Answering Your Questions about Structure

Happy August, all. I just got some very happy news: week, Publisher’s Weekly reviewed my new anthology, The Story of the Body: Poems of Illness & Recovery, calling it “excellent” among other things and featured it as the cover review–one and only time I’ll get to be on a magazine cover. Shoutout to my amazing photographer, my brother-in-law, David Surowiecki. If you’re looking for an author photo, or family portraits, reach out to him — he’s incredible and makes it so painless. I’m really happy this book is getting some attention, as anthologies in this market and moment could easily go unremarked on. But I felt a real need for a book of poems about illness and resilience when I was very sick; I imagined it, too, as a book I’d give a friend when I didn’t have my own words to say what I’d most want to say.

What have you been reading? I need new recommendations. I’ve been rereading and reading some worthwhile new books: Maya Popa’s If You Love That Lady (luminous and lucid, philosophical, deeply structured poems about love and its eviscerations and remakings of us); Rachel Cusk’s The Life of M, which I tend to think is not being reviewed/read as carefully as it demands to be; rereading Nathalie Leger’s Suite for Barbara Loden (extraordinary, highly recommend–and it’s short). Anything good on your reader?

As for the work at hand, in my last post I wrote about structure, and I got a number of excellent questions from you, so this follow-up post addresses those. Keep them coming! And I’ll be back with a new post soon.

How do you braid disparate storylines together?

Braiding disparate story lines together is a way to create more opportunities for suspense and drama, as well as a way to enact certain kinds of realizations through structure (rather than by clunkily telling the reader with exposition). The virtue of, say, writing a memoir with a storyline in the present and lots of flashbacks is that the flashbacks seem real and present — they enact the past coming through into the present, rather than the present tense narrator having to stop and explain things to the reader. This is a version of what I did in The Long Goodbye, which had a present-day story line of losing and mourning my mother, with lots of flashbacks. There’s almost always a spine (one primary logic) and secondary ones are layered within or around that.

One thing I have found typically to be true….