I have never been a fan of poetry. I can tolerate The Road Less Travelled and Shakespearean Sonnets and I have recently gotten to translate some latin poetry from Catullus and Martial, but other than that, I do not enjoy it. I don’t like looking for symbolism and I don’t like the meter or weird line breaks and i can’t really find a plot well in a poem. I truly wish i did like poetry. I think it is a fascinating concept to make musical art out of words, but my brain just does not like to think that hard about words, I think.
So, going into this, I knew it was going to be a struggle for me. I was not wrong. Why would you want to write a life story through short bites of words that neither give the full picture or explicitly give the reader important details of the plot? If you are going to write a novel, write a novel. If you are going to write a series of poems, write poems. Just, please, don’t try to morph the two and call it a novel. Just like in Feed, I become very very distracted when reading Brown Girl Dreaming simply because of the format. I can’t just read it cover to cover, but I must read a page, then think about what they are trying to say, then repeat for the next hundred pages and my brain gets tired. Verse novels are a very concentrated niche, I understand, but it is not one I really plan on giving another go. I prefer to immerse myself in my reading instead of analyzing every single word, or line, or sentence.
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