Margarita Engle on Writing Verse

My new novel in verse, THE WILD BOOK, was inspired by stories my grandmother told me about her childhood.  She grew up on a farm in Cuba during the turmoil that followed U.S. occupation of the island after the Spanish-American War.  She also suffered the inner turmoil of dyslexia.  Choosing verse rather than prose gave me a chance to distill that complex historical and personal situation down to its emotional essence.  How did my grandmother feel?  What were her choices? 


Poetry forces me to be brief.  All the facts and figures won’t fit on an un-crowded page of free verse, so I have to choose only details that mean the most to me.  Historical research is painstaking and meticulous, but poetry is expansive and imaginative.  My hope is that the two moods will blend, offering a glimpse into the life of a young person who found hope in times that must have seemed hopeless.