Exploring Genres - Free Verse and Verse Novels

by Jeanette O'Hagan

In the last Genre Post - Valerie Volk ably spoke for the value and place of poetry. (You can read her post here.)  Before we move on to another genre, let's explore a little more the possibilities of poetry.

Often when we think of poetry, we think of rhyming couplets, but there are, in fact, a wide number of poetic forms and traditions. There are traditional forms like couplets, sonnets and ballads; humorous forms such as limericks; or more challenging forms like villanelles and sistenas. There are also Japanese forms such as haikus and tankas, Arabic or Burmese forms etc and modern forms like found or shaped poetry.

Today, I'd like to explore two - the verse novel and free verse.

Verse Novel

As Valerie reminded us, the verse narrative (a story told in verse) is as old as story telling, itself.

The Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer's Iliad and Beowulf are all ancient stories told through poetry.  While much of the Bible is in prose - Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations and most of Job are told poetically. Hebrew poetry relies more on structures such as parallelism, chiasmus (x-type pattern), assonance (similar sounds) and word puns, than rhyme and rhythm. Chaucer and Shakespeare used poetic verse. At a popular level, local stories were expressed in ballads - such as 'The Man from Snowy River'.

Since the eighteenth century and the rise of the novel, prose has replaced poetry as the preferred way to tell stories.

However, in recent decades, the verse novel has emerged as a popular genre, particularly in young adult literature. In a verse novel the narrative is told either entirely, or in part, by poetry. It also includes characters, point of view, dialogue, narration, description, and other features appropriate to writing a novel. The poetry may be traditional form with strict rhyming and meter, but it is often told in free verse.

Calvin Miller's powerful trilogy - The Singer, The Song, The Finale - is an allegorical and poetic retelling of Jesus' life, death and resurrection that helps one see this pivotal story with new eyes.

More recently, Michelle Dennis Evans has published Sink, Drift or Swim - a young adult, free verse novel about Rina's fishing trip with her dad. It an engaging and dramatic tale told from Rina's point-of-view in her distinctive voice.

Why not just tell the story in prose? By choosing free verse, Michelle Evans brings both a vividness and a focus to Rina's experiences and thoughts. It enables Michelle to tackle a serious subject with a light hand. I think it adds to the impact of the book.

So, what is free verse?

Free Verse

Usually, when English speakers think of poetry, we think of rhyme and meter (or beat), e.g. 'I'm a poet, and I didn't know it.' As I mentioned above, other cultures use different devices. The Hebrews especially liked parallelism, Japanese poetry often focuses of syllables. However, with English poetic forms we also have blank verse (meter without rhyme) and free verse (which may include rhyme, but isn't tied to a particular meter).

Free verse uses other elements such as assonance, metaphor, image, alliteration, the senses, themes, pacing, white space and other visual elements such as changes in font or how the letters are aligned to convey meaning and emotion.

While there is both a discipline and indeed a refining process in using a particular poetic form like a ballad or a villanelle - there is a freedom in free verse which I particularly enjoy.

Often poetry is a way of expressing the inexpressible, of allowing deep emotions eloquence and crystallisation. Free verse gives freedom to vary the rhythm and pace. Also, I find an element of play and fun with free verse.

Here is an example from my own work - but I'd also urge you to check out poets such as Michelle Dennis Evans or Cameron Semmens 10 Poems that can really help you through a tough spot and his other books or perhaps some of the poems in Glimpses of Light, especially Sue Jeffrey's 'Sight' or Mazzy Adams 'Journey' for great examples of free verse.

Thunderstorm

The teacher’s voice drones on

Futt, futt, white dusty blades whirl

the fan rotating overhead

listlessly pushing the hot humid air

around the temporary aluminium heat box.

At last the sonorous school bell rings

Books slap shut, chairs squeal, pushed backwards

“Class dismissed” “Homework due on Monday”

and we jostle and stream out into the turbid air.

Moisture beads on my upper lip,

my forehead and armpits drip.

Overhead white cotton candy clouds tower.

I adjust the strap cutting into my shoulder

and daydream my way home.

Clouds roil and collide

stacking ever higher

their underbellies bruised in aubergine tones.

The sudden hush of bird song,

a fitful wind stirs

harrying leaves along gutters

eyes seared by silver flashes

sonic booms reverberating

watery missiles pelting down

stinging arms and face

water sluicing through flattened hair

burrowing past turned up collar

flowing in plump streams

pooling and gurgling

overflowing in the gutters.

