The Practice of Poetry

And then sometimes, a book changes your relationship to paper. Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” is one such book. It is a post-9/11 novel that grapples with the aftermath from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy. The narrative is keen and true, but I am most interested in what Foer chooses to do with the page to tell his story. The book is interspersed with photographs, graphics, handwriting, and white space. The illustrations and images depict what the characters in the book look at, photgraph, or imagine. Some of the pages echo pages from the character’s own journals; the affect is a deeper intimacy with the characters: we see what they see, much as if the novel has loose snapshots or postcards tucked in-between the pages.

This is not a wholly new approach of course–writers often play with white space, or use graphics to enhance the story-telling. But ultimately, Foer makes the reader comfortable with the multidimensional feel of the story-photograph medium by consistent use of images of believable, everyday things–doorknobs, cats, Stephen Hawking–that makes the ending significantly more impactful. I won’t write a spoiler; you’ll have to find out for yourself if you haven’t already read it.

Foer re-shaped the novel to fit a topic that refused traditional models. The result is stellar. I find the techniques employed in “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” inspiring for not only the way novels can be reconsidered as form/text relationships but also the way poems can be reconsidered. Poetic form is an endless frontier. But, many of us are stuck in the suburbs, re-creating track-home poems.

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