Verse Novels by Jacqueline Woodson, Margarita Engle, and Sarah Crossan
I read verse novels by these authors not because of their gender, race, religion, or politics. I read their work because their poetry does what true, timeless literary works are meant to do. What is that, exactly? For an attempt at explanation, I turn to playwright, novelist, translator, soldier, scholar, and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Thornton Wilder (1897-1975). In reference to his play OUR TOWN, what we now consider to be an American classic, Wilder commented: “OUR TOWN is not offered as a picture of life in a New Hampshire village; or as a speculation about the conditions of life after death (that element I merely took from Dante’s Purgatory). It is an attempt to find value above all price for the smallest events of our daily life.?
Looking at the text of OUR TOWN itself, I always pause at these lines spoken the character known as The Stage Manager: “We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings…There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.”
Please don’t get hung up on the theistic implication of that word “eternal.” Define it for yourself in a way that suits your heart. For me, “eternal” can mean that each human creates some deep value through those days simply lived — they leave behind family, friends, good works, novels, poems, stories, recipes, notions that carry on in the hearts others.
Verse Novel Quotes from Woodson, Engle, and Crossan
“Maybe, I am thinking, there is something hidden like this, in all of us. A small gift from the universe waiting to be discovered.”
― Jacqueline Woodson, Brown Girl Dreaming
“That is how I think of peace
― Margarita Engle, Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba
and peace of mind—as timid birds
that we have to search for,
not bold ones that come
looking for us.”
“No goodbye is forever
― Sarah Crossan, Being Toffee
unless you can
erase everything you ever
knew about a person and everything you once felt.”
The Universal Search for Peace, Hope, Connection
Every April, I celebrate National Poetry Month with a post about the value of verse. For me verse offers a sort of infinity distilled, a ballet of words. Adding structure and meter to carefully chosen words, poetry is sometimes able to evoke meaning deeper that what can be merely explained. Of course, poems are not the only vehicle for such achievement. It is more the perfect synergy of idea, story, and form that yields the best work. Now, as April crawls toward May in this year of slow-moving time, I hope you are able to find find beauty in these and other works poetry. To see hope and worth in routine, even mundane moments that, well-observed, point to something of value. To find something that’s maybe even eternal.