My shoes squelch

with each liberated step

until laughing and gasping

I hug my slick school bag

and run as I laugh

attempting to chart a path

between the silver rain drops

flying towards home.

Jeanette O'Hagan ( First published, Judge's choice, Poetica Christi Inner Child, 2014)

So - if you have an inkling to write poetry - but have always got bogged down in meter and rhyme - why not give free verse a go?

***This is a cross post with Australasian Christian Writers.***

Images and poems © Jeanette O'Hagan

Jeanette O’Hagan first started spinning tales in the world of Nardva at the age of eight or nine. She enjoys writing secondary world fiction, poetry, blogging and editing.

Recent publications include Heart of the Mountain: a short novella, The Herbalist's Daughter: a short story and Lakwi's Lament: a short story. Her other short stories and poems are published in a number of anthologies including Glimpses of Light, Another Time Another Place and Like a Girl. Jeanette is also writing her Akrad’s Legacy Series—a Young Adult secondary world fantasy fiction with adventure, courtly intrigue and romantic elements.

Jeanette has practised medicine, studied communication, history, theology and a Master of Arts (Writing). She loves reading, painting, travel, catching up for coffee with friends, pondering the meaning of life and communicating God’s great love. She lives in Brisbane with her husband and children.

Find her at her Facebook Page or at Goodreads or on Amazon or on her websites  JennysThread.com or Jeanette O'Hagan Writes . if you want to stay up-to-date with latest publications and developments, sign up to Jeanette O'Hagan Writes e-mail newsletter.  

Genre - Exploring Poetry

by Valerie Volk

I grew up with a father whose simple philosophy was expressed (often!) in verse quotations:

Life is mainly froth and bubble;

Two things stand like stone,

Kindness in another’s trouble,

Courage in your own.

From Adam Lindsay Gordon to Longfellow:

Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.”

These were my father’s creeds  - but he would never have classified himself as a lover of poetry. How intriguing that lines of verse expressed best the values that were so important to him!

Why does the word ‘poetry’ set up barriers?

Two preliminary thoughts spring immediately to my mind, and they are both significant. One is the poignant moment when I stood in an Adelaide bookstore and watched people pick up my just-released verse novel Passion Play – only to put it down immediately saying “Oh, it’s poetry ...”

The second, equally sad, comes in that very popular 1989 film, Dead Poets Society,  where before the advent of the charismatic Mr Keating, a poetry lesson consists of the dreary reading aloud of chapter one of a ponderous tome on the topic “What is poetry?”

Perhaps this second thought explains the first. Too many schoolrooms where the study of poetry has been a soulless dragging through besmirched classics with a relentless analysis of rhyme, rhythm, symbolism, similes and metaphors  -  and let’s not forget alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia – these have been the breeding ground for a general automatic response: “Poetry is hard work!”

But prose writing is relatively recent!

“Too hard’ is a sad reaction, because poetry has been throughout the centuries the instinctive response of people (not just that breed we call ‘poets’) to an experience that they wish to communicate as vividly as possible to others. It’s interesting to recall that novel writing, prose fiction, any of the non-poetic genres of today, are comparative newcomers on the scene, only a few centuries old, where poetry was the natural form of expression for thousands of years.

In ages before people could read and write, audiences in the great halls of castles, gatherings around camp fires, villagers welcoming travelling minstrels, fair ladies being wooed by optimistic troubadours, all were being entranced and entertained by poetry. What did it offer them?

Certainly, for the pre-literate ages the use of verse made communication much easier. The epic poems, the sagas of a heroic age, depended heavily on the devices and techniques that made the oral traditional tales easy to listen to and to remember. Rhyme and rhythm were important as an aid to understanding and literary devices such as assonance, with its repetition of vowel sounds, and alliteration, with its use of repeated consonants, were there not to be clever or ‘poetic’ but to get right into the hearer’s consciousness and memory. So still today works like Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, the Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Shakespeare’s plays are part of our literary heritage, all of them in verse.

So what does poetry offer us today?

