On a Winter’s Night
“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade,” wrote Italo Calvino on the first page of his 1979 novel, translated from the Italian by William Weaver. Calvino’s postmodern structure comprises twenty-two sections, with each odd-numbered passage narrated by a second-person “you” (you, the reader; you, a character). Each even-numbered passage, in turn, is the start of a new work, a fictional book that the “you” character discovers and reads, only to find that it ends abruptly and picks up in the next even-numbered passage as an entirely different work. Taking a cue from this puzzle of an approach, compose a poem that alternates between two narratives united by a winter’s night. How might a second-person “you” character be utilized in your poem? Is there an emotional progression connected to the accumulation of images and themes?
