by Michael Cart
Ironically, the same teens who have traditionally been reluctant readers of poetry have, nevertheless, always loved writing it. “Poetry is a perfect medium for adolescence: it lends itself to the fierce dramas and false clarities of these years,” the author and teacher Katie Roiphe (2009, 14) writes in the New York Times Book Review.
The Internet has begun providing teens exciting new opportunities for writing and hearing poetry. A number of sites like the former poet laureate Robert Pinsky’s own (www.favoritepoem.org) and the Atlantic Monthly’s Unbound Poetry Pages (www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/) present opportunities for hearing both poets and ordinary Americans reading work. Such sites as www.teenpaper.org, “Scriveners,” and “Writes of Passage” were only three of many that offered teens abundant opportunities for publishing their work online. Book publishers, too, began issuing collections of teen-written work. Betsy Franco’s You Hear Me? Poems and Writing by Teenage Boys was selected as a 2001 Best Book for Young Adults. Other collections include Lee Francis’s When the Rain Sings: Poems by Young Native Americans and Lydia Omolola Okutoro’s Quiet Storm: Voices of Young Black Poets.
Franco (the mother of the celebrated young actor James Franco) is one of a new generation of anthologists—others are Naomi Shihab Nye, Liz Rosenberg, and Lori Carlsen—who have brought enhanced popularity to poetry for teen readers. Nye and Carlsen have also enriched multicultural literature by editing anthologies of poetry from the Middle East (Nye) and from Latin America (Carlsen). Jan Greenberg, known for her many books about art and artists, received a Printz honor for her innovative anthology Heart to Heart: New Poems Inspired by Twentieth Century Art.
Another measure of the new popularity of poetry may be found in the annual Top Ten Best Books for Young Adults. Since this list was established in 1997, a total of eight works of poetry—of 130 total titles—have been included (a fairly robust 6 percent of the total).
Arguably, the most visible manifestation of poetry’s new popularity, however, is the profusion of novels in verse (book-length works of narrative poetry). Hardly a new form (Homer, anyone?), the modern verse novel began to excite interest about the same time as poetry did. One of the early examples from adult literature is Vikram Seth’s The Golden Gate, which was published in 1986 and became a surprise best seller. In the young adult world, two of the first were Mel Glenn’s My Friend’s Got This Problem, Mr. Candler (1991) and Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade (1994). Interestingly, Wolff does not herself consider Make Lemonade or its two sequels (True Believer and This Full House) to be novels in verse. “Reviewers have called my books ‘novels in verse,’” she told Publishers Weekly, but “I consider them as written in prose but I do use stanzas. Stanza means ‘room’ in Latin, and I wanted there to be ‘room’—breathing opportunities to receive thoughts and have time to come out of them before starting again at the left margin. I thought of young mothers reading my books, and I wanted to give them lots of white space, so they could read entire chapters at a time and feel a sense of accomplishment” (Comerford 2009).
The accessibility of verse novels—pages set with short lines surrounded by white space—has made them popular for use with reluctant readers as well as those who speak English as a second language. The narrative nature of their content is also an inducement to teen readers, and because almost all of them are written in free verse, no one need fear the rigors of form or any perceived formality.
Though free verse sometimes invites self-indulgent writing that has more to it of prose than poetry, it can—when properly executed—prove not only reader friendly but also exceedingly artful. Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust, published in 1997, is an example of the latter. Set in Oklahoma during the Dust Bowl, this elegantly composed story of family loss and hardship is a demonstration of the stark capacity of verse to capture and stir the deepest human emotions. Another example is the California poet Sonya Sones’s first book, Stop Pretending: What Happened When My Big Sister Went Crazy (Simon & Schuster, 1999). Telling the story of the emotional breakdown and subsequent institutionalization of the narrator’s older sister, the first-person poems from the point of view of a thirteen-year-old girl have a cumulative emotional power that is quietly devastating—which makes the first evidence of the older girl’s recovery dizzyingly cathartic: “I blink / and there you suddenly are / inhabiting your eyes again . . . and I’m feeling all lit up / like a jar filled / with a thousand fireflies.”
