I have this love/hate relationship with poems. My absolute favorite poem is "Annabel Lee" by Poe, followed by "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost. I love poems that are dark and deep and serious; silly and humorous poems just annoy me. Sometimes, if I'm feeling particularly inspired, I even write poems. But they're usually not that good.
Anyway, having read two verse poems, I also have a love/hate relationship with this genre. Like how I feel with poems, I need these types of novels to be serious (and any novel, really). Brown Girl Dreaming was serious enough and I think it worked in lyric form. With I Heart You, You Haunt Me, it didn't work AT ALL. It was choppy prose, as Sam said about the book she read; it would have *maybe* been better in novel form. I think verse form can be a lazy way for writers to write something quick and with less word count. A certain kind of writer could make verse work. Some who appreciates poetry and takes it seriously, which I don't think the author of I Heart You was. I wasn't blown away by either novel I read, but if I found the right one, I have a feeling I would probably cry, like good poems make me do sometimes.
In the critical reading, it said voice had a lot to do with making a verse novel. That's probably true. It has a huge impact with any literary form. With me and my picky poetry tastes, it would be more so for me than others.
Also in the reading, I liked the little diagram/picture showing the three aspects of verse novels: novel, poetry, and drama. I can see the three aspects clearly. It could also be easily screwed up, either by putting too much emphasis on one and not enough on the other.
Verse novels are always nice if you want a quick read, too.
Alyssa out.
I know what you mean. I think that verse is an easy method of writing for young adult literature because it reads so quickly and that's a huge selling point with young people. So, someone reads an entire book in a day and they feel like they've read a lot, but when you boil it down, it's really not very much at all. There's too much left unsaid to be a novel and not enough poetry to be a poem. I also have a love/hate relationship with poetry and I wish that's what made me feel this way, but really it's just that the book I read was not very good writing and Brown Girl Dreaming was just a forgettable story.
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