McCormack’s The Road and Morrison’s A Mercy are great inspiration for poetry, as well as great examples of affective prose that force the reader to take the same state of mind as the narrator. They’re novels, not poetry, but both have such vivid prose, that they evoke the same emotions. The Road, especially, isn’t very interesting plot-wise. However, his fluid, dream McCormack does this be describing character action without punctuation, in blunt, dry, run-on sentences. But, he intersperses this with enough adverbs to make it feel colorful and vivid, and suck you into the narrator’s mind. The text itself isn’t a model for poetry- it’s much more blunt and dry than the poetry we read in class. But it is a great lesson in getting your readers immediately immersed through nothing but words.
Morrison, too, utilizes the same method to enrapture her readers. However, her prose is much more vivid while utilizing the same affective techniques- while still from a third person perspective, we get a direct look into the character’s head and are thus immersed. What’s interesting about Morrison’s prose is that she easily code-switches based off the character’s state of mind. Morrison’s prose devolves into run on, nonsensical sentences as the characters Rebekka loses her grip on reality. Morrison’s entire syntax changes, too, as she switched from character to character. Each narrator has a distinctive voice, you can tell from the syntax alone. There’s an illiterate woman, Florens, who has a narrative nothing like I’ve seen in conventional liturature. It’s incredibly compelling.
Anyway, these are very inspiring works. Great for getting me think about narrative voice, code-swiching, and engaging the reader, which are all vital to poetry. Hope these help.