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Poetry Prompt of the Week: Story as Scaffolding

In this contemplative prompt, tell a half-story as a way to explore a shadow experience.

Robert Wood Lynn

Jun 21, 2026

Edward Hopper, City Roofs, oil on canvas, 1932 (The Whitney Museum of American Art)

It is, again, the longest day of the year, which always reminds me of my favorite Sharon Olds poem.

Someone once told me—with more than a hint of derision—that Sharon Olds is a story poet. “She just,” they elaborated, “talks about something, in a flowery way, that’s the poem.” I find this to be funny because it’s one of those analyses that is true at a distance—Olds does tend to write direct narratives/odes/ballads that circle a central subject—but ultimately this epithet turns out to be fundamentally out of focus. Sharpen your gaze, and you’ll notice Olds just pretends to talk about one thing, in order to explore others.

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Let’s take a look at “Summer Solstice, New York City” to see what I mean.

Summer Solstice, New York City
By the end of the longest day of the year he could not stand it,
he went up the iron stairs through the roof of the building
and over the soft, tarry surface
to the edge, put one leg over the complex green tin cornice
and said if they came a step closer that was it.
Then the huge machinery of the earth began to work for his life,
the cops came in their suits blue-grey as the sky on a cloudy evening,
and one put on a bullet-proof vest, a
black shell around his own life,
life of his children’s father, in case
the man was armed, and one, slung with a
rope like the sign of his bounden duty,
came up out of a hole in the top of the neighboring building
like the gold hole they say is in the top of the head,
and began to lurk toward the man who wanted to die.
The tallest cop approached him directly,
softly, slowly, talking to him, talking, talking,
while the man’s leg hung over the lip of the next world
and the crowd gathered in the street, silent, and the
hairy net with its implacable grid was
unfolded near the curb and spread out and
stretched as the sheet is prepared to receive a birth.
Then they all came a little closer
where he squatted next to his death, his shirt
glowing its milky glow like something
growing in a dish at night in the dark in a lab and then
everything stopped
as his body jerked and he
stepped down from the parapet and went toward them
and they closed on him, I thought they were going to
beat him up, as a mother whose child has been
lost will scream at the child when its found, they
took him by the arms and held him up and
leaned him against the wall of the chimney and the
tall cop lit a cigarette
in his own mouth, and gave it to him, and
then they all lit cigarettes, and the
red, glowing ends burned like the
tiny campfires we lit at night
back at the beginning of the world.

It is a narrative poem, so yes, a story poem. But if “Summer Solstice, New York City” is a story, it is not a particularly good story (though it is, I contend, a good poem). It’s a half-story. A man decides to kill himself and is prevented from doing so. Who is this man? We don’t know. Why does he want to die? We don’t know. How is anyone else affected by this? We know only of the children of one of the cops. All we get, story-wise, is a little scene setting, and an abbreviated climax and resolution. Instead, the poem uses the (half-)story as scaffolding upon which it attaches its work, the beautiful, messy, painful work of poems. And that work is where our emotional experience as readers comes from.

So what work is Olds doing with her half-story? Some of it is in the pacing (she starts in medias res), some is in the sensory description (“soft, tarry surface” “complex green tin cornice” “suits blue-gray”) but most of it is in the figurative language, which is everywhere, deepening everything: her earth is now a huge machine working for life, her net is preparing to receive a birth, her edge of the roof is the lip of the next world. Olds is pretending to describe this one event but every time she does so, she invokes a wider, more interdependent world. She gives us the specter of birth. Of scientific inquiry. Of the fear and anger of mothers. The intimacy of an object passed from one mouth to another. Even, surprisingly, the gaze of the speaker (just when we thought this was a third-person story). Olds is stripping away, bit by bit, all the heavy exhaustions of modern life, with its pragmatic demands, until she gets to an image of humans at our very origin, tribal, gathering together as necessity of survival.

Telling a story like this is risky, and it takes a lot of deft work for Olds to pull it off. The poem risks losing the reader in lots of ways, always finding a way to keep them in their seat. The heavy description almost becomes purple, but the straightforward voice keeps us trusting it. The repeated figuration almost slips into melodrama, except the dramatic subject earns this treatment. The density of image almost falls into tedium, except it never overwhelms the propulsion of the narrative. The poem almost loses focus by drifting to the speaker, or the cop’s children, or the mother and child, except the poem stays steadily tethered to our central story. This is story as scaffolding.

The first mistake people make when writing narrative poems is to think of the poem as a story. They live through or hear about or think up a story that feels resonant to them and then endeavor to try to recount it, borrowing what they know from other forms of storytelling: furiously trying to establish character and setting and plot arc and resolution and meaning-making all in the condensed space of a poem. This pretty much never works, and they emerge frustrated and often in disbelief that such an emotionally charged event isn’t automatically a poem. They might walk away thinking some events don’t make for good poems the same way some events don’t make for good movies (the moon landing, COVID, September 11th).

But the problem is usually not with the story they picked. It’s that a poem is not, cannot be a story, a recounting of an experience. The poem itself is an experience. This is a distinction Marie Howe often makes, herself crediting Rilke’s ideas in Letters to a Young Poet. What matters is the experience of the reader, and any use of narrative is just a tool to deepen that experience—one of many tools, as Olds demonstrates. Don’t think of your poem as a story, think of your story as a scaffolding. You need just enough narrative to build life around, like a stripped subway car that becomes a coral reef. Allow yourself to follow other comparisons and impulses, as Olds does, or even just your own thoughts on the subject (as in Ada Limón’s “ The Raincoat” or in Gabrielle Bates’s “ The Dog”). The life of your poem is what attaches to your story, not the story itself.

The (contemplative) prompt:

Pick a simple story you want to tell. From your life, from history, from a family anecdote, anything, just make it a simple one. As simple as “A man wants to kill himself but is stopped in the process.” Now write your story out in four or five bullet points, just the facts, no figuration or metaphor or illustration. When you are done, use this as a scaffolding to build a poem around it—think of Old’s use of sensory images and color and metaphor. Let those metaphors become the real subject of your poem.

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Some notes:

The Brooklyn Poets zoom workshop I’m teaching this summer on assembling a poetry manuscript has SOLD OUT, but spots may open up on the waitlist, or if there is enough demand I’ll open up a section section, so throw your name in that hat if you are still interested. (7 weeks on Thursday nights (6:30PM ET) beginning on July 23rd.) Otherwise stay tuned for workshops I’ll be teaching this fall on poetic retellings as well as unorthodox approaches to metaphor.