Sones’s subsequent works—One of Those Hideous Books Where the Mother Dies, What My Mother Doesn’t Know, and What My Girlfriend Doesn’t Know—similarly demonstrate the capacity of poetry to record the personal and, through the use of figurative language, rhythm, verbal economy, emotional insight, and honesty, to translate it into the universal. Small wonder that Sones has become one of the most popular (with both readers and reviewers) practitioners of the verse novel form.
Another notable practitioner is the versatile Ron Koertge. The author of such celebrated prose novels as The Arizona Kid, Stoner and Spaz, and Margaux with an X, Koertge is also an award-winning adult poet who demonstrated his skills in his YA novels in verse, Shakespeare Bats Cleanup and The Brimstone Journals, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults. The latter, told in the different voices of fifteen members of the graduating class of Branston High School, fluidly demonstrates poetry’s wonderful capacity for presenting multiple points of view; other notable titles that do this are Nikki Grimes’s Bronx Masquerade and David Levithan’s The Realm of Possibilities.
A few writers—Helen Frost and Marilyn Nelson among them—have written verse novels employing either traditional or newly created poetic forms. Nelson, for example, wrote her Printz Honor Award-winning A Wreath for Emmett Till in the exquisitely difficult form of a heroic crown of sonnets. Frost, another Printz honor winner for Keesha’s House, which is written in the form of sonnets and sestinas, also specializes in creating forms that match the thematic or narrative material of her novels in verse. In The Braid, for example, she has, as she notes in an afterword, “invented a formal structure for this book, derived in part from my admiration for Celtic knots” (Frost 2006, 91).
All in all, the book-length work of verse has proved marvelously versatile, lending itself to a variety of forms and genres, including biography and memoir (Stephanie Hemphill’s Your Own Sylvia: A Verse Portrait of Sylvia Plath received a Printz Honor Award), mystery (especially in the work of Mel Glenn), fantasy (Lisa Ann Sandell’s novel of the Lady of Shalott, Song of the Sparrow), historical fiction (Jen Bryant’s two novels about the Scopes trial, Trial and Ringside, 1925), and even problem novels (see, for example, Ellen Hopkins’s Crank, Glass, Burned, Identical).
Trends are transient, and doubtless the novel in verse will pass in and out of favor with writers and readers for years to come. But one thing seems certain: poetry itself will remain one of literature’s most durable—and versatile—forms.
Notes
1. American Library Association, “The Michael L. Printz Award Policies and Procedures,” www.ala.org/ala/mgrps/divs/yalsa /booklistsawards/printzaward/ aboutprintz/michaell printz.cfm.
2. A complete list of Printz winners and honor titles is available online at www.ala.org/yalsa/.
3. Those interested in reading more about this preconference might look at my “Carte Blanche” column in the September 15, 2005, issue of Booklist.
romancing the retail
Of Series, Superstores, Harry Potter, and Such
Not every twenty-first-century trend in young adult literature has evidenced the field’s artistic evolution. Some have demonstrated its ever-expanding commercial possibilities, instead. Principal among these is the inexorable (and apparently never-ending) rise of what has come to be called chick lit: those often (though not always) humorous novels aimed at female readers in pursuit of romance and/or designer labels. Arguably the first of these epidemic novels was Helen Fielding’s adult title The Diary of Bridget Jones, published in England in 1996. Wildly popular, the book quickly inspi
red a host of similar titles, and thus a major trend—“perhaps the only new one of the past 25 years,” according to Laura Miller (2004, 27)—was born. The phenomenon arrived in the United States with the 2000 publication here of the British comedian Louise Rennison’s Angus, Thongs, and Full-Frontal Snogging. To the surprise of many, this became a 2001 Printz honor title, turning the usual controversy on its head as—for once—a book was criticized as being too popular to receive Printz recognition! Be that as it may, Angus was so successful that at last count, eight more addled adventures of its protagonist Georgia Nicholson have followed, clearly demonstrating that the operative word in any discussion of chick lit is popular, followed closely by commercial.
