Writing the Verse Novel: Setting Your Scene

Poets Alice Notley and Ellen Bryant Voigt make us live their works, but how? Let’s face it; a book length poem is daunting.

It’s more frightening still if scanning the page you come across the voices of people you don’t know, events and objects you’ve not been introduced to. How does an accomplished poet overcome this, so that the reader easily slips into the time and place intended? 

Alice Notley apparently doesn’t worry about this problem.  Witness how she begins, The Descent of Alette without prelude or note: 

“One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly”

“I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”

“Great,” we may think, “even Notley doesn’t know who the speaker is.” She’s pulled a smart trick, though: If the speaker doesn’t know her own identity she must begin a process of discovery. Her surroundings and history will be revealed to us readers as they are revealed to her.  The effect is simple and so complete that we won’t even notice as scene and character information is delivered to us, slowly, as we read.  (1)

To be honest, Alice Notley does include a preliminary note about her use of all those quotation marks, but nothing about Alette or her subterranean world.  We’ll talk further about those quotation marks and other intriguing formal techniques in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, let’s look at Kyrie, a narrative told in a series of sonnets by Ellen Bryant Voigt.  In Kyrie, Voigt takes care of scene set-up by including a two-line mention of the 1918 epidemic from a history text.

Following two pages later she inserts the prologue, which is, in fact, an eight-line poem. It describes the world after the pandemic has come and gone, in lines that echo Walt Whitman:

After the first year, weeds and scrub;

after five, juniper and birch,

….

who can tell us where there was an orchard,

where a swing, where the smokehouse stood? (2)

Voigt began the timeline of her narrative two pages later, with the first poem of the sequence:

All ears, nose, tongue and gut,

dogs know if something’s wrong;

….

Outside, the vacant yard: then,

within minutes something eats the sun. (3)

Next article: We will continue this discussion of beginnings, featuring two gritty narratives from the dramatic side of the poetic spectrum.

Exercise 1: Write four lines of poetry to deliver information, as in Voigt’s prologue. First make sure your prologue works as poetry. Remember: The human brain is designed to find pattern in chaos, so don’t feel compelled to over explain.

Exercise 2:  Devise a scenario in which information can be delivered without prologue or notes, as in Notley.  Write four lines following that scenario.

1. Notley, Alice.  The Descent of Alette.  New York: Penguin Books. 1992. 3.

2. Voight, Ellen Bryant.  Kyrie.  New York:  W.W. Norton and Company.  1995. 11.
3. ibid., 15.

Article first published at Suite 101.com