Melanie Hundley has another post for April and this one reminds us that we are still in the poetry month of April. To check out her earlier post click here.
There is something about a novel told in verse. Poetry, to me, sings off the page as it constructs the story; each poem stands on its own but, taken together, the poems create a story that moves and flows differently than prose. Narratives constructed across poems seem to be a series of intense moments captured and seamed together by deep threads of emotion and rhythm. Poetry, by its nature, is both written and visual; it is writing that uses language and form to evoke emotion, sound, meaning, rhythm, and images in the reader. The layout and placement of words on the page become part of the reading as well—the white space and placement of words is also part of the meaning. Poetry, because it is condensed, focuses on the essence of the moment and uses the absence of words to create and evoke. The silence at the end of a line of text or in the spaces between verses allows for the reader to fill in, to pause, to think.
Since the start of the pandemic, I have noticed an increase in my reading of novels in verse. I am not sure if it because I have seen the pandemic as a series of intense moments of fear, worry, and hope or if it is because I have been surrounded by incredibly rich and powerful verse novels. For whatever reason, novels in verse have been a huge part of my reading life. Because these novels were such a big part of my reading life, they became a big part of my teaching life. These texts served as tools for classroom discussion and as mentor texts for student writers. I am going to focus on three of them for this post: Ordinary Hazards by Nikki Grimes, The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep by Allan Wolf, and Starfish by Lisa Fipps.
Nikki Grimes’s Ordinary Hazards is a beautiful and painful memoir. From moments of observation in her writing notebook to descriptions of friendships she had and lost to questions of whether or not her mother would stop drinking, Grimes offers a view into her life. She describes the hazards of a life—the ordinary and extraordinary events that shape someone. She says:
Nikki Grimes’s Ordinary Hazards is a beautiful and painful memoir. From moments of observation in her writing notebook to descriptions of friendships she had and lost to questions of whether or not her mother would stop drinking, Grimes offers a view into her life. She describes the hazards of a life—the ordinary and extraordinary events that shape someone. She says:
| My narrative’s a puzzle. What’s next and next and next I couldn’t say. The moments, hours, days a jumble. The only thread connecting them is me, and even then the thread is frayed-- the break, at most, a hair’s breadth away. (p. 209) |  |
A student in one of my classes said in response to this poem that “Covid and the whole pandemic thing has been like this poem. The threads of everything are frayed and a break or breakout of the illness seem so close, a hair’s breadth away.” The other students in the class echoed this feeling and connected it back to those moments in your life where things seem “stable but so very fragile.” Ordinary Hazards became a writing mentor text for them, a way to look back and make sense of a painful time in their lives. They wrote about masks, the distance between friends, the conflicting messages about COVID, the loss of family, and the pain of testing and vaccines.
Wolf’s The Snow Fell Three Graves Deep tells the story of the Donner Party’s journey across the Sierra Nevada during the winter of 1846-1847. The novel is narrated by Hunger and other members of the Donner Party. Hunger, now a character in the story, largely uses prose in its telling but the other people use verse to tell their parts. What is striking to me as a reader are the ways in which food—directions to eat, the hunt for food, the lack of food—thread through the story. References to food and then hunger build up and create suspense. Knowing that this is based on a real event is frightening as well. As one student said, “There were options and choices. This could have gone a different way. Reading it knowing how it ends makes it intriguing and painful.” One particular poem from Buck and Bright (two of the oxen) generated class discussion around the structure of a poem and how poems can provide insight into more than just the story. The poem opens with:
| We shoulder the yoke. We bow our heads. Plod our hooves into the sod. Dumbly, numbly pull the load. Chains pull tight from yoke to yoke, from pair to pair. We’ll take your wagons there. (p. 70, italics added) |  |
The lines about the chains, yoke, pair, and wagons get repeated in the next stanzas of the poem. Students focused on the ways in which the repetition created the idea that the same series of action happened over and over again for the animals and the people. This poem and its pattern of repeated lines with small variations became a mentor text and technique for the students as writers. They researched recent events and created their own versions of the story using this poem as a model. One student said, “The author wrote about an event that happened in the past. This gave us a model to write about the current events that we think are going to be historical events that people talk about in the future.”
Starfish by Lisa Fipps moves us from thinking about a writer’s life or past events to thinking about bullying and body image. Ellie, the main character, deals with bullies both inside and outside of her family. In the poem “Deserve It,” Ellie and her therapist are talking:
| I nod, do an amazingly good impression of a bobblehead. “I’m fat. I deserve whatever anyone says or does to me.” “No, Ellie. You don’t. No matter what you weigh, you deserve for people to treat you like a human being with feelings.” A lump grows in my throat, and I think I can’t breathe, but I just can’t swallow, so I gasp in a gulp of air. But, I’m not, I think. I’m just a big ol’ fat thing. My own mom said so. (p. 179) |  |
This moment in the book draws attention to ongoing harm that Ellie’s mom is doing to her under the guise of helping her with her weight. This is after a time when Ellie plasters the kitchen with articles on the harm that overly focusing on weight can do to a child (Ellie’s mom brings up articles to her about weight frequently). The students focused on the idea of self-image when talking about this poem. One said, “No matter how hard Ellie tries to see value in herself, she hears the voices of other people in her head. That makes me think about how often I value someone’s comments about me more than what I think about me, especially if the comments are negative.” Students wrote their own “Deserve It” poems. One student wrote, “My poem was about being black and how often I get stopped in stores. When I was younger I thought I was doing something to cause this. I know differently now.”
These three novels in verse provided opportunities to talk about what it means to be human, to be different, to celebrate who we are, and to question how we got to this moment. The past few years have been rich in momentous events—rich with the hazards of our own lives and the world in which we live. These novels provided opportunities to connect with the texts and with other people. Seeing these texts as writing mentors allowed students to express and explore ideas about hazards, graves, and starfish as well as ideas about themselves.
There is something about a novel in verse.
There is something about a novel in verse.
Until next week.
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