For many readers, the first indication that a new genre was in the offing was the unheralded appearance of book display tables at their neighborhood Barnes & Noble bookstores bearing signs that read, simply, “Chick Lit.” This suggested several things: the principal market for this new kind of genre fiction was retail, not the traditional institutional market, and the major chain bookstores (principally Barnes & Noble) were playing an increasingly active role in the process of publishing books for young readers and were able to create and develop trends. One of the earlier indicators of this had been an article that appeared in the August 12, 1997, New York Times. In it, the reporter Doreen Carvajal noted, “Publishing executives in search of oracles have begun turning to the dominant chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders for guidance about a broad range of issues—from dust jacket colors and punchy titles to authors’ precise sales histories and forecasts of customer demand—that could determine a manuscript’s destiny.” To affirm this, Carvajal (1997, C5) quoted Ira Silverberg, then Grove Press’s editor in chief: “Barnes & Noble and Borders have an increasing presence, so we really must spend more time with them to get our books across to a wider audience.”
Silverberg, of course, was an adult publisher, but a similar influence was being felt on the juvenile side of publishing houses. The children’s book reviewer Barbara Elleman (1998, 44) noted in a 1998 School Library Journal article, “Juvenile trade marketing staffs have begun close contact with bookstore chains, as their adult counterparts have done for some time. Barnes & Noble has 35 central buyers who make the [purchasing] decisions for all the stores across the country. In the children’s field, there are only one or two buyers. Their selections are usually based on an author’s reputation, the number of awards he or she has won, the ‘spin’ the sales and marketing people have put on the book, and how much money the publishers are willing to put into marketing it in the bookstore.”
Whether these buyers have ever actually exercised veto power over the publication of any particular book is moot, but I know from personal experience that their opinions are taken very seriously, indeed. When, in the late nineties, I served as a consultant to Houghton Mifflin on the development of their prospective new YA series the Best American Nonrequired Reading (the term young adult literature was considered too noncommercial!), I was flown to New York for a meeting with Joe Monti, then children’s book buyer for Barnes & Noble, to solicit his views on the viability of the series and whether it should be published as a YA or an adult title. Later, when I was developing Rush Hour, my own short-lived YA literary journal, its publisher Delacorte also sought advice and feedback from Barnes & Noble regarding marketing, jacket art, and price points.
The growing influence of the chains affirmed another equally significant trend: the growing purchasing power of the young adults themselves. “Attracting teens’ business has become a Holy Grail for marketers,” the reporter Dave Carpenter (2000, D1) wrote in a November 2000 article, adding that American teens were projected to spend “a staggering” $155 billion that year.
Two years later, the Washington Post reported: “Teenagers are the demographic that almost everyone in the book industry—librarians, publishers, booksellers—wants. As the number of teenagers in the population has risen [the 2000 census had shown 5.5 million more ten- to nineteen-year-olds than in 1990], so has teen buying power for all kinds of items, including books” (Bacon 2002, B1).
The Los Angeles Times defined precisely how much buying power when it reported in a 2001 article that literature for young adults (which it defined—à la YALSA—as twelve- to eighteen-year-olds) had become a $1.5 billion industry (DiMassa 2001). That same year USA Today reported that teens ages fourteen to seventeen had bought 35.6 million books in 2001, an increase of about 6 million over the previous year.
One noteworthy aspect of teens’ new spending patterns was an equally new penchant for hardcover books in a field where paperbacks had reigned supreme! The editor-publishers Brenda Bowen (Simon & Schuster) and Elise Howard (Avon) both told Publishers Weekly in 1999 that they were finding a new receptivity to hardcovers on the part of the chains (Maughan 1999, 93), and a year later, Andrew Smith, then vice president of marketing for Random House, agreed: “We’re selling more hardcovers to teens than we have in the past. The format and price point don’t seem to be a problem for them” (Maughan 2000, 28).1 Apparently not—five years later, the Association of American Publishers reported in 2005 that children’s and young adult hardcover sales in 2005 were up an amazing 59.6 percent over the previous year (2006).
