Poetic Form as a Tool to Create Emotional Connection

Poetic Form as a Tool to Create Emotional Connection By Melanie Hundley

Melanie is a voracious reader and loves working with students, teachers, and authors.  As a former middle and high school teacher, she knows the value of getting good young adult books in kids' hands. She teaches young adult literature and writing methods classes.  She hopes that the Monday Motivator page will introduce teachers to great books and to possible ways to use those books in classrooms.

YA verse novelists are uniquely skilled at using various poetic forms to tell stories in ways that grab readers’ attention.  The emotionality that poetry allows is used to great effect in these novels.  The new school year is here and I find myself focusing on what texts I will use in which classes to encourage students to write.  I also find myself working with teachers as they are trying to get students in their classes to see poetry differently.  One student commented, “I know that books are being banned for being about people like me.  That’s dangerous.”  That comment is echoing in my head as I look at October Mourning—a powerful YA verse novel about the death of Matthew Shepard. This is a book that is banned in many areas but its message is so important. Messages of hate lead to dangerous actions.  

Leslea Newman’s (2012) October Mourning: A Song for Matthew Shepard uses multiple poetic forms in telling the story of the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard.  The villanelle and the pantoum are not poetic forms that adolescent readers often see, yet the strong use of pattern and repetition are easily connected to the pattern and structures used in hip hop and spoken word poetry.   

Both “The Protestor” and “The Angel” are villanelles, six-stanza poems that use repetitive lines as a key component of their structures.  The first five stanzas have three lines (tercet) and the sixth one has four (quatrain).  The repetition is in the pattern of the lines—the first and third line of the opening stanza alternate and repeat in the last lines of the next stanzas.  The refrain serves as the poem’s last two lines.  For example, in “The Protestor,” the first line becomes the last line of the second and fourth stanzas and the third line becomes the last line of the third and fifth stanzas.  Both lines become the concluding couplet of the final stanza.

The only good fag is a fag that’s dead
He asked for it, you got that right
The fires of Hell burn hot and red
 
A boy who takes a boy to bed?
Where I come from that’s not polite
The only good fag is a fag that’s dead
 
A man and a woman, the Good Lord said
As sure as Eve took the first bite
The fires of Hell burn hot and red
 
I hear upon his knees he pled
Fairies don’t know how to fight
The only good fag is a fag that’s dead
 
Beneath the Hunter’s Moon he bled
That must have been a pretty sight
The fires of Hell burn hot and red
 
C’mon, kids, it’s time for bed
Say your prayers, kiss Dad goodnight
The only good fag is a fag that’s dead
The fires of Hell burn hot and red (p. 66)

The repetition of these lines creates a rhythm that seems almost hypnotic.  The lines increase in power and horror as they are repeated.  The contrasts between the seemingly simple good night ritual of a father putting his children to bed and the devastating effect of what has become the bedtime story for those children provides insight to how these men could justify their murder of a young, gay man.  The men, raised on steady diets of hatred and hell, would not see how killing someone who is gay could be wrong.  

The companion villanelle, “An Angel,” provides an alternative perspective explaining angels need not fear evil.  The poem states that we should “love thy neighbor, as it’s said/ short of that, give them their space/ Lift your wings above your head.” The commandment stresses love and nonjudgment.  The contrasting villanelles provide alternative ways to be in the world—filled with hate and murder or filled with love and grace.  The repetition in both poems ensures that the messages illustrate what will happen when people follow those commandments. 

In addition to villanelles, Newman also uses poetic structures such as pantoums and haiku.  Pantoums, like villanelles, use the repetition of lines to help create meaning.  The pantoum consists of  four-line stanzas.  The second and fourth line of one stanza become the first and third line of the next stanza. 

Haiku are three-line verses that have a rigid syllable count—the first and third lines have 5 syllables and the second line contains seven syllables.  “The Fence (that night)” uses the repetition of the lines to show how an inanimate object had more humanity than the men who killed Matthew.  The second line of the first stanza, “He was as heavy as a broken heart” becomes the first line of the second stanza. The repeating of the lines becomes like a heartbeat in the poem.  The layering of words—heart/beating, dead/breathing, cradle/cradled—emphasizes Matthew’s humanity and his life and highlights how little humanity the men who attacked him showed. 

​To them, Matthew was not worthy of life; to the fence, Matthew deserved to be held, cradled by someone who loved him.   

​I held him all night long
He was heavy as a broken heart
Tears fell from his unblinking eyes
He was dead weight yet he kept breathing
 
He was heavy as a broken heart
His own heart wouldn’t stop beating
He was dead weight yet he kept breathing
His face streaked with moonlight and blood
 
His own heart wouldn’t stop beating
The cold wind wouldn’t stop blowing
His face streaked with moonlight and blood
I tightened my grip and held on
 
The cold wind wouldn’t stop blowing
We were out on the prairie alone
I tightened my grip and held on
I saw what was done to this child
 
We were out on the prairie alone
Their truck was the last thing he saw
I saw what was done to this child
I cradled him just like a mother
 
Their truck was the last thing he saw
Tears fell from his unblinking eyes
I cradled him just like a mother
I held him all night long (p. 16)

The horror of Matthew’s murder and the callous disposal of his body is developed in the layering and repetition of the lines in this poem.  Matthew’s slow death from his beating is contrasted with the openness of the prairie and the truck driving away.  Nature and the fence witness the horror of Matthew’s death while his murderers drive away.