In Celebration of the Verse Novel…and Some Thoughts on “Poetry Hate”

In my teaching years, no matter where I happened to live or what grade I was teaching, when I asked my students to define poetry they would all tell me the same thing: Poetry is about love and flowers. These upper elementary and middle school kids were saying more than they realized. They were revealing they’d already latched onto the message that poetry isn’t for everyone — just the people who are fans of sappy sorts of things.

Every year I tried to prove this idea wrong. I’d read my kids poetry about sports and vacuum cleaners, about growing into too big feet and laughing when you shouldn’t. We’d hunt down perfect poems to exchange with secret poetry pals, attend a “Poetry Gallery”, sing Emily Dickinson’s lines to the tune of Gilligan’s Island (Try it! It works!), and share memorized poems in our classroom version of a beatnik coffeehouse. In one of my favorite lessons, we’d read aloud Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” first scanning the poem then clapping out the beats as we chanted the words. Sometimes we’d add in some funky rhythm, and half the room would whisper train-like chu-chu-DU sounds that lined up perfectly with each clap. Then we’d swap roles, playing with the poem’s sound and meter again. One year a student pulled out his trombone and blurped along to the beat. It was a magical moment, our own poetry happening.

Those kids who’d said weeks before that poetry was about flowers and love? They weren’t buying it anymore.

That sort of transformation is what I experienced the first time I picked up a verse novel. It was Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, and when I closed the book I had changed. The story was raw and beautiful, its spare language a straight shot to my heart. I’d climbed into Billie Jo’s skin and left myself behind. Something similar happened when I read Sharon Creech’s Heartbeat:

Thump-thump, thump-thump
bare feet hitting the grass
as I run run run
in the air and like the air
weaving through the trees
skimming over the ground

In reading those first lines I was with my students again, our hearts-beating-hands-clapping. Verse novels pushed me one step closer to the world on the page. Each word spoke doubly — first telling the story, second helping me feel it.

My students were right about the love thing. Poetry heightens the emotions. And verse novels made stories come alive for me in ways they never had before.

For a genre like historical fiction that is often viewed as distant or hard to understand, verse becomes a beautiful fit. It strips away the unnecessary and gives readers an intimate picture of a book’s central characters. I stumbled into writing my first verse novel, May B., a survival story set in 1870s Kansas, when I realized my early writing efforts felt lifeless. Once I went back to my research and re-read the private writings of frontier women, I realized I could most honestly tell May’s story through mirroring their spare language. Instead of explaining, I could let the words speak for themselves. (I didn’t tell myself at the time that I was writing a verse novel. I had no idea how to do that. The only verse novels I’d read at that point were the two I mentioned above.)

I chose verse deliberately for Blue Birds, my historical novel about the Lost Colony of Roanoke. My favorite passages come from the poems Alis and Kimi share. Here are two girls from entirely different worlds who nevertheless become friends. The structure of these dual-voice poems speaks the story visually. The reader is invited to look and listen as the girls move from distrust to curiosity to mutual understanding. It was deeply satisfying for me to watch their friendship take shape upon the page.

Verse was the best fit for The Burning Season, a story that like May B. relies heavily on solitude, nature, and survival, a story that has large swaths of internal reflection and moment-by-moment stream of consciousness during the climax that couldn’t have happened successfully if it had been told through prose.

Poetry isn’t exclusive, as my students first thought, but sometimes it can feel that way. That’s the beauty of the verse novel, a succinct, condensed blend of poetry and story that flows from one word to the next. Those words sink deep and move with familiar rhythms we encounter every day. Verse novels cover so much ground. They can truly be about anything. The verse novel doesn’t just tell a story, it shows us how to listen, encourages us to linger. It changes us along the way.

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I originally shared this post in 2019, the same year Afoma Umesi began digging into everything that is middle grade. If you aren’t familiar with Afoma, her website, Reading Middle Grade, is a wealth of information. I had already scheduled this post to run a second time (with a few updates) when Afoma sent (via Substack) an article called “Kids Know What They Hate” (it’s very much worth your time). In it, Afoma discusses survey results about kids and their reading preferences. She had one hundred responses to her survey, so while the answers are most likely skewed toward self-motivated readers, it is far more comprehensive (in my mind) than many adult interpretations or publisher-driven ideas we have about kids and reading.

There is a lot there worth thinking about and a lot to discuss. I have thoughts and opinions about many points that perhaps I’ll mention another time, but the thing I want to talk about today, in light of what I’ve written above, focuses on this portion of Afoma’s survey results:

Finding 5: Don’t conflate poetry and verse novels

Poetry hate climbs steeply with age: 0% at ages 7 to 9, 11% at 10 to 11, and 17% at 12 to 14. Verse novel hate rises gently across the same age bands, peaking at just 6% in the 12 to 14 group—about a third of poetry’s rejection rate at the same age. Same form on the page, very different reception. Verse novels are niche but tolerated. Poetry is actively disliked, and the dislike grows as kids get older…

The poetry hate curve also closely mirrors the school curriculum poetry exposure curve. Most US schools start ramping up poetry analysis around fourth grade, which is exactly when the kid data starts showing the rise in poetry rejection. I can’t prove the connection with this sample, but it’s worth saying out loud that the way poetry gets taught may be the very thing killing the love for it. Kids don’t hate poetry because it’s poetry. They might hate poetry because of how they’ve been forced to meet it. (emphasis mine)

Again, I have opinions. But the thing that absolutely slayed me was the “poetry hate.” I’m not going to pretend this isn’t a real thing. (You can see my former students’ biases in what I’ve written above.) But it doesn’t have to be this way.

Please, please, please, teachers. Please, parents and librarians. Expose kids to poetry in fun, inviting ways. Do not analyze poetry in fourth grade! Celebrate it! It is our job as the adults in their lives to offer them good things, to show them the beauty and fun and variety of various art forms and writings. And while yes, not all of learning is about choice, celebration, and self direction, my goodness, some of it needs to be. Some of it should be simply allowing kids to explore and experience wonder.

I am all for choice when it comes to reading, especially when we are trying to encourage children to become life-long readers. I’m about it for adults, too, who naturally gravitate toward what they already know they enjoy. And I’m for asking kids to try things beyond their already developed tastes. (I feel the same way about adult readers. I have some pretty strong feelings about the reading writers should be engaged in. Again, my opinion. Take it or leave it.) But I think (I hope!) that we can allow for, and even encourage, exposure to poetry that is no-strings-attached joyful so that “poetry hate” isn’t something that happens to ten-year-olds, so that we might keep the door open (a little longer? ideally forever?) to the idea that poetry is for everyone and can be about anything.

Please, let’s do better.