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 new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Interview with Poet Patricia Spears Jones: The Beloved Community

Poet Patricia Spears Jones published her collection The Beloved Community in 2023. Here she speaks about the book and her path as a writer.

Patricia Spears Jones, photo by Marcia E. Wilson

Zack Rogow: Many of your poems are sparked by chance encounters in an urban area, often New York City. What types of encounters are most likely to generate a poem for you?

Patricia Spears Jones: The encounters could be a phrase overheard on the sidewalk, the weather, a gallery exhibition, a movie scene, another poet’s work, the scent of the subway or a perfume counter, the taste of whiskey, music—especially live performances, a garment’s color and cut. Basically, even with my diva cane! I am a flaneuse, as the poet Scott Hightower once described me. 

 

Q. There are several elegies in The Beloved Community: for Black Panther leader Fred Hampton, for Aretha Franklin, for pianist Geri Allen, and others. How does a poet make the loss of an individual life resonate for readers?

 

I think that one of the great gifts that poets give is to make the loss of an individual resonate—whether they are historic figures, or celebrities, as listed in your question, or a family member or friend. Thulani Davis said that poets sing people into this world and sing them out.  Sometimes it takes very long to do so—I’ve been thinking about the life and very much the death of Fred Hampton since I was in my teens. His death is mentioned in an early poem of mine. “Glad All Over,” but I wasn’t able to write the poem about him in The Beloved Community until 2021. So finding that language took like 50 years. As for the Gerri Allen lyric, that was almost sent—I had recently seen her play in a lovely park in Sugar Hill, Harlem, and a year later she passed and I could still see her playing the piano. Each of these poems can only provide a trace of what I was feeling when I wrote them. The hardest was the one for Aretha because I was out of the U.S. when she passed, but it gave me the opportunity to see her globally. 

 

There are also poems in the collection that are a kind of elegy for persons and the place—the persons are Lee Breuer, Steve Cannon, and Hannah Weiner—and the place, the East Village of the 1970s. Lee and the people at Mabou Mines got me to New York City,  Steve Cannon introduced me to the “third whirl” poetics, as he called it from his perch on East Third Street, he lived in an actual house! And Hannah Weiner was sort of the older cool poet who seemed to have the strangest and vibrant life—I am sure she was mad, but mad for poetry.  She saw WORDS and, in a way, gave all of us permission to delve ever so intensely into WORDS. 

Q. The title poem is in a sense an elegy for someone the speaker did not know, the attendant or a customer in a laundromat. The poet just happens to be in the laundromat when another customer sees a flyer for a memorial and realizes someone has died. What inspired you to write about an anonymous person the speaker of the poem seemingly never met or heard of before that incident?

I was inspired by the encounter and the sense of community that the laundromat and indeed any of the laundromats in Brooklyn have. They are places you go to regularly and if you have a routine you see some of the same people maybe twice a month or weekly.  People are often talkative or secretive—it’s amazing what some folks don’t want you to see in a laundromat. The workers are often immigrants, English may be their second or third language, sometimes family members join them to clean up. All the while people are washing their clothes. And the workers often post fliers for neighborhood events, so seeing one for a memorial service was a jolt. It is strange I only saw that woman in question just that time, but accidental intimacy happens in neighborhoods where you must go outside your home to do even the most mundane thing, like wash your clothes.

 

Q. One thing that’s always struck me about your poems is how you can move from what seems almost like a superficial level to such a deep one with just a few words. I’m thinking about the poem “First and last nights in Virginia, January and May 2020,” where you describe shopping in a chain drugstore. Suddenly the last three syllables of the poem turn it into a political manifesto. How do you switch from what seems like an everyday description to something much more significant in only a few words?

 

It's all in the build-up  and I also want to collapse that time in as sharp a way as possible. The year 2020 was just so grim and the sham response from the business community (we need workers to go back to work even as workers were dying) and President Trump worsened the atmosphere. And one of the great things about poetry is when you want to really say it you do it with as few words as possible and each one matters.

 

Q. You’ve recently received well-deserved recognitions, including being named New York State Poet and the inaugural Lucille Clifton Poetry Chair at the Community of Writers; and winning the Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers. For many decades, though, you worked without receiving major honors, surprising for an author as accomplished as you. What kept you going all those years when your work was not widely recognized?