YA Imprints Arrive
Although publishers’ children’s divisions had previously released young adult books, it is small wonder—considering this robust market—that as early as 1999, publishers were starting to launch separate young adult imprints, many specializing in reader-friendly (i.e., commercial) fiction. At least a baker’s dozen would emerge between 1999 and 2007. In chronological order, they are
1999: Avon (later Harper) Tempest and Simon & Schuster Pulse
2002:Scholastic Push, TOR Starscape, Penguin Speak, Penguin Firebird
2004: Penguin Razorbill, Houghton Mifflin Graphia
2005: Abrams Amulet
2006: Llewellyn Flux
2007:Aladdin Mix (aimed at tween readers), Harlequin Kimani Tru
A measure of their success is found in a startling statistic from the Book Industry Study Group, which found that, in 2006, retail sales accounted for roughly 60 percent of all domestic children’s hardcover sales and 90 percent of children’s paperback sales (Brown 2006, 24).
In addition to the thirteen new YA imprints, two new adult imprints—Pocket Books’ MTV Books (1995) and Simon & Schuster’s Spotlight Entertainment (2004)—were aimed directly at the newly emerging crossover audience: eighteen- to twenty-five-year-olds. Though MTV Books publications were notably edgy and clearly aimed at the upper end of the MTV demographic (eighteen- to thirty-four-year-olds), many of its titles could easily have been released as YA and—in one notable case—should have been. I refer to Stephen Chbosky’s Perks of Being a Wallflower, an extraordinary epistolary novel with a haunting sensibility, an unforgettable protagonist, and an absolutely exquisite narrative voice. Published in 1999, it became an instant YA classic and—had it been published as YA—surely would have been a strong contender for the Michael L. Printz Award.
Not every commercial effort to reach teens was successful, however. One of the most notable failures was the Teen People Book Club, launched in March 2000 by the magazine of the same name in cooperation with the Book of the Month Club. Sadly, this promising effort, which initially brought in four to five times more new members than expected (Maughan and Milliot 2001, 12), lasted only a year before it fell victim not so much to disappointing sales as to the fraught merger of its owner Time Warner with AOL. In the meantime, the self-described categories of books offered by the club and deemed especially attractive to teens are instructive. For those interested in the equation between teens and popular reading, here they are from the club’s website, which—sadly—is no longer available:
Amazing books about real teens and real issues
Great novels that will make you laugh or make you cry or make your heart pound with fear
Star-studded books on today’s hottest celebrities
Useful guides with advice that’s truly relevant to your life
And all the new, new, NEW stuff you just won’t hear about anywhere else. It’s also worth noting that—in a further effort to establish credibility with young adults—titles for the club’s catalog were selected with the advice and counsel of a panel of teenagers recruited from across the country called the Review Crew.
Mean Girls Materialize
Ironically or not, the emergence of teens as überconsumers influenced the emergence, a year later, of a new chick lit subgenre that was quickly dubbed both “mean girl” books and “privileged chick lit.” A New York Times article about this new subgenre with its relentless focus on designer labels and other consumables was amusingly titled “Poor Little Rich Girls Throbbing to Shop” (Bellafante 2003). The chief exemplar of this new subgenre was, of course, Cecily von Ziegesar’s Gossip Girl series, which retails the designer-label-ridden lives of fabulously wealthy girls like Blair Waldorf and Serena van der Woodsen, both of whom attend the exclusive Constance Billard School on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Although loosely based on the author’s own teenage experience of being a student at the tony Nightingale-Bamford School, these are books in which—the New York Times dryly noted—“No cliché of Upper East Side privilege goes unnoticed” (Bellafante 2003, F1).
The genesis of the series was an outline proposal that von Ziegesar wrote when she was working as an editor at the book packager 17th Street Productions (later part of Alloy Entertainment). One of the first such proposals to be shopped around by e-mail, the project was quickly snapped up by the Little, Brown editor Cynthia Eagen, and the rest is literary history—of a sort. Within two years, the incipient series had sold 1.3 million copies and spawned a companion spin-off series, The A List, which was set on the other coast—in Hollywood. The only difference between the two cultures under examination was that the kids in the A List titles didn’t attend a private school; instead, they were students at Beverly Hills High, a milieu that irresistibly recalls the once-popular television series Beverly Hills 90210 and underscores the growing symbiosis between commercial fiction and its electronic counterpart, motion pictures and television.
