Daniel Cowper’s new book plays out through an intimate form of writing – the novel in verse.
Kingdom of the Clock follows the lives of several people living in a west coast metropolis over the course of 24 hours. As their day moves along, we meet more and more of the main characters and experience their stories and relationships as they navigate the expansive city. While Vancouver is not named specifically as the book’s setting, the inspiration for the novel, characters, and stories are drawn from Cowper’s experiences living in the real life city.
Cowper began envisioning the book as he and his wife (and fellow author) Emily Osborne decided to move from Vancouver to Bowen in 2019 as they awaited their first son. “I was thinking about saying goodbye to Vancouver, and I started thinking about the city more and the way that it worked and the different crazy things that I’d seen in the city over the 10 years I’d been living there.”
“After the pandemic I was really thinking about community and about cities… about the importance of cities and how much they have to offer and the costs they impose on people,” explains Cowper. “So I started writing more about characters, rather than just about the landscape of the city. And then the stories of those characters started getting novelistic, growing up and taking over the piece. That’s really when it became a novel in verse rather than a book of poetry.”
Time itself is an important character in Cowper’s novel. Living in two such different places heavily influenced how he now looks at a day, and how the same period of time and how it's measured can have very different meanings and outcomes. “I was thinking about how the city really operates on the timeline of the clock in a way that the countryside doesn’t. When you’re on Bowen the seasons are really important, the weather is really important,” he explains.
“In Vancouver all that stuff is a little bit secondary to the routine of the day to day. A Thursday in November works very much the same way that a Thursday in June does. Because it’s operating by the terms of the clock,” he says.
The novel in verse genre can trace its roots back to Russian writer Alexander Pushkin, who was writing a piece in the style of Lord Byron’s satirical work Don Juan. But as Cowper explains, Pushkin “started wanting to treat it more seriously and write about his characters in a more compassionate and three-dimensional way. So he started writing about them like it was a novel and… called it a novel in verse.” The end result was Pushkin’s classic novel, Eugene Onegin.
The genre faded away later in the 19th century but experienced a resurgence in the 1980s thanks to Indian writer Vikram Seth. His novel The Golden Gate – detailing his life experiences living in San Francisco – was a hit, leading to more authors choosing to experiment with fully fleshed out novels in verse.
“It’s a really rich form, because in poetry you can add an emotional weight and an emotional punch to something very quickly. You can move very rapidly with your story without sacrificing its impact,” says Cowper.
“But it’s also a challenging book to write, because you have to sustain the poetic energy from beginning to end. Sustaining the energy of a poem over the length of a novel is not an easy thing to do – but if you can pull it off, it’s a lot of fun.”
Kingdom of the Clock is Cowper’s second book, his first a collection of poetry called Grotesque Tenderness. Daniel says the challenge, and payoff, of composing poetry is what has led to his love of the writing form.
“I really like the music of words. I find the sound of words very exciting, and I find it very moving,” he explains. “I find prose very challenging to write artistically. Writing functional prose or persuasive prose is one thing, but writing artistic prose is another thing.”
“The view that I have of literary art is that it’s doing three main things – and this is something that Vladimir Nabokov said – it’s teaching, it’s entertaining, and it’s enchanting. But it’s mostly supposed to enchant,” explains Daniel.
“I hope this book will teach people something about cities and how they work and the kind of things that go on outside of their own specific lives that are happening in real lives in the city. I hope that people will be entertained by the story… There’s a lot of plots in this book, there’s a lot of narrative fun.”
“And I do hope that the enchantment is successful. I’ve tried to make it enchanting and if that’s successful then people will have an experience of beauty, which is what I would like.”
Kingdom of the Clock is now available at Phoenix Books and at the Hearth Gallery. Cowper is planning a reading of his book on the island sometime in the near future.
