ONE WAY TO ORGANIZE A POETRY COLLECTION
How to Make a Poetic Memoir Read Like a Novel
Poems can have plots
When it became clear that Mom needed more help, I begged her to choose one of her 7 children to move closer to. She chose me, the eldest daughter and second oldest child. I wasn’t surprised because I had always been her helper around the house, especially when she bore 4 new babies between 1958 and 1961. This plumb of new life included twins delivered in 1960 while she was under hypnosis. A year later, the seventh almost killed her. At the age of 10, I was a surrogate Mommy for a year while Mom healed.
Despite my devotion to Mom, my Uncle Bill (her brother) asked me if I loved my mother when I announced she had chosen to live closer to me. His question haunted me over the course of the 14 years I cared for her as she aged and dealt with Alzheimer’s. Could I doubt my love for her? And for the stranger she was becoming?
When she passed away in 2016, I wrote many poems to deal with the grief and resolve the question of love for her. I was led to an online memoir course taught by Alison Wearing called Memoir Writing, Ink. I thought I would write a prose memoir, but the poems kept coming. This video describes how I learned through this course and other sources to organize my poems. My publisher told me the collection “reads like a novel”. Indeed, most of the poems are narrative.
As you listen to this video (one hour), you will learn about the following techniques I used. I’ll list three as I seem to like the number 3!
- Containers for memoirs (My container holding the poems together is the number 3. You’ll see why.)
- Three-word sentence poems (Once I learned this technique, I was able to write many poems for the book. This style creates tension, so I had to soften some poems by expanding the clauses. It was like writing music!)
- The W-Storyboard Structure (Mary Carroll Moore, author of Your Book Starts Here). Check out her YouTube videos on story structures. Here’s one. This story structure taught me how to use triggers, crisis events, back stories, rising and falling conflicts, climax events, and resolutions to problems.
While planning my memoir, I also considered character arcs, the use of dialogue, and other fiction-writing techniques. I wasn’t able to discuss all these elements in the time given.
I hope you enjoy the video. Let me know if you have any questions or comments after you view the videos and read this post.
My book, Three-Penny Memories: A Poetic Memoir, is available on Amazon.
