Advice for Writers: 2025

Sunday, February 2, 2025

“Yes”—The Power of a Single Word, by Federico Roncoroni

This charming and thoughtful essay is an excerpt from the Italian writer Federico Roncoroni’s book Words: A Private Dictionary [Parole: Un dizionario privato]. Roncoroni talks about the word “Yes” and how many shades of meaning and emotion even a tiny word can express. Translated and adapted from the Italian by Zack Rogow. Thanks to Sabrina Orefici for bringing this essay to my attention.

Federico Roncoroni (1944–2021)

Yes is such a short word, but so dangerous. It should be used only with the utmost caution.

It takes just an instant to pronounce the word Yes, but that little word can have disastrous effects.

In fact, when it’s not used merely to answer in the affirmative a question that is in itself innocent and innocuous (“Do you like pistachio ice cream?”—“Yes”) or to express assent to a specific proposal of limited scope (“We’re gonna go see that new action movie, you wanna come?”—“Yes”) there is the risk that the word will bind you to a solemn commitment, a promise or a choice with effects that can last a lifetime (“Do you take for your lawfully wedded spouse…”— “Yes”). Everyone knows that answering Yes to such a question has serious consequences, much heavier than being considered a pistachio ice cream lover or spending a bad evening sitting through a boring film in the company of boring friends.

The affirmative and binding force of this little word is reinforced by the fact that this one syllable is actually the equivalent of an entire sentence: “Did you buy the newspaper?” “Yes” (I bought the newspaper). So, if you really can’t use its opposite, which is just as short but disengages rather than engages (if you say Yes you’re definitely signing on for something, but if you say No you’re turning in the opposite direction), it’s advisable just to keep quiet and hide behind expressions like “Don’t know,” or “Lemme think about it,” or “We’ll see.”

This little word is no less dangerous on the level of significance, rich as it is in shades of meaning depending on your intonation, how you say it, and the pitch you use to release that phoneme, all of which communicate a vast array of sensations and emotions, not always easy to decipher.

In actuality, a simple Yes can be, depending on the situation, whispered murmured susurrated meowed stammered barked shouted screamed or muttered under your breath. It can be beseeched requested imposed extorted or demanded. A Yes can be spontaneous sudden impulsive hasty sincere frank blunt cordial false treacherous forced unexpected expected sarcastic providential advantageous or disadvantageous wrong useless absurd too late liberating enthusiastic formal warm festive passionate cold icy humiliating or servile. A Yes can be conclusive decisive determinant and even definitive.

It can open up new horizons and perspectives, or it can get you into deep trouble trap and ensnare.

Yes can also be used ironically to say that you really have no intention of doing what the other person requested: “Yes…sure, tomorrow,” or “Yes, in your dreams.”

When repeated, a Yes can mean forceful agreement, or more often doubt, depending on the tone: “Yes, yes… of course I believe you.”

Please avoid substituting for Yes the word Affirmative, which is best left to military personnel, and also avoid saying Absolutely, a highly ambiguous word at best.

If you just precede Yes with an article, which is, of all parts of speech the most attentive servant, the word Yes can also function as a noun:

“Was that a Yes?”

“All in favor? The Yeses have it.”

No less a writer than Dante immortalized the Yes as a noun in Canto XXXIII of The Inferno, using it to portray his homeland:

Italy “…that beautiful country where the Yes resounds.”

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Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost

Saturday, January 11, 2025

The Braided Poem

In recent decades, the braided poem has opened dynamic possibilities for writers and readers. The current wave of braided poems began with the work of Larry Levis in the mid-1980s in books such as Winter Stars.

Larry Levis (1946–1996)

Many other writers then successfully adapted the braided poem to different subjects. These poets include Mark Doty, Lynda Hull, Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Jorie Graham, Brenda Hillman, Dionisio Martínez, and Frank Paino.

I trace the origins of the braided poem back to Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” In that poem, Whitman described the widespread mourning in the wake of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, and crocheted that together with images of lilacs, birdsong, and a star that signaled the start of spring:

Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,
There in the fragrant pines and the cedars dusk and dim.

What is a braided poem? A braided poem twines together disparate strands of narrative and imagery, connecting them metaphorically. Usually a braided poem restlessly moves from one topic to another, at first perhaps jarringly. As the poem progresses, the reader gradually comes to understand what ties together the different braids, on a figurative level. When done well, the braided poem is electric, following the jumps of the mind and the heart as they come to grips with complex emotions and thoughts that are difficult to fit all in one strand. The braided poem evolved alongside the braided essay, which uses similar techniques in prose, combining different threads to explore how seemingly independent topics intertwine.

One of the most successful braided poems, to my mind, is Mark Doty’s “Fog.” Mark Doty braids together three distinctive subjects in the space of only a couple of pages. The poem begins with an account of plants taking turns blooming in the speaker’s garden. Already in the opening lines, the description foreshadows fatal possibilities, as the flowers last only a few days, and the white peonies have a “blood-color…ruffle”. The second element in the poem, a Ouija board belonging to the speaker and his partner, echoes this theme. Spirits of dead children use the planchette to communicate with the couple. It’s not until line 45 that we come to understand all these hints about blood and death:

Though it [the blood] submits to test, two,
to be exact, each done three times…

The reader becomes aware that the speaker and his partner are being tested for HIV at the crest of the epidemic that killed tens of millions of people worldwide. Gradually we learn that the speaker is negative, but his partner has antibodies indicating the presence of the illness. The speaker is so stricken by the news that he can’t even use the word “positive.” Nor do the acronyms HIV or AIDs appear in the text. Those omissions reveal that the speaker does not want even to voice the possible outcomes for his beloved. The poem is terribly moving, and uses a device similar to Whitman’s elegy for Lincoln, evoking the cycles of life and death in spring to highlight grief. With incredible skill, Doty braids together the poem’s three strands—the garden, the Ouija board, and the HIV tests.

During the time when Mary Doty published “Fog” in his dazzling collection My Alexandria in 1993, the braided poem arrived as a revelation. It was a period when much of the poetry in the U.S.A. was taking paths that had become a little too well travelled: the “I do this, I do that” poems of the New York School, the Beat Generation stream of consciousness howl, or the personal-as-political autobiographical poems of identity. The braided poem allowed for a complex and nuanced exploration of myriad awakenings taking place in North American society, changes that were upending Victorian morality; as well as challenging dominant cultures in class, gender, race, and sexuality.

To my mind, the braided poem works best when the varied strands have a strong rubber band holding them together, and the different braids strengthen the poem’s emotional fibers. The strands have to twist together organically, and not arbitrarily or gratuitously. Braiding very different strands in the same poem can feel gimmicky or forced if parts of the poem strike the reader as added on for no compelling reason. Those added parts can then dilute the impact of the poem’s core.

Here are a few of my favorite braided poems that beautifully combine multiple strands:

Jorie Graham: “Salmon”
Brenda Hillman: “The Spark”
Lynda Hull: “Utopia Parkway”
Dionisio Martinez: “Bad Alchemy”
Frank Paino: “Each Bone of the Body”

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Zack’s memoir, Hugging My Father’s Ghost