use a variation of this technique include Creech's Love that Dog and Karen Hesse's Out of the Dust. In Out of the Dust we're allowed to see, through metaphor and what's left unsaid, visual images that don't actually happen on the page. For example, Billie Jo writes of how, after her mother runs from the house to escape a pail of burning kerosene, "I tore after her/ then,/ thinking of the burning pail/ left behind in the bone-dry kitchen,/ I flew back and grabbed it,/ throwing it out the door./ I didn't know./ I didn't know Ma was coming back."
   We don't need Billie Jo to tell us she poured burning kerosene on her mother. We know. The moment carried incredible emotional power and poignancy because Billie Jo can't say what happened. This is an excellent example of using the spare language of poetry to tell of an emotionally intense event in such a way as to avoid melodrama.
   Sonya Sones uses similar poetic devices in her free verse novel What My Mother Doesn't Know. Movement and growth occur in "It's Been Rachel, Grace and Me Ever Since," when Sones punctuates poetic movement by ending each verse with a variation on a refrain: "But they did." "But she did." "But we had."
  In Whitechurch, a novel for older young adults, written in sections of internally personal poetry interspersed between narrative, Chris Lynch uses reptitition to demonstrate the turmultuous emotions of Oakley, a character who realizes that in standing back and doing or saying nothing about bad situations, he has been a part of the problem. Okaley explains, "I sit at the window watching the wind blow." A few stanza's later, he repeats the refrain while moving the poem with additional detail, "Watching from my room, facing the street." Later, "And I watch." In this case repetition used as a poetic device spirals toward a violent outcome and the intensely personal response that comes of Oakley's realization. He's in part responsible because all he did was watch.
   I think we need to look at how we can use these contemporary examples of poetry to draw teens into the genre. The incredible contemporary literature that exists is much more accessible to teens than Shakespeare and Whitman and Browning's rich poetics that require knowledge of past language, lifestyles, historical references and politics. Teaching a contemporary novel about urban violence, grudges, romanctic love, or prejudice and its consequences alongside Romeo & Juliet makes so much sense. Teachers can bring teens to the poetry in an accessible form and then let them enrich themselves, their sense of history and place in history with some of the classics.
 Anyhow, I've loved following this discussion and appreciate that YA writers are experimenting with poetic forms so we have this additional opportunity to bring poetry to our students. I'm also interested in hearing if others find that they can use these longer poems to draw students into the world of poetry. Ann Angel
Received on Wed 09 Apr 2003 02:19:21 PM CDT