This year’s Conference is lucky to have as one of our Spotlight readers Oliver de la Paz, the 2023-2025 Poet Laureate of Worcester, Mass. You can read his bio here.
In one of his recent books, The Boy in the Labyrinth, de la Paz engages deeply with the experience of raising his neurodivergent sons. Asked in a 2019 Four Way Review interview how he went about structuring the book, de la Paz had this to say:
When I started writing the “Labyrinth” poems I had no intention other than to explore atmosphere and tone. The process of writing those specific sequences only started shifting right around my third year of generating more of them—I was probably thirty to forty poems into what wound up being almost one-hundred poems. As I became more conscious of my process, I became more intentional in implementing narrative elements. Threads of sequences have similar settings and characters, for example the boy in the sky became a character for a handful of poems. Additionally, the opera house became a locus in a few of the poems. All of these disparate entry points into the world of The Boy in the Labyrinth created organizational issues. It wasn’t written as a linear narrative, and yet I needed to convey to the reader a sense of forward movement. My restructuring of the collection began four years ago when I began to write the “Autism Questionnaire” poems. I saw the “Autism Questionnaire” poems as mile markers in the progression of the work. So I began structuring around them as though the book as a whole were a three-act play. I then layered the “Labyrinth” poems around them to suggest momentum/movement. And I also added the Greek Chorus elements to the work as a nod to the structure of the Greek Tragedy.
De la Paz’s “Autism Screening Questionnaire — Speech and Language Delay” from The Boy in the Labyrinth can be read here.
To hear Oliver de la Paz read from his work in person, register here for Poetry by the Sea, March 27-30.