A National Poetry Month Guessing Game
April is National Poetry Month and as it happens, the book I’m reading at the CNIB right now is a novel written in poems, and so is the book I’ll be reading next. The stories in both are told from the points of view of different characters, so it’s been fun trying to match my voice to the different girls who were accusers during the Salem witch hunts, and I’m looking forward to capturing the voices of Natalie and Tricia and the English teacher and guidance counsellor at their high school. (A male narrator will be reading the Kyle and Miguel parts. It’s a bit like working on Ragged Company was in that way, but less complicated because we won’t be overlapping at the studio for any of the work this time.)
One of the reasons that the obvious appeal of Wicked Girls and Fishtailing interests me – both books have attracted great reviews and one a GG Award – is that I’ve written a little poetry myself, and in fact some of the pieces in 101 Ways to Dance were actually poems when the collection was accepted for publication. But the publisher practically pleaded with me to not insist on including the poems. Not that she didn’t like the poems, she did, but “Short stories can be a hard enough sell,” she said, “without including poetry!”
Well, I wanted the book to sell, so I rewrote the poems as prose. Here’s how one of the poems started:
paint on our jeans and in our hair
me and the new guy from bc
the other painters have gone home
wet optical illusion
a vase or two faces
on the wall of the church basement
he’s tall dark
not handsome
too small a mouth
receding hairline
but something
marianne says he has a kid
in vancouver and got a letter last week
from regina dear bram you’re going to be a daddy
my mother would say
being alone with a boy like bram is
asking for it
ever played chicken bram asks
i don’t drive
i don’t mean in a car
oh like on railroad tracks
where you have to stay on while the train comes
and whoever jumps off first is chicken
he shakes his head
what then
facing each other cross-legged
his lips aren’t that small
put your finger
here
his forehead
i do
and pull away
no you leave it there
what if i’m too chicken
then the game’s over
what game
he puts my finger back on his forehead
and i let him explain
move your finger
down
as slowly as
you want
till somebody says
stop
they’re the chicken
what am i doing here
me no one suspects of having even
thoughts of
bram’s hands
those lips
where his jeans ride . . .
Maybe the story is actually better in prose, I don’t know. But I wonder: Told that four stories in 101 Ways to Dance were originally poems, would a reader be able to guess which are the four? If you’ve read the collection (which btw was shortlisted for the CLA YA Book of the Year and was listed as one of OLA’s Ten Best YA Books of 2006), I’d love it if you’d send me your guesses.
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Kathy Stinson is the author of the classic Red Is Best and the award-winning The Man with the Violin. Her wide range of titles includes picture books, non-fiction, young adult fiction, historical fiction, horror, biography, series books, and short stories. She has met with her readers in every province and territory of Canada, in the United States, Britain, Liberia, and Korea. She lives in a small town in Ontario.