Here we come to the crux of it: what really does poetry offer? It provides the opportunity to capture experiences, emotions, ideas in a more precise and meaningful way, for this is what poets of all ages have wanted to do: to communicate at the deepest level with readers in ways that make their words a shared experience, and one to remember. Poets want to open our eyes to see things in a new way, whether it’s Wordsworth standing on London Bridge on a fresh new morning, a sight so touching in its majesty, or Shelley, listening to a skylark, and marveling at its unpremeditated art, or Wilfred Owen, bringing home to us the horrors of World War One, with its returning soldiers bent double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags.

Difficult? No. The fact that poetry has been, traditionally, broken into lines seems to make casual viewers think that some special initiation into this art form is needed. Yet the line divisions in fact give us the chance to pause, hesitate, feel the emphasis on words in a way that allows them to carry special weight and power. Similarly, the language use in poetry is often richer and more flexible than that in everyday speech. Again, it heightens our responses. The potential of even standard devices, such as alliteration, is recognized in today’s advertising world – how many product jingles depend on alliteration! Try watching commercial television with an ear to this, and you’ll swiftly see its value in making an impact.

We read poetry to be moved and challenged to see the world in new ways. When Hopkins writes The world is charged with the grandeur of God we catch our breath with the sudden shock of his words – and that’s exactly what he wants.

This one line actually crystallizes what I’m saying. Take that word ‘charged.’ In a single word it opens so many thoughts, from the sense of electric vitality and force with which God created the world to the responsibilities we are charged with as custodians of the earth. It would take prose several paragraphs at least to explore these ideas, but in the succinctness of poetry they are evoked with one word. That is poetry’s potential.

But what we are talking about with this term poetry anyway?

Let’s move away from the blanket definitions, like Coleridge’s famous ‘the best words in the best order.’ It’s not a genre in itself, but almost needs a series of discussions on the various types of poetic genres: epic poetry, narrative poetry, descriptive poetry, lyric poetry with odes and idylls, dramatic poetry and the dramatic monologue, didactic poetry with its focus on teaching a lesson, satirical and humorous verse, specific forms such villanelles, sestinas,  triolets, rondels, ballads and sonnets, foreign forms like haiku, tanka and cinquain. What about song lyrics or rap poems? Poets can write in strict rhymed forms with lines that follow a huge variety of patterns, or they can choose unrhymed forms such as blank verse or the even more open free verse. Or further still these days, prose poetry, where it is only the heightened language use and phrasing that makes the classification ‘poetry’ possible.

Why do I write poetry?

I write poetry because I want to share as intensely as possible a scene, a person, an idea, that has been important to me, and I try to communicate this by calling on all that poetry makes possible. I try very hard to overcome the threatening reputation this genre so unfairly has acquired.

What makes me happy is when someone reads my work and says: “I’ve never read poetry, but you know, I could understand that. It really didn’t seem like poetry.”

I like to think my Dad would have felt the same. And I’m intrigued by the realization that many of the important ethical lessons he taught me I recall easily because they are expressed in poetry.

This blogpost was also published on Australasian Christian Writers.

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Meet Valerie Volk:

As a seven-year-old I wrote embarrassingly bad fairy stories. Now, many decades later, I’m still writing  ... but I hope there’s been improvement. In between, there have been years as an academic, a researcher and an education program director in three Australian states –  but at last I’m a full-time writer with awards for both poems and short stories, which are to be found in journals, anthologies and magazines.

My first published collection, In Due Season, won the national Omega Writers CALEB Poetry Prize in 2010. The following year produced A Promise of Peaches, a verse novel, (Ginninderra Press), while my third book, Even Grimmer Tales, (Interactive Publications) is a dark and wickedly funny modern take on Grimms Tales, but, as the sub-title warns, definitely ‘not for the faint-hearted.’ My fourth book, Passion Play, an extended verse novel (Wakefield Press), is a modern reincarnation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, with the medieval pilgrims replaced by twenty-first century characters travelling to the famous Passion Play at Oberammergau. Next came two shorter collections of verse, Flowers & Forebears and Indochina Days, while 2015 brought a Biblical fiction prose work, Bystanders, (Wakefield Press) and 2017 will launch Of Llamas and Piranhas, South American poems.

My main interests, apart from writing, are reading (especially crime fiction), film and theatre going, music, and food - both cooking and (as a lover of good restaurants) eating. I’m an enthusiastic traveller, especially overseas, but my focus is always the writer’s first question: What if ...?

Web link:    www.valerievolk.com.au