 

I made a serious decision in 1990 to complete my MFA from Vermont College and keep pushing my work because I knew that I had something to say as a poet and I am quite stubborn and proud. For my MFA I was advised by Lynda Hull and Mark Doty, and briefly by the late Belle Waring, and finally David Rivard. I read like 200-300 poetry collections, literary criticism, philosophy, history, etc. And from that I knew that what I was saying and how I was saying it could and should be part of the discourse. As stated, I am quite proud. While my work appeared to be ignored by the various versions of the poetry establishment, I have always had patrons and champions who have found my work to be important and necessary. I am glad they did. It has not been easy and there are days when I wished I had received all this 10 years ago when I was healthier, but better late than never. The Jackson Poetry Prize was a total surprise, but earlier in 1996 when I received an award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts (FCA) I knew that maybe just maybe my poetics was finding readers and a place in what is often called the avant-garde. I do not think of myself as that, but I got to thank Jasper Johns for the FCA funds which allowed me to: a) buy a computer, and b) take a trip to Paris.  I don’t usually name drop, but you know what, if I want to I can and that is another way of saying writers, musicians, artists, journalists whom I respect and admire offered me their respect and admiration—that kept me going. And keeps me going.

Patricia Spears Jones’ poetry collection The Beloved Community is published by Copper Canyon Press. Her other books include A Lucent Fire: New and Selected Poems. She has taught creative writing at Hollins University, Adelphi University, Hunter College, and Barnard College. Jones leads poetry workshops for The Workroom, Hugo House, the Community of Writers, Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill, Gemini Ink, and Brooklyn Poets. She organizes the American Poets Congress and is a Senior Fellow Emeritus of the Black Earth Institute.

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Zack’s new book of poetry, The Kama Sutra for Senior Citizens and Other Poems on Aging. Order in the USA    Order in the UK

Zack’s most recent translation, The Water Drinkers and Other Sketches of Paris in the Romantic Era by Henry Murger

Other posts of interest:

How to Get Published

Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop

How Not to Become a Literary Dropout

Putting Together a Book Manuscript

Working with a Writing Mentor

How to Deliver Your Message

Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?

Why Write Poetry?

Poetic Forms: Introduction, the Sonnet, the Sestina, the Ghazal, the Tanka, the Villanelle

Praise and Lament

How to Be an American Writer

Writers and Collaboration

Types of Closure in Poetry

Interview with Poet Frank Paino

Frank Paino’s first two volumes of poetry, The Rapture of Matter and Out of Eden, both from Cleveland State University Press, astonished readers with their exquisite insights into the human condition. His literary mentors include the poets he studied with in the Vermont College MFA program, Mark Doty, Lynda Hull, Richard Jackson, and David Wojahn.

Frank Paino's long-awaited third poetry collection Obscura, can now be preordered through Orison Books.

Frank Paino

Zack Rogow: Should a book of poems have a common subject, theme, or thread? If so, why? And does Obscura have that? If it does, what is the common thread?

Frank Paino: I’m not sure I really buy into the idea of “should” and “should not” when it comes to poetry books. Each is as individual as the poet. That being said, it’s certainly true that most contemporary volumes tend be thematically-oriented. Some readers will find that approach helpful. Others may not.

Personally, I have never set out to deliberately create a manuscript organized around a specific theme; despite that, I really only write about the things I am wildly passionate about, so that narrows the field to such a degree that I think my same little cosmos of themes will always be there for me from book to book.

So…what are my common threads? In no particular order, and very broadly speaking:  Death. Religion and sex/the erotic, which, speaking as an atheist who was raised Catholic, I find to be inextricably bound together. Humanism. The terrible consequences of the worst of our tendencies. Obscure historical facts and events, especially relating to some or all of the above. There are other things I touch upon, of course, but these are my wellsprings.

ZR: If Obscura has a common thread, how did that affect your writing or editing process for the book? Are there ideas for poems you set aside, or entire finished poems you set aside for another collection, in order to maintain a common theme?

FP: The common threads in Obscura are what I mentioned a few moments ago. Yet, despite these connections, I had a difficult time putting the manuscript together because I was (and am) somewhat resistant to the idea of books being divided into sections. Instead of making those separations (which may have been problematic in any case), I just laid all the pieces on the floor and tried to determine how one might speak to another in ways beyond what might seem to be the most obvious. It was a process I both loved and abhorred.

I’ll add here that, as a reader of poetry, I almost never pick up a book and move from cover to cover. Instead, I choose by titles that intrigue me, or, sometimes, I just pick a page number and open to whatever poem happens to be there. I’m not sure if other people read poetry in this manner, but I prefer it that way. I look at each poem as its own world and I’m more than happy to switch things up between pieces. I don’t necessarily want a guide.

