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Vetting the verse novel.

Article Excerpt
The verse novel? What is it? It's poetry.

Poetry? What is it? Who knows.

Maybe Webster knows Or at least American Heritage.

Aha! "A composition designed to convey a vivid and imaginative sense of experience, characterized by the use of condensed language chosen for its sound and suggestive power as well as its meaning, and by the use of such literary techniques as structured meter, natural cadences, rhyme, or metaphor."

Which about sums it up Except for the part about rhyme.

IF YOU THINK the above sounds like I've been reading too many YA verse novels, you're right. Twelve, to be exact, of the thirteen or fourteen published so far in 2004. An impressive statistic, because up until last year there had been only about thirty titles in the form's whole ten-year history. But each year more writers have been choosing this way to shape a YA novel, and this year's sudden jump in numbers may mean that the verse novel has become a standard part of young adult literature, rather than an occasional oddity. In any case, we've seen enough now to look at the origins and history, the rules and parameters, the successes and pitfalls of this emerging form.

A long story told in verse is probably the prototype for all literature, but this approach to storytelling faded away with the appearance of the prose novel in the eighteenth century. Its reinvention in YA lit--and only in YA lit, because there is no adult equivalent--is one of the glories of adolescent literature. The first verse novel to be recognized as such was the masterwork Make Lemonade by Virginia Euwer Wolff, published in 1993. However, the poetry collections of Mel Glenn had been groping toward the form for several years before that. In the late...

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