Levi Stahl Urges Ernest Hilbert to Write a Noir Novel-in-Verse over at Quarterly Conversation
by Ernie on 04/03/10 at 10:35 am
Mr. Stahl, poetry editor for Quarterly Conversation, writes on their new blog, Constant Conversation:
Even the least money-conscious among us has a fantasy about what he’d do if he came into a windfall of absurd proportions, right? A trip around the world? An apartment in Tokyo? A shelf full of rare first editions?
Me, I think I’d commission a verse novel. Now, admittedly, the verse novel has never been the most robust of forms. Though it does have some grand forebears–Eugene Onegin and The Ring and the Book among them–it’s such a hybrid, ill-defined form that it tends to find its proponents protesting a bit too much, greedily pulling every poem longer than “The Waste Land” into its capacious tent–as demonstrated by this Wikipedia entry, which finds room for Gilgamesh, The Odyssey, Don Juan, and even Anne Carson’s The Beauty of the Husband, whose very subtitle, A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, argues against this categorization. It’s no wonder, really, that there aren’t more verse novels: the very concept of the verse novel is enough to scare off most readers, daunting them with the idea of the concentration that thousands of lines of verse would surely demand of them.
Read on here. Read the two poems he references here.