As for ideas and/or finished poems that weren’t included in Obscura, I’ve got enough other material for an entire manuscript, mostly older work that didn’t make it into the book for any number of reasons. It’s been over 20 years since I published a volume of poetry. During much of that time, I wrote on and off, but I really didn’t submit to many journals, and I certainly didn’t send manuscripts out until the last few years, so, in addition to a lot of newer work, I have a backlog of older poems.

Perhaps more to your point, though, while there’s nothing wrong with such topics, I don’t have a cache of nature poems, or love poems, or humorous poems, or political poems (you get the picture!) waiting for a new manuscript to fit into. I might experiment with different forms or styles, but my obsessions and passions, my themes, are pretty consistent. The one exception would be personal narratives…something I used to write a lot more of, but, honestly I find myself increasingly disinterested in creating that sort of work. There are exceptions, even in Obscura, but, for now at least, I’m far more interested in looking out at the world.

ZR: A number of the poems in Obscura are based on actual historical events or personages. How do you pick an event or person to write a poem about? How much research about a historical event or person is enough or too much? How do you write your way into an actual event so that you are not writing history or journalism, but approaching the event from a poet’s vantage point? 

FP: I’m not sure I pick an event or person so much as they pick me. If I read about something/someone, or see a show on a rather obscure, strange, dark, or off-the-wall topic, I’ll immediately know if it wants or needs to be a poem I want to take on. Additionally, I have a number of people who know me well enough that when they come across something they consider to be a “Frank topic,” they’ll pass the info on to me. It might be months or years, but a lot of those “tips” have become poems. My sister, Gerrie, is a good one for this sort of thing, but I’m often surprised and delighted by people who think of me when encountering the aforementioned sorts of information. It’s weirdly flattering!

The amount of research varies with my prior familiarity, or lack thereof. In the case of saints, for instance, I have a vast store of that information in my head. But something like William Forsyth’s “reverse Noah’s ark,” which I wrote about in the poem “Falling,” took quite a bit of research.

That being said, I don’t feel an obligation to get all the facts into a poem. Indeed, my first priority is to language...to the craft. Being 100% accurate about every historical fact is secondary. My poem about the space dog Laika is a case in point. I know I don’t have every detail right, but the basics are all there and I think the point is made. Someone, I can’t recall who, once told me about an artist from Newfoundland, Christopher Pratt. As the story goes, Mr. Pratt had a friend who remarked that the artist’s rendering of a hay field was very inaccurate because farmers would never make the haystacks in the way Pratt depicted. To which Pratt replied, “Probably so. But this isn’t a hayfield, it’s a painting.” Well, I’m a poet, not an historian. I want to tell the story, but I don’t feel any obligation to get every detail correct.

Finally, I’m a frustrated visual artist. I think this drives my lyric impulse. As I have no ability to paint or sculpt, I use words as my palette or clay. So, when I approach an actual event, it is with my innate tendency to see things with an artist’s eye…it’s the only way I know to enter those moments, and I think it saves me from any risk of merely recounting “the facts.”

ZR: Many of the poems in Obscura are about ill-starred or doomed events or people—the fire that devastated a pleasure cruise in New York in 1904, the execution of the spy Mata Hari, the suicide of the pregnant Harriet Westbrook Shelley (first wife of the poet Percy Shelley). What is it about the tragedies in this book that tug at you as a writer and make you want to explore them deeply in poetry? 

FP: I’ve got what I consider to be a healthy preoccupation with death. Our culture is such that many people want to ignore the fact of our mortality. But I think it’s critical to embrace that reality so that we are daily inspired to live as fully and as generously as we can. After all, this is the only life we can be certain of, so we should be mindful of making it the best it can be...for ourselves as well as others (including those who will come after us).

One natural avenue to take in this regard is pondering the ways others have faced tragedy and death. This can be quite instructive. It forces me, as a poet, to ask a lot of big questions, and, hopefully, share my perspectives in a way that’s both meaningful and aesthetically resonant with anyone kind enough to read my work.

Finally, I’ll say that while I believe it’s important to write about these topics, I also think there’s a fine line between a kind of redemptive exploration and simply being morbidly voyeuristic. I never want to write about something purely because it’s tragic. I’m interested in holding the darkness up to the light as a means of informing the way I live. My poetry refuses to turn away from disaster, evil, grief, oppression, etc., because it’s searching for a way through. If I’m lucky, whatever path I discover might be one at least a few of my readers will want to travel with me, too.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies

Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts on writing topics:

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry