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One of my favorite forms of storytelling may not look like storytelling at first and certainly does not resemble traditional storytelling. I love those collections that use short poems to put together a narrative, those epiphanies and slices of life that require the participation of the reader to create a coherent narrative so that the text itself becomes like life as it is experienced (uneven, brief moments of consciousness in a sea of nothing) and life as it remembered (with a story). The reader’s collusion in the art of meaning-making is made clear and of the greatest importance. Moreover, reading such a collection can help one to become aware of the ways we all construct our pasts.

A fine example of such a collection is Alice Notley’s autobiographical Mysteries of Small Houses. These mostly one or two page poems move forwards and backwards showing us slices from every period of her life. We read about childhood, university, marriage, and motherhood, but making a coherent story of what we are told is left to us. Alicia Ostriker’s The Volcano Sequence works similarly, though it is less overtly biographical and places more emphasis on the cyclical and the eruptive. In addition, It is almost required of editors to tell a story when they select and collect a writer’s poems, even if the only story to tell is of the poet’s development as a poet.

This is also the effect I’ve tried achieve in How to Drink a Floral Moon (forthcoming from Blue Lion Books). I’ve tried to make each of the first twelve sections represent the development of a multiplicity of voices and the perceptions of one voice about the others in a way that can be read as cyclical. The thirteenth part focuses on one voice that leaves the possibility of a cycle and suffers.

Related posts:

1. rob mclennan’s Short Histories
2. Deathmatch: Short Story vs. Novel
3. Stories from Sudan
4. What About Our Stories?
5. grain short/grain long
6. 24-Hour Read-a-Thon: Fung Yu-Lan’s A Short History of Chinese Philosophy
7. Lines of Faith: Why I Write Poems
8. Three Poems in Counterexample Poetics
9. A Pair of Poems in Listenlight 19
10. Scientists Discover that Cats are Poems

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