Young Adult Literature: Poetry

Titles Discussed

A Wreath for EmmettTill (2005) by Marilyn Nelson

19 Varieties of Gazelle Poems of the Middle East (2002) by Naomi Shihab Nye

How to (Un)cage a Girl (2008) by Francesca Lia Block

Genre Overview

Poetry written for children and adolescents is not a new addition to the tradition of Western literature and poetry in general. Nor was the convention of writing about or from the perspective of a young adult anything revolutionary in the late twentieth century. English poet William Blake and other Romantics, for example, wrote many poems centered on the experiences of young, poor workers to highlight and eliminate what they saw as social injustice within English and European society. Yet even these poems were not targeted at a younger audience. It was not until the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century that young adult poetry, as literature written about teenagers and addressed and marketed to a teenage audience, found a voice in Western literature.

Young adult literature as a genre is generally accepted to have gained popularity in the United States in the late 1960s. Since then, the genre has been defined largely by adolescent protagonists dealing with various issues, from becoming adults and a part of society to finding a place and identity in a larger social structure. The genre went through a period of popularity in the 1970s in which narratives focused on real-life issues faced by protagonists navigating the world of high school social structures and undergoing puberty. While the next decade saw a sharp decline in the sales of young adult books, the genre resurged in the 1990s, exploding with a wealth of new subgenres, such as fantasy, historical fiction, supernatural fiction, and mystery. Realism took a back seat to the more popular genres and books such as the Harry Potter series (1997–2007); however, realism was still a major subgenre for young readers. The problem that authors faced at the end of the twentieth century was finding subject matter that could hold readers' attention.

Adolescent readers did not simply want stories about innocent teen romance or learning to have a good relationship with a stepparent. Now that libraries and schools were faced with budgetary cuts, librarians were making fewer purchasing choices. Publishers and authors had to market directly to young readers, so they needed to focus on new, exciting, difficult, and sometimes taboo subjects. The subgenre of realism looked to adult themes such as death, addiction, pregnancy, drugs, violence, and even depression and suicide, issues that teenagers were facing themselves more than ever.

While novels and short stories were able to focus on young protagonists dealing with these issues, poetry became a vehicle through which readers could experience the interior thoughts of a character, dealing almost directly with the emotional consequences speakers and characters faced as a result of real-world situations. Novels written in verse, such as Judy Scuppernong (1990) by Brenda Seabrooke and Soda Jerk (1990) by Cynthia Rylant, marked the start of this new perspective in the 1990s, which was then continued with seminarrative works such as Crank (2004) by Ellen Hopkins, which deals with methamphetamine addiction, and True Believer (2001) by Virginia Euwer Wolff, a story of how to deal with and overcome violence.

As young adults took their place in an increasingly globalized world that continues to broaden and encompass disparate cultures, poetry reflecting the many voices of the international community has taken a place in young adult poetry of the twenty-first century. Poets such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Marilyn Nelson, and Francesca Lia Block have become representatives of the new era in young adult literature, sharing perspectives that epitomize and embrace the new era of pluralism.

Works

One of the marks of young adult literature is the wide range of protagonists who make up the multitude of narratives. Key to the appeal of these different perspectives is the idea of identity. Unique identity is both conventionally something adolescents seek to define for themselves and something that makes literature engaging. In modern young adult poetry, poets tap into their own unique pasts, cultures, ethnicities, and perspectives to show how individualism has its place within the new culture of pluralism.

Marilyn Nelson is an example of a poet who brings her own perspective to modern coming-of-age narratives. As a Black American growing up during the height of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, her poetry seeks to reintroduce the perspective from when she was a child into twenty-first-century culture, where young readers have only secondhand experience of what US culture in the 1950s and 1960s was like for minorities.

Nelson's collection of poetry, A Wreath for Emmett Till, (2005) is a meditation on the past, individual and cultural memory, and the relevance of each in the twenty-first century. In the title poem of the collection, Nelson brings life back to a fourteen-year-old child whose murder was one of the sparks of the civil rights movement, “His mother had finally bought / that White Sox cap … she'd packed dungarees, T-shirts, underwear … Her only child. A body left to bloat.” While the details of Emmett's desire for a baseball cap and his mother packing his bag establish him as a child, the warmth of this scene is cut short by the reminder that his body was dumped in a river in Mississippi by his murderers. This poem allows modern young readers to identify with Emmett as a young adult and offers a stark reminder of the past.

Memory is also an important device within the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye. As the daughter of a Palestinian refugee and an American of European descent, Nye grew up at the intersection of many different cultures. However, her poetry focuses mainly on the Middle East. Her poetry captures a girl's voice, defining her identity between the traditional and contemporary, the past and the present, and the East and the West. Her book 19 Varieties of Gazelle: Poems of the Middle East (2002) is a collection of poems focusing on identity and duality. In the poem “Different Ways to Pray,” the narrator begins, “There was the method of kneeling, a fine method … Women dreamed wistfully … their prayers … small calcium words uttered in sequence.” Here, through memory, she focuses on the idea of tradition, its beauty, and its difficulty. While it is the cornerstone of identity, it is also calcifying and hard to break. Even for men, tradition can bind: “There were men who had been shepherds for so long / they walked like sheep.” Nye's poems assert that there needs to be a fusion, a meeting where nothing is forgotten, but nothing stays the same.

