Why Use Poetry in a Novel? Pt.1

Why include poems in novels? How do they affect the reading of the novel – as well as the poems? There are many reasons to include poetry in your prose. Basically, you have personal reasons and structural reasons. Many contemporary poets have made a stab at writing novels, a venue that gives them an opportunity to include and share their poetry to broader audience, an audience that might not ordinarily read poetry. A structural reason would be to entice the reader to slow down and smell the coffee. While reading a novel, you may come across a poem. What happens? You stop and think about the poem or you skip over it and continue. The author is suggesting you stop for a moment and think about what you are reading.

Poetry can serve many different functions within the novel. These range from ornamental, used as epigraphs (short quotes at the beginning of the book or each chapter) or giving the characters something to say when words fail them. Some books use the poetry to enhance character development and for foreshadowing some future action that will drive the story. Poetry can also be used to call attention to an emotion or action, that prose would not sufficiently explain. In Boot: A Sorta Novel of Vietnam, the poetry serves many of these same functions, and luckily for me, my friend, Bill McCloud, a well-known, published poet from Oklahoma, enhanced my novel with his poetry.

Early on while writing Boot, I began each chapter with lyrics from music representative of the era, to foreshadow what was about to take place in the forthcoming chapter. When I found out how expensive this endeavor was going to be, I dropped that idea. I had a couple of poems I had written, already placed in the book. Then I came across The Smell of the Light by Bill McCloud and fell in love with his poems about his time in Vietnam. He offered to assist, and after about a months’ worth of correspondence, we had a beautifully enhanced story. One of my beta readers thought I should remove the poetry, that it interfered with the flow of the story. When I related this story to my writing group, their responses were, as near as I can remember, “Would you take the poetry out of Alice in Wonderland? (here they all started reciting, ‘The time has come the Walrus said, to speak of many things, of ships and shoes and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings!’)” or “Lord of the Rings?” or “Harry Potter?” My personal favorite by Douglas Adams, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, contained some awful poetry. If you are talking about the third-worst poetry in the universe, then providing a sample is the perfect way to let the reader know.

"Oh freddled gruntbuggly,

Thy micturations are to me

As plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee.

Groop, I implore thee, my foonting turlingdromes,

And hooptiously drangle me with crinkly bindlewurdles,

Or I will rend thee in the gobberwarts

With my blurglecruncheon, see if I don't!"

So, the best approach is to take one poem at a time and exam its relationship to the novel.

In Boot, the first page contains a free verse quintain:

Ah, Prudence,

Princess Loving Fox,

Mother of the Horned Dream,

Scintillating lady with the 1956

Cadillac tits.

Poetry is used here and throughout the novel as a literary device to remind the reader that this is a work of fiction and it symbolizes both the necessity and difficulty of understanding and articulating human emotion. G.O.’s lustfulness is hollow and insincere, even though he yearns for moments of tenderness, vulnerability, and connection.

This next free verse is in Chapter Three on page eleven. The verse is a sestet by one of G.O.’s future dopplegangers, Genghis Omar Hill. Partially based on nonsense rhymes, made popular by Lewis Carroll, it is also a tribute to John Lennon who also loved nonsense poetry (click on Jabberwocky for complete poem and beware the frumious Bandersnatch!):

THE JABBERWOCKY by Lewis Carroll

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

This poem describes the AHA moment, when G.O. contemplates the bane of the Marine Corps…bureaucratic paperwork. This sets him off on another mind manifesting allegorical journey to discover what becomes of all the paperwork created. This time his fantasy involves the future. Once again, the nonsensical wordplay and the meaningless dialogue with the Hag, in a toilet in Manchuria, serve to exemplify the absurdity of jingoistic nationalism, and how G.O tries to make sense of it for himself.

Toe-Jam

Bearer of Confucian Blues

Renderer of yak-butt lard

Flatulator of the red, white, and fuchsia Manchurian

Sunset

Of thee I sing

Until next time,

I remain,

Just another old Zororastafarian looking for poetry in his life…