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Dorothy Porter

The Verse Novel and I

This is a revised version of a piece written for a panel on verse novels at the Sydney Writers’ Festival May 2004. It is 500 words or about two printed pages long.

Like most poets I was sick of not being read. I was sick of my books not being on display in bookshops — either hidden away so successfully that not even I, their vain and insecure author, could find them or simply not there at all. To be honest vanity was one of the most combustible ingredients in what fuelled — and fuels — my desire to write verse novels.

Dorothy Porter with her cat Wystan, August 2005.
Photo by Andrea Goldsmith.

Because they are fiendishly hard to write. A good verse novel is an impossible juggling act of narrative and poetry. They both have to work. They both have to pull together. You can’t have a successful verse novel where the story drags and the characters are tepidly drawn. The same rule of narrative enchantment applies to verse novels as applies to prose novels. There are plenty of boring unreadable novels around. I have no desire to add to their number. But there is no point in writing a verse novel at all if the poetry is dead doggerel or suffocating obscurity. The quality of the poetry gives the verse novel its true distinction and luminous intensity. Poetry burns for longer than prose. There is nothing hotter than a terrific verse novel. There is no better read. A wonderful and enduring example is Alexander Pushkin’s “Eugene Onegin” which changed the course of Russian prose fiction. Pushkin’s verse novel set a very high bar indeed. And it continues to do so.

The verse novel is a highly unpredictable literary form. Unlike prose novels, where most read in terms of their structure and language pretty much the same, every verse novel is different.

Whether good or bad each one is a unique reflection of the poet who wrote it and the struggles the poet had in trying to weld poetry and narrative together. Even though a verse novel claims to be fictional no literary form is more revealing of the thrashing cries of the author behind it.

I am never more myself than when creating the characters of my verse novels. To give them authentic voice is like writing intensely personal operatic arias. I have to find a new pitch and a greater stretch and courage in myself.

In my most recent verse Wild Surmise I experiment for the first time with two points of view — male and female, husband and wife, Daniel and Alex.

Daniel is an ailing embittered academic — and poetry buff. Alex is an eminent astrobiologist obsessed with the search for extraterrestrial life. I put these characters through the grinder, together and apart, against the richest tapestry of poetic images I’ve ever had to work with — astronomy. It was the toughest and most rewarding of my verse novels to write. And indeed to an almost operatic degree — the most unconsciously astute and revealing.

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