Yet, while many poets offer their own voice and unique background to modern young adult poetry by focusing on world cultures and backgrounds, some also seek to add complexity to the identity of the traditional American teenager. Far too often, American teenagers are simplified and homogenized into a bland conglomeration of pop culture. Poets such as Francesca Lia Block seek to add interiority and complexity to her American characters, demonstrating to young adults that intelligence and depth are desirable and attainable traits. How to (Un)cage a Girl (2008) is a collection of poetry from the perspective of a teenage girl in the process of finding her own voice and identity in a society that seems to elevate physical beauty, complacency, and popularity above anything else. In the poem “the little oven,” the speaker is listening to her teacher talk about Nazis while the boys of the class make fun of her looks: “my body so thin / i had chopped off / my pretty brown hair / my skin charred and blistered.” Without using capitalization, mirroring the language of texting, Block reveals the inner mind of the speaker and the brutality that the smallest comments can carry for a young woman.

The language of these poets can vary dramatically. Whereas Block attempts to directly relate to the interiority of her characters through language more suited to an adolescent, poets such as Nye and Nelson use descriptive, complex language to convey more complex concepts.

Food is a significant theme in Nye's poetry that helps accent the pluralism of her characters. Through various descriptions, she uses the concept of food as something that both unites and contrasts. The food symbolizes community between those of the same culture, as in “Different Ways to Pray:” “At night men ate heartily, flat bread / and white cheese, / and were happy.” Or, as in “My Father and the Fig Tree,” food symbolizes culture, tradition, and individuality within a more extensive system. At the end of the poem, the poet's father, after many years in the United States, finds a fig tree like he had when he was a child, and to him, it is “assurance / of a world that was always his own.” Particularly in cultures from the Middle East, food is different from traditional food in the United States. So, the contrast in tastes becomes symbolic of the contrast in cultures. Still, these contrasts are brought together under something emotional, both in one's personal ties to the food itself and its part in individual and cultural historical significance.

Nelson's poetry involves a similar connection to individual and cultural memory, although the catalyst for most of these connections is not food but nature and natural imagery. Drawing at some points from the idea of American regionalism, particularly the description of scenery in the Deep South, Nelson often employs imagery with a hint of nostalgia for her own past and a view of the past for a culture that was constantly marred by the brutality of some of its people. In “Pierced by the Screams of a Shortened Childhood,” the narrator listens “to the songs of creature life, which disappears / and comes again to the music of the spheres.” The narrator understands death and sees it in nature for two hundred years until the “slaughter axed one quiet summer night.” The quiet, serene landscapes of the South, particularly at night, symbolize an innocence that was shattered for the author and the country as a whole. Though years have passed, the memories and past return quickly, shattering the comforting innocence and nostalgia but not the whole truth.

While Nye and Nelson emphasize individualism through membership to different distinct communities, Block's poetry works on finding a voice within the dominant cultural sphere of US society. In a poem entitled “Popular Girl,” the speaker meditates on this high school figure, “What are you going to be when you grow up? / are you still going to be beautiful? / with good hair?” The narrator has both an innocence about her and a certain maturity, showing some awareness that life will change drastically after high school and that those with high status in one social sphere are at once imbued with power within that sphere yet are powerless beyond its boundaries. Yet, as with other poets of this genre, the speaker and author work together to both ask and answer the most important questions of a young reader trying to make sense of their world and to create some sense of identity and a way to approach the impending move to adulthood.

As the twenty-first century progressed, poetry aimed at young adult audiences proliferated and delved into vital identity issues. The appearance of young poet-activists such as Amanda Gorman has increased the popularity of young adult poetry. Blue Lipstick: Concrete Poems (2007) by John Grandits contains poems from the perspective of a fifteen-year-old protagonist. Beauty is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability (2011), edited by Sheila Black and Jennifer Bartlett, presents poems that follow the history of the disability movement. Ink Knows No Borders: Poems of the Immigrant and Refugee Experience (2019), edited by Patrice Vecchione and Alyssa Raymond, contains poems about the immigration and refugee experience. The genre of young adult poetry has also been hastened by novels-in-verse, which combine narrative storytelling with poetry. Authors such as Kwame Alexander, Elizabeth Acevedo, and Jacqueline Woodson have made this genre of young adult literature able to present the interior workings of the minds of its characters through a reader-friendly style of poetry, exceedingly popular in the twenty-first century. 

Conclusion

Although works of young adult poetry, like poetry works in general, have a narrow readership base compared to prose, their popularity continues growing in the twenty-first century. Young adult poetry remains a legitimate form of literature and should not be judged artistically for its lack of commercial success. Poetry has always had a place and will always have a place in literature, and the uniqueness of the form makes it a crucial addition to young adult writing. In the future, as more poets write to and for an adolescent audience, there will be more voices and more perspectives to which teens can turn.

The more unique voices there are, the more likely readers will find poets who explore the interior thoughts of young people like them. Novels will never fully capture the intensity of this introspection or the deep look into the mind that poetry can offer. Poetry is a form that holds little back from the reader, and this should become more popular as teens look for more direct insight into their own problems.

As long as the celebration of the plurality in US and world culture continues, many young adult poets will find their work being read, and there is space for many more voices to be heard within the genre. Even though it may be difficult to market poetry to younger audiences directly, schools and teachers continue to look for literature that is multicultural, intelligent, accessible, and engaging. Thus, through the efforts of schools, young adult poetry's popularity will likely continue to increase, even if it does not follow the path many young adult novels have taken since the 1990s. Ultimately, young adults want literature that tackles complex and challenging concepts, and poetry remains one of the most direct ways to reveal ideas about the world.

Bibliography

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