Five Treasures to be Found in Novels in Verse

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By Marci Whitehurst Novels in verse are a hybrid form of storytelling. Novels in verse combine a complete narrative with the structure of poetry, bringing depth and richness to the beauty of stories.  Here are five treasures you’ll find in a novel in verse:  POETRY!  This treasure is obvious on every page of a novel in verse. Each page is a poem. The majority are free verse poems, meaning these poems don’t follow a particular meter, form, or rhythm. The poems can stand alone, but when each page of poetry is read from beginning to end, it weaves a full narrative to make a complete story. Check out this example from our own Rebecca J. Gomez’s forthcoming novel in verse:  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published We call this car, Sandra’s white clunky car, a marshmallow with wheels. It’s riddled with dings and dents, and the rear driver’s side window is stuck stubbornly up and the tear in the vinyl seat pinches if you sit just wrong while wearing shorts
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National Poetry Month Celebration: List Poems

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Read, Discuss, Do! is celebrating list poems this week! List poems are exactly what they sound like -- poems written as lists! A list poem can be a list of anything real or imagined. They can be lists of people or places, ideas, things, actions, even emotions. Many list poems are silly. Many of them rhyme. But they can cover all sorts of topics and themes, and rhyming is completely optional. We hope that you will read some examples of list poems this week and try writing one or two of your own.

It's Raining Pigs and Noodles by Jack Prelutsky, illustrated by James Stevenson, isn't specifically a book of list poems, but it's got some great examples of list poems in it. And the title poem is a silly, rhyming list poem that you'll be sure to enjoy.

Underneath My Bed: List Poems by Brian P. Cleary, illustrated by Richard Watson. This book is all about list poems! What they are, how to write them, and a lot of fun ones to read as examples. 

Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems, edited by Georgia Heard. This is a diverse mix of list poems of all sorts of topics by a bunch of different poets.

Example of a list poem:

"Sick" by Shel Silverstein

"I cannot go to school today,"
Said little Peggy Ann McKay.
"I have the measles and the mumps,
A gash, a rash and purple bumps.
My mouth is wet, my throat is dry,
I'm going blind in my right eye.

Read the whole poem on poets.org. 

For more on writing list poems, see this post on poetry4kids.com. 








Comments

Julia said…
I love Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout by Shel Silverstein!
April 22, 2022 at 9:39 AM
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