Re-Viewing a Piece on National Poetry Month

It's April 30th and that means another National Poetry Month comes to a close.  It also means it was my turn to blog again but a number of issues this week got in the way of my completing my assignment.  I wish I could say "My dogs ate my homework," but since I do my "homework" on a computer and my dogs are not interested in technology, that excuse just ain't gonna fly.  So, if you don't mind, for this week I'd live to revisit a post from April, 2008. 


 I think it's still relevant: 


Out of the Dust, Karen Hesse's popular and Newbery Award winning  novel-in-verse (Scholastic, 1997), provided the impetus for a future plethora of poetic tomes by children's authors. (How's that for using alliteration and consonance during National Poetry Month?)

I generally enjoy reading novels-in-verse. They are quick reads for a person who has difficulty finding time to read for pleasure and, I believe, the added white space is encouraging to the child who experiences reading difficulties. For many kids, reading a page is an accomplishment. Being able to read many pages in a short amount of time is a triumph.

I also like the tightness of the form. Poet/novelists describe emotion, setting, and character in the fewest words possible--and, they are usually the perfect words. Writing a novel in verse--even free verse--is intellectually challenging, sweaty work.

Some books have succeeded more easily than others. Ron Koertge's The Brimstone Journals, (Candlewick, 2001) for example, takes us quickly and efficiently into the minds and lives of high school students. Their complicated assumptions about how life's problems must be solved break our hearts.

I had a bit more difficulty with the Newbery Honor book by poet Marilyn Nelson: Carver a Life in Poems (Front Street, 2001). This is a biography in verse and as such, must not only give us a sense of a George Washington Carver's world but include enough facts to allow the reader to march across the timeline of the famous teacher/scientist's life. I found this part lacking. Like many people, I knew only the very basic elements of why Carver's name is familiar. He is the man who found multiple uses for the peanut. Nelson helps us realize that he was so much more. Biographical footnotes are included in some of the pages and I found them to be extremely helpful. I sometimes felt lost when references were omitted. I wasn't always sure what event the poem depicted. If I was confused, I wondered how children read these sections.

The best part of the novel-in-verse is the way it combines both sides of the writer's brain. True, writers are generally thought to be creative, right-brained types. But there is also a logical, left-brained method to the sequencing of a novel. The reader sometimes has to work a little harder to read a novel written in verse. That's part of the fun.

--Mur