This week I picked up a copy of “No one belongs here more than you.”, Miranda July’s book of stories, which all have terrific opening sentences like:
In an ideal world, we would have been orphans.
Her sentences delight the way Lorrie Moore’s do, and Amy Bloom’s. This kind of breezy pain: the satisfaction of nailing an emotion though the emotion itself blows. I came back to this book all weekend, but I began to notice that the end of each story felt like the wobbliest part. And that got me to thinking about other stories I love, and what their weaknesses are. I noticed a pattern. Fiction writers seem to do first sentences far better than poets do first lines. Many of the fiction writers I read seem to trail off at the end, choosing either narrative or language to drive their last paragraph, rarely both. Whereas poets often put all their money on that last line, or couple lines–the endings are reliably the best part of poems, this payoff that makes up for for any earlier muddiness, or boringness, or blur. Poems often open a little more sideways, a little more haphazardly, getting stronger as they go along. But stories are often the opposite, starting off with a concentrated beauty of an opening sentence, nestled in a watertight opening paragraph. And then towards the end sometimes things fade.
But why? I can think of two possibilities–either fiction writers are more savvy (of course they are!) in that they know you need to hook a reader at the start if there’s any hope of him reading all 20 pages you’ve just laid in front of him, and so you rewrite and rewrite what he’ll see first, when he’s deciding whether to commit to the story, highlighting strengths like a woman who knows how to put on makeup. Whereas poets, who tend to worry less about hooking a reader because there hardly are any out there and those who do read poetry are usually willing to do a fair amount of work for you (and plus poems don’t have as much of a time commitment–by the time you’re deciding whether to read it you’ve read it), don’t give as much attention to the strategy of building a good opening, though at the end they feel the pressure to make sure it was worthwhile, or to create a sense of coherence from the disparate parts of the poem.
Or poems and stories are different enough entities that their weight-bearing requirements don’t align. Their skeletons are different. Maybe a poem can be more of a unit of air, can fall through the reader as a single sheet, its whole held by the reader and then let go, let echo, and of course the ending would echo longest as it drives away. But a story can’t be held all at once, time passes as the reader moves through it, and there’s always the good chance the reader won’t make it to the end. I’ve heard that the first paragraph of stories often trace the path of the entire story, a microcosm of the story’s arc. I wonder if a reason for this is to lay down track for the train that’s coming. And when you watch a train, the excitement with which you greeted the first 30 cars often diminishes by the 40th car, or 50th–maybe it’s like that when you read a story: by the time you get to the end you’ve often done most of your work and are at the end of your shift, thinking of home.
There is something to how you get to know a fiction writer in the course of reading a story much better than you get to know a poet through a single poem. Does this familiarity connect to the load-bearing elements of stories and poems? If I go back to the idea that a poem can be held in the hand, whole, can be taken in all at once, while life runs alongside story reading, interrupting and informing, combined with the process–no, I’m getting tangled up here. The familiarity, the sense of intimacy with the text, of recognizing and anticipating some of its quirks, which naturally develops over the course of a story, proceeds from the pull of that opening sentence. But when you read a poem, that familiarity rarely develops. The act of reading a poem is usually one of continually trying to get your bearings, checking the map, saying looks like we’re here. It’s that Here that a poem works towards, that last line.
Maybe I’m caught up in lyric vs narrative drives. I realize these vast generalizations I’ve just made have many exceptions (check out the stunning last paragraph of Amy Bloom’s “A blind man could see how much I love you”) but it was a pattern I wanted to trace. Apologies for the broad, example-less swath.