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.

That said, people do continue to write and publish them occasionally, and the best model that comes to mind for what I want to commission is actually a fairly recent one, Toby Barlow’s Sharp Teeth (2008). It’s a werewolf tale, nearly three hundred pages long, told entirely in unrhymed free verse and full of scenes like this:

There’s blood everywhere,
but it’s the creatures at the edge,
licking the corner of the ruby pool,
that hold your curiosity.
So get this straight
it’s not the full moon.
That’s as ancient and ignorant as any myth.
The blood just quickens with a thought
a discipline develops
so that one can self-ignite
reshaping form, becoming something rather more canine
still conscious, a little hungrier.
It’s a raw muscular power,
a rich sexual energy
and food tastes a whole lot better.

It’s a genre piece, in other words, taking familiar conventions of horror and making them new by making the reader pay attention to the form in which they’re delivered. That’s what I want, only I want not a horror novel, but a noir crime novel–and I want to commission Ernest Hilbert to write it.

I got this idea from a pair of poems in Hilbert’s brilliant book Sixty Sonnets (2009) that together tell of a badly botched crime. The first, “She Remembers How They Fled from the Liquor Store Robbery in New Mexico,” doesn’t have to come right out and tell us things went sour–it’s right there in the blood:

Flaming cloud-runs slowly thawed like candles
On the sad, unattainable horizon.
You’d been shot three times, soaked with tar and sweat,
But you gunned the grimy frame toward night,
Lit a smoke and cringed at the oily guts
Leaking from your side. You could never let
Them win.

Then the second poem, “The Fugitive Spends Christmas in a Las Cruces Motel Room,” takes us beyond the scene of immediate action to reveal what we already knew–that this was going to end badly:

He’s in a mound of stones and chaparral.
We didn’t get much cash. It’s nearly gone.
Life is gathered closer here, and death too.
I’m sad, and I have no one left to call.

That last line alone is enough to make clear that Hilbert gets noir, the way it is supposed to remind us at every turn that we are but one slip-up, one accident, one betrayal away from being all alone in this hard, hard world. In just twenty-eight lines, their sounds sharpened like weapons, Hilbert describes a whole world of sordid life and painful death and bad, bad decisions, “The past dragging and chiming like a chain”; imagine what he could do with this sort of focus, this sort of attention to the sound and feel of the fallen world, over the course of an entire verse novel.

Sadly, Mr. Hilbert, my millions are still non-existent, and I fear I haven’t the fortitude to take them by the sort of force that has led your characters to their “wasted and true, savage, coarse, and far” fates. But oh, should the situation change . . . don’t be surprised if you get a frantic call from a gas station bathroom. “That the poet? Yeah–listen: I gotta talk fast–have I got a deal